elgenie

Looking at Brexit is picking up the story halfway through.

About 18 years ago now the Tories thought, incorrectly, that budgetary austerity was the prescription for responding to the global financial crisis. Eight years of indulging conspiracist nonsense later, their PM decided to hold the Brexit referendum as a means of jangling some keys in front of their voting base and then, perhaps even more dumbly, the party decided to treat the result of a 52-48 referendum as more than advisory.

This 1-2 punch has locked in two lost decades in which the UK's GDP will have stagnated in real terms. Most of their politics in the last decade has been make-believe that what obviously happened somehow didn't, with various scapegoating and culture-war distraction attempts tossed in. Not helping is that they have first-past-the-post individual districts (and way too many parties to be sustainable in that electoral system) that result in their self-defeating hinterlands being over-represented.

Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.

That works mainly because the money comes with a heavily implied threat: don't vote the way we want and the money spigot stops, or even reroutes into the coffers of your opponent.

But if that all happens, including the opponent funding, and those opponents get routed, then the bluff's been called and the lobby's hand has been found wanting.

In jurisdictions in which there's a large imbalance between the parties the general election is a foregone conclusion; the primary of the dominant party becomes the real election. Primaries still have lower turnout and feature candidates with less name recognition, so the potential impact of money is quite high.

The US tracks six different unemployment metrics plus overall labor force participation rate. You’re talking about U6 and/or labor force participation rate.

Just because U3 is the measure typically quoted doesn’t mean the others don’t exist.

Isn't there a great deal of gaming going on with the car disengaging FSD milliseconds before crashing? Voila, no "full" "self" driving accident; just another human failing [*]!

[*] Failing to solve the impossible situation FSD dropped them into, that is.

No code is as easy to maintain as no code.

No code runs as fast as no code.

QA efforts can whack-a-mole some issues, but the mismatch of problem and solution is inherent in any situation in which a generator of plausible-sounding text gets pointed at an area where correctness matters.

Discomfort is present only if you suspect they're a Guesser and thus one of you has greatly misjudged the relationship and social context.

If you know or suspect they're an Asker the discomfort disappears because you say "No" and they say "OK, cool".

The usual dichotomy / terminology for this stuff as it relates to painting national and business cultures with broad brushes is "high context" versus "low context". In a high context culture like Japan people would be expected to code switch between Asking and Guessing behaviors depending on their audience, relative status, social rapport, etc.

The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.

They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.

They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.

This working is a function of density. First, imagining a park at the corner is a huge assumption.

Second, if the park isn't within shouting distance of the necessary number of kids, half of the ones within shouting distance are at parent-scheduled activities, and half of the remainder aren't allowed to brave street crossings because of the six-foot-tall hoods and inattentive drivers of passing ChildMurker1050s, no amount of park yelling will be sufficient.

That feeling of shared societal responsibility probably has at least something to do with the birth rate. Japan is down to just 686K babies born per year from a population of 123 million.

Now consider what's happening to the learning process of the (rather large) subset of current college students choosing to replace that struggle for detailed understanding with LLM queries.

Spelling things out helps with the euphemisms.

Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion forces turn out to be (gasp) against all of diversity, and equity, and inclusion.

This is an incoherent blog post.

1. The concept of "domestic terrorist organization" not a thing under any US law. Further, there exists no such organization in observable reality.

2. "All relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations" is … nothing, because that's what federal law enforcement is already charged with.

You’re attempting to argue that “revisions exist” is somehow strong evidence for the proposition that “no aspect of particular revision X was politically motivated”.

That is gaslighting.

These are numbers compiled by this administration about a period immediately before Trump imposed some very very very economically stupid tariffs. It's quite suspicious to have such a big drop timed precisely as if to serve as a handy baseline to minimize the perceived impact of that idiocy; it comes out of an agency (BLS) whose previous head was fired for the sin of a displeasing report and was replaced with a commissar.

Note that survey data about the present is collected and aggregated piecemeal by a sizable bureaucracy and is thus hard for a dedicated ideologue to systematically revise without that leaking. However, when the data about today comes in below estimates the number of people involved in reconciling and dating the discrepancy to ascribe it to the past is much smaller.

Like 5-10% of the US's total GDP gets wasted annually on the layers and layers and layers of healthcare middlemen… for worse outcomes.

De-densification isn't required; a one-for-one knocking down and rebuilding of a single family residence suffices.

Houses depreciate if there's an adequate supply of newer housing keeping up with the housing demand of the area. If there isn't then the general GDP growth of the area in which the house is located dictates that the house's value grows as well.

Appointing a know-nothing conspiracy theorist doesn't have that exact issue, yes … but in a way where the cure is significantly worse than the disease.

You can cultivate state capacity and independent expertise to reduce regulatory capture, not replace it with a kakistocracy where regulatory capture is instead by woo-woo morons.

What is this record of which you speak and what, pray tell, are the penalties suffered by Elon for lying repeatedly on it?

When the words are actually spelled out the sheer ridiculousness of "Full Self Driving" having a "(Supervised)" postscript becomes rather readily apparent.

Tesla can't help but know that the supposed non-driver getting constantly nagged to be vigilant as if actively driving destroys most of the value proposition of FSD. Vision Attention Monitoring has quite a bit of potential to be very useful … precisely in situations in which vehicles are not driving themselves.

Sort of. Campaigning on vague slogans about something doesn't mean you have democratic legitimacy to avoid the whole process by which that something is supposed to get turned into law.

Congress has previously delegated tariff authority for emergencies to allow the president to do stuff like impose (temporary) sanctions in fast moving foreign policy negotiations. The mechanism by which all the current tariff stuff is getting done is by Trump having declared that trade deficits (in goods only), by virtue of existing, constitute such an emergency, despite having been observed for 80 years and being both an inevitable consequence of the US being an advanced country. Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.

The fuel/carbon tax would still be behavior-shifting for low-income emitters because it would still apply to low-income emitters per marginal unit, and that part is likely overall regressive because fuel is a larger expenditures for low-incomes.

However, the part where the resulting revenue is pooled and payed out in an equal amount back per capita is progressive, since that payment is a greater fraction of a low income. Desirably, it also means that low-income people emitting less than the average would make money overall: consider a household consisting of a single mom and two kids that take public transit to work/school.

Volpe and Chisholm have honed and fine-tuned their swings over 20 years to produce results good enough to vault them into the top few hundred in the world at that particular craft.

They have a lot riding on that existing swing. Pro baseball is an unforgiving endeavor in which small edges add up over the course of a six month season, and the rewards for skill follow a power law distribution such that being just a bit better has millions of dollars attached to it, but becoming just a bit worse can also mean losing millions of dollars.

Changing swing path to get contact on a slightly different portion of the bat on a particular kind of pitch, possibly when looking for another pitch, perhaps just in particular counts, requires a lot of offseason work and carries no guarantees. The risk is similar to a from-scratch rewrite where the old code is thrown away; a very large portion of the time the resulting hitter ends up unplayable in the majors.

Tweaking the bat shape, on the other hand, is a micro-optimization akin to a bug fix whose rollout is behind a feature flag: undoing it is as easy at pulling a different bat from the rack.

Most of those incorrectly use the linguistic terminology (in particular, "dialect", "baby talk", "slang") but, yes, congratulations on discovering that context plays a role in communication.

Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey the sentiment with as little as "Breakfast?" or "Hungry?" when talking with family. In the child's second language, would the maitre'd at the restaurant of a fine hotel ask a two word question, or rather bury those in respectful filler?

"Ow" and friends, by the way, are interjections to express sudden pain, functioning analogously to an adult's swearing. They're not full sentences about the pain and its source.