kyboren
> It's early, yet, but if Democrats can't win a state or two in the south, they're going to have a hard time taking the White House.
The Democrats are going to have a hard time taking the White House. Full stop. The electoral map isn't pretty. And if current trends continue, it's gonna become almost impossible for a Democrat to win the Presidency after the next reapportionment.
> The northern "blue wall" simply aint
Preach. It was always a delusion. Democrats have a long history of taking their voters for granted. Then, of course, they are shocked when they give them the finger. Unfortunately I don't see this changing any time soon. The DSA faction seems similarly aloof, in their own way.
That's a good point.
What scares me about Newsom is that, outside of California, Newsom's corruption, broken promises, and policy failures are totally unknown. He's just the handsome guy with all those great anti-Trump zingers. And as a relatively young white man, he might be seen as a demographically "safe" choice for primary voters burnt by their experience with Hillary and Kamala.
> I hope primary voters are as fed up with the corporate Democratic party as the country in general is.
I think a good chunk of them are. The question is really, who can win both the Democratic nomination and the general election?
AOC is the obvious choice for the DSA faction, but I'm deeply skeptical she can win in the general. The corporate faction seems dead set on Newsom or Kamala. If Kamala can somehow eke out a primary victory, she's gonna crash and burn badly in the general. And I don't see anyone else suddenly appearing as a viable candidate.
So from where I'm sitting, it looks like Democrats' most likely path to victory goes through Newsom. And I think his corruption and inevitably poor governance will discredit the Democratic party for a generation and catapult MAGA--perhaps another Trump--back into power. Then we'll be properly fucked.
But please note that he's pre-emptively declared he won't run if Kamala runs[0]. He even admits this is because they're both backed by the same groups and share the same donor network[1]. So there's at least one more Democrat you simply should not vote for.
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/gavin-newsom-sa...
[1]: Quote from above article: "The governor said he would not want to force a contest against the former vice president, noting that the two share many political allies and supporters."
There's a happy medium somewhere between Juche and just-in-time rawdogging global markets.
Anyway, I don't think US policy should revolve around how jihadis react, regardless of whether or not livestreamed executions are good policy.
It's completely ridiculous to say that a single city becoming an urban combat zone and getting largely destroyed is "ethnic cleansing".
If Rafah had been teeming with Christians or transsexual capital-B Black Jewish lesbians they'd have been displaced (note: displaced, not ethnically cleansed) in exactly the same way as any other resident of the area.
But of course, Rafah wasn't teeming with Christians, because most of the Christians in Gaza have already been actually "cleansed" from Gaza. And those entirely-hypothetical diverse LGBT folks would have been unceremoniously pushed off of rooftops.
You guys have completely lost the plot.
My impression is the Western powers--Kissinger in particular--didn't really give a shit about Israel. Then Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, starting the Yom Kippur War, and the USSR promised to back them up. Golda Meir threatened to go nuclear and Nixon launched Operation Nickel Grass in order to give her a more palatable alternative.
Israel hasn't necessarily been looked upon more favorably since then, but they've continued to receive strategic support from the US in order to persuade them they don't need to open that Pandora's Box.
> allow BDS to work and stop military aid then Israel is going to have a much more difficult time
Perhaps, but for the aforementioned reason that's not necessarily a good thing. An Israel without Uncle Sam backing them up telling them, "nah bro, chill, we got this" is going to be an Israel more likely to do exactly the things you don't want them to do.
If they feel their existence is truly threatened, they will go all the way. But in the mean time, while under the US's security umbrella, it's true: They're better off not doing things that might get them cut off. Threatening to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel is not only totally impractical but actually increases the risk of the genocide you lefties keep bleating about, because it would make the Gaza/Lebanon security crisis existential.
> Also Israel depends very much on its network of high-tech companies, companies that are extremely sensitive to any sort of sanctions regime
It would be a truly huge disruption, but they have those high-tech companies because they have the talent. If they get sanctioned up the wazoo, I'm sure China would be happy to pivot in to become Israel's patron, at least economically.
> And once Israel is politically and militarily isolated it becomes a much easier target against rivals in the Middle East
Israel's only real rival in the Middle East is Iran, and as you may have noticed, they have disengaged from direct combat.
Israel made it rain oil in Tehran. Iran made it rain ballistic missiles in Israel. Neither can afford total warfare with the other; they're too close together.
They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened? You say, "that's not an argument," but I think it is. If we accept your claims, then it follows that Israel has had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill everyone in Gaza for years (at least).
The fact that they still haven't done that suggests that your claims are false.
> Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them.
Ah, so it's just international pressure holding them back. Right.
I don't buy it. Israel has hardly shown itself to be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions. And at the end of the day, they are a nuclear power and functionally immune to military threats from rational actors. If the IDF started the genocide tomorrow ain't nobody gonna do shit about it.
Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
> Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
The questions needed to be asked at all because it was your comment that was of the lowest caliber. All smoke and no fire.
Can you please remind me where they finally found Yahya Sinwar? And was that before or after they "level[ed] the city"? Do you think they would have found him if they left the city untouched? Why was he there in the first place?
> And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them
Hamas isn't following a ceasefire; they've been militarily degraded.
There's a causal relationship here: If the IDF hadn't destroyed so many fighting positions and booby-trapped buildings, there would have been many, many more attacks and IDF soldiers KIA.
You say "there's no justification" but unwittingly go on to point out exactly why it's justified.
So they're all dead now? Ethnic cleansing complete?
> All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
> When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing
Then why is it taking so long?
- no defined territory--and certainly none widely recognized
- no unique language or ethnicity
- a culture only distinguished from Egypt and the Levant by their penchant for terrorism
- a history that only meaningfully diverged from their neighbors within the last half-century, and which divergence springs entirely from their consistent unwillingness to pursue peace with Israel
So even if Israel had the intent to commit genocide--which, unfortunately[1], they don't--the Arabs in Gaza don't qualify as a distinct group that can be subjected to genocide.
If Colombia had decided to annihilate the FARC, just kill them all--would that have qualified as a genocide, too? It seems to me they meet at least as many tests for nationhood.
[1]: See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49912637
I take the opposite view. Making genocide 'illegal' was a noble but misguided pursuit, and the result has been chronic geopolitical instability that makes everyone less safe.
In total war, when a zealous enemy has been militarily defeated but not annihilated, yet such annihilation is off the table: They simply refuse to surrender. Only when that enemy's BATNA becomes total annihilation will they finally accept defeat.
If you wish to live in peace, prepare for war. And if you wish to live in peace, but your enemy is committed to total war, prepare for genocide. Credibly threatening total annihilation is, paradoxically, the surest way to achieve a negotiated peace in total war.
Start the genocide! A durable peace will follow shortly, one way or another.
How many apartment buildings are left standing in Bakhmut?
It was clearly a tragedy. Very few Americans--certainly I've never met one--support that strike in retrospect. Instead they are angry that such a terrible mistake was possible and they generally want a thorough investigation and targeting procedure reforms to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Americans hold their military to a high moral standard. But wars don't have to be fought so cleanly. Certainly the Golden Horde had no compunction about genocide. If acknowledging our shared humanity with innocent victims and expressing remorse for their deaths is ridiculed, then we're primed for a descent into nihilism, wanton cruelty, and mass slaughter.
The real kicker is DNNs are much easier to program than CPUs because they don't require a closed-form description ("a program") of the function to be approximated; you just throw a bunch of input/output pairs at the model, compute loss, backprop and update weights, repeat.
Hence the unslakeable thirst for input/output pairs, i.e. data.
> In the field of machine learning, the universal approximation theorems (UATs) state that
> neural networks with a certain structure can, in principle, approximate any continuous
> function to any desired degree of accuracy. These theorems provide a mathematical
> justification for using neural networks, assuring researchers that a sufficiently large or
> deep network can model the complex, non-linear relationships often found in real-world data.[1][2]
>
> The best-known version of the theorem applies to feedforward networks with a single hidden
> layer. It states that if the layer's activation function is non-polynomial (which is true
> for common choices like the sigmoid function or ReLU), then the network can act as a
> "universal approximator." Universality is achieved by increasing the number of neurons in
> the hidden layer, making the network "wider." Other versions of the theorem show that
> universality can also be achieved by keeping the network's width fixed but increasing its
> number of layers, making it "deeper."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...
I remember taking a California statewide essay exam in middle school whose prompt was specifically to argue for or against banning Harry Potter from the school library. I wrote a stridently anti-censorship piece extolling the virtues of literary freedom and calling out the censorious right for attempting to use schools not to educate, but to transmit catechism.
The essays were graded by (obviously heavily left-leaning) teachers from all over the state, with two teachers independently assigning a score and if their scores differed by more than one grade, another teacher would be tiebreaker.
I got the top score from both teachers--one of only a handful in the (large) school district. I even got an award from the local newspaper.
Now I see the same demographic take the polar opposite view and it's disappointing to say the least. Especially after the "anti" racism struggle session era, it seems to me that their real issue with the book bans wasn't the censorship; they just wanted to transmit the "right" catechism.
It's not the voters, the party apparatchiks, (social) media barons, big-dollar donors--no, it's those pesky artists who are responsible for "normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation"!
Besides that, they indeed "owned up" that they hadn't watched it in over a decade. Not only would they plausibly have drawn a different conclusion if they had, but it's just a bit ridiculous to blame some TV series 10+ years ago for "the current situation".
Hence my comparison to Jon Stewart's contemporaneous departure from The Daily Show, which is a "media butterfly effect" I see more frequently blamed in Democrat-leaning circles.
Get real.
I don't think South Park ever implied both parties are equally bad. Just that they are both bad. And I don't think irreverent satire is prep work or psy-op propaganda for an authoritarian government. If anything, it's the inoculation.
It's quite clear that you haven't watched the series in the past decade. I'm sure you wouldn't be crowing the same tune if you'd watched the Mr. Garrison storyline.
How about "free" school lunches?
Progressive income taxes come close, though ideally they'd have more brackets with higher rates and the brackets would be graduated by both wealth and income.
The "gas guzzler" tax in California seems pretty fair to me, as does the "polluter pays" principle in general.
Specifically traffic-related: I like how California does HOV/FasTrak lanes. There is a separate lane (or even a separate segregated roadway) with free access for "high occupancy vehicles" (2+ occupants, rarely 3+). However, individual commuters can pay (with FasTrak) for access to the lane. The cost is set dynamically depending on traffic conditions; it's a realtime market for spare capacity unused by actual HOVs. (It could still be improved, though, with an AGI coefficient, but I digress). Anyway, the most important part is there are always cost-free freeway lanes available; there's always an option just to sit and wait without additional payment.
> If you really care to deal with the extreme high-end, there are other mechanisms that are easier to do at small n, such as having a superlinear vehicle registration tax.
The extreme high end don't register super fancy vehicles, and if they do, even superlinear registration taxes would be a much smaller marginal utility hit than would be fair--and once again, would be an unfairly large marginal utility hit to the upper middle class.
The congestion charge should reach each person using that infrastructure in a way that fairly impacts their available individual utility. The impracticality of achieving this goal is why, in my opinion, congestion charges are bad policy.
Just as the Framers intended.
>>> Ban smartphones for kids.
>>> But the school gives my kids homework on them.
>> Then tell the school you and your kid won't use them; they still have to educate your kid.
> But I want my kid to use them. I just don't like what they allow my kid to do.
If they allow your kids to do things you don't want your kids doing, then don't let your kids use them! That's parenting 101.
It's very frustrating how many parents want to nerf the world and destroy freedom and privacy, all so they can offload some of the essential duties of parenting to the state. Usually this is combined with a heaping helping of learned helplessness and lemming-like groupthink.
"But everyone is using smartphones; I couldn't deprive little Timmy! And it's modestly inconvenient to be a stick in the mud! Lawmakers, help! I demand that everyone has to do a face scan to authenticate every TCP packet--just think of my children!"
A marginal $20 has very little utility to rich people, but 15 minutes saved in traffic has large utility. Congestion pricing results in large utility gains to the rich.
A marginal $20 has tangible utility to poor people, and 15 minutes spent finding alternative transport also has tangible utility. Congestion pricing results in large utility losses to the poor.
KBB values are an imperfect proxy for individual monetary utility but could definitely be used to more fairly distribute the utility gains from congestion pricing.
But the mechanism here is highly unfair. It's obvious why rich people support congestion charges--they're rich! They don't give a shit about the $20 or whatever, and it clears the roads of those dirty poors making traffic. Bring it on!
Meanwhile the poor--already struggling with affordability and cost of living--are the ones who bear the burden. They can't afford the congestion fee, so they're forced to find some alternative way to get into the city. But that comes at an obvious utility cost; if that alternative was the best way for them to get into the city, they'd already be using it! And poor people are the ones with no time to spare, so choosing between spending $20 they don't have or spending 30 more minutes that they don't have is a Hobson's choice.
Here's my proposal: Every vehicle gets 60 free days per year with no congestion charges at all. Days 61-100 have a $1,000,000 congestion charge. Days 101-365 have a $10,000,000 congestion charge. Congestion charges will be reduced, however, to 0.1% of the driver's AGI (for days 61-100) and 1% of the driver's AGI (for days 101-365) upon application. Now even hedge fund managers in Connecticut will be inconvenienced in just the same way as poor people.
Yet somehow I believe that if that were how congestion pricing was implemented, all these Econ professors would magically discover what a bad policy congestion pricing really is!
Your child has a right to an education. School administrators cannot force parents to enter into contracts with companies as a condition for their child to receive an education.
For an extra solid case, insist that you have a sincere, deeply-held conviction against the use of these devices and any attempt to force their use or deny your child the right to an education due to your refusal is a violation of the First Amendment.
Why do parents just surrender and do whatever school admins want?
Refusing to sell its energy to rich allies who consistently refuse to secure their own energy supplies, and who got themselves in this predicament despite the US's admonitions--that's just reciprocity, not acting like an abusive asshole. You won't help the world with their energy problem; why should the US help you? Especially when you wouldn't have an energy problem at all if you'd listened to the US in the past?
But if you want to see an abusive asshole, keep up the good work alienating the US. The Russians love their "We can do it again" bumper stickers. Pray that mentality does not rise in the US. Or else with a Europe openly antagonistic to both the US and Russia, they just might do it again...
> Our previous deaths and support don't matter
Nor, apparently, do USA's matter to you.
USA WWI combat deaths: 53,402
USA All-cause WWII military deaths in European theater: 250,000
European NATO member (excluding Turkey) soldiers killed in Afghanistan: 897
European NATO member (excl. Turkey & UK) soldiers killed in Afghanistan: 440
Now tell me again who's ungrateful for blood shed in defense of whom.
> you'll fuck over your own economy just to hurt us
No, selling oil and refined fuels to Europe raises prices in the US. Stopping those sales would bring prices down and help the US economy. Shareholders in O&G companies might miss out on a windfall, but every molecule will still find a willing Asian buyer.
Considering that gas prices and affordability are probably the most salient topic for the upcoming US midterm elections, you're incredibly lucky that this administration is generous enough to allow you to buy their energy. That can change.
> because we didn't want to help you in yet another retarded (unilaterally started!) war.
No, because you didn't want to lift a finger to defend your own energy supplies. Instead you angrily demand that Uncle Sam ensure your energy security for you while heaping on the opprobrium.
Typical European self-centered entitlement.
> To think that Russia who is actively waging war on us isn't [...]
I never said Russia wasn't a target of European vitriol. Just that the US is but DPRK is barely even mentioned while their troops are fighting and ballistic missiles are raining down right next door.