Surplus Cornbread

Which he needs to do well to bail out his unprofitable sexual harassment machine he attached to his rocket company

Around that time I remember getting into an argument with this guy who said he could build what amounted to a perpetual motion machine because he got SO MAD that I was saying "OK, cool build your device, just don't expect tax dollars to support it until you do."

Weed's legal limbo status along with difficulty with monopolization has meant it hasn't consolidated into big business. That makes it politically weak compared to much more harmful recently legalized vices like sports betting. So its a concern not due to consumer problems but lack of profits.

Never please. Edits are annoying to see and mistakes can often be really funny. Just delete and post again if its too bad!

To me the breakdown seems to be who actually understands externalities and rent seeking vs who only has negative associations with large scale forms of organization (corporate and government especially).

Had an uncle who went through a bottle of whiskey by noon. Chart like this is a classic "this consumer item relies on addiction and killing people to be profitable".

Most US elections!

Though on nationwide scales examples include India pre-BJP (and maybe now with the BJP), Hungary with Fidesz since 2006, Turkey with the AK Party since 2002, Singapore, South Africa post-apartheid.

To me the ID thing at this point is not a big deal either way.

The centralization however for the US specifically is. Even if done after Trump, without a lot of constitutional changes, the US has proven with this term our version of federal checks and balances are insufficient to prevent abuse.

Now the looney left has a problem with President Trump killing a pedo. Sad!

I love the part where the Nazi complains "Sam says true thing that new liberals agree with" and the new liberals go "I really want to vote for the Nazis the second they give me an excuse to do so"

The old man in me is angry at the kids for speaking in ways I find mostly incomprehensible.

The guy who watches linguistics channels on YouTube in me is fascinated by the implications for how language is evolving!

Sounds annoying to manage on the front end. We should just take the suggestions of election conspiracy theorists and just throw out any vote marked "Republican". Maybe we can even grab them as they turn in their vote and reassign them to a re-education 15 minute city.

And if you object that this is "letting nonvoters off the hook" I'd counter its absolutely not. They're still on the list of culpability. But its silly to say nonvoters should feel more wrath than politicians whose choices swing large numbers of votes, or of course those making bad decisions.

That's fine as long as you calibrate your anger to degrees of responsibility. Which goes something like:

1) Trump admin
2) Congressional Republicans/the Supreme Court
3) Republican voters
4) The Biden admin/Harris campaign that drove voters away
5) Media (on its own sliding scale)
6) Nonvoters

Though I'd say this biggest problem with abstention is if you aren't going to vote in the general election, you're almost certainly not voting in primaries either. Further, even radical left politics require mobilizing at the ballot box to both promote left positions and practice organizing skills.

were swing House districts in states that weren't competitive on the presidential level and keeping the House out of Republican hands would have been a limit on Trump's actions in ways the popular vote just wasn't. For some, especially those in major cities in blue states, that still didn't matter.

Ehhhh, I'd dispute that hypothesis. Project 2025 was written and published before anyone knew what the popular vote would be and no equivalent work preceded Trump 1. What changed was the far right forces were ready and experienced in 2 in ways they weren't in 1.

A stronger point is that there 1/2

The media however used the evidence of Dr. Loeb's competence to promote his hypotheses as realistic and credible. This is very clearly the inferior way to approach skepticism.

So I find myself very skeptical of this paper's arguments and proposed understanding of skepticism. 8/8

describes as "baseless skepticism" by ignoring the evidence of competence of Dr Loeb and solely examining the strength of the evidence of Dr Loeb's claims and found them to be highly speculative at best and with evidence consistently piling up against them as observations continue.
7/

Dr. Loeb is an accomplished physicist with strong evidence of past competence through his work. However for the past several years he has produced a series of short papers describing ways extra solar objects might be intelligent in origin. Scientists have largely been doing what this paper 6/

And I have a case study for that and who makes errors based on over trust in a person with prior proven competence: The case of unfounded claims of extrasolar objects being likely intelligently created by Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard. And the people giving too much credence are generally media orgs. 5/

The Error of Baseless Skepticism: The baseless skeptic attempts to freeze P(H) at a low value regardless of the strength of E. They ignore the likelihood ratio. When an individual demonstrates competence under constraint (e.g., creating a functional system), they generate a strong signal. To ignore this signal—to treat the claims of a proven expert as identical to the claims of a novice—is a failure of probabilistic calibration [4].

That section is in fact not attacking credentialism, but formalizing and encouraging it! Evidence of competence being used to increase one's belief in another's claims IS credentialism. He goes on to argue that "baseless skepticism" is not giving extra weight to those claims. 4/

Header: 3 The Bayesian Weight of Demonstrated Compentence Not all claims enter the epistemic landscape on equal footing. Claims emerge from agents operating under varying degrees of constraint, scrutiny, and validation. We propose that "Competence" is not a social label, but a measure of successful navigation through constraint systems (e.g., engineering functionality, mathematical proof, market viability). This can be formalized using Bayesian inference. Let H be the hypothesis that an agent is competent/reliable, and E be the evidence of a specific achievement (e.g., a published paper, a patent, a working prototype). According to Bayes’ Theorem: P(H|E) = P(E|H) · P(H)/P(E) Where P(H|E) is the posterior probability of competence given the evidence. *Highlighted*If an agent achieves a result that is highly unlikely for an incompetent agent to achieve (low P(E|¬H)), then the evidence E must significantly update the prior probability P(H).*End Highlight*

So the example he uses would really be best filed under racism preventing understanding. From this paper we have no idea who is practicing "baseless skepticism" except for British mathematicians over a century ago.

But then I'm very concerned about the practice advocated in this section:
3/

Consider the three "case studies". Perelman and COVID-19 were given as examples where the baseless skepticism didn't actually happen but would have been bad if they did. Ramanujan did face that, in the context of several British mathematicians dismissing an Indian researcher without credentials.2/

I don't. That assumes there is some symmetry in the space of correct answers vs the space of incorrect answers when the former is a far more constrained area than the latter.

I also worry because no where in the paper actually establishes where this "baseless skepticism" concept is practiced.1/

This could have been avoided if Venice was still Austrian. Those guys have no idea how to market for tourism!

Morning hot take!

"Italian culture" is a marketing gimmick meant to trick tourists into extending their trips visiting beautiful Tuscan vineyards by also visiting Europe's smelliest swamp city.

Side-by-side pictures of Miss Piggy and Sabrina Carpenter from E News with the text "EXCLUSIVE: Miss Piggy Says Sabrina Carpenter Was "Very Intimidated" By Her"

No shade Sabrina, I would be too. Some fights you just can't win

twitter qt by @mattyglesias: "This is an egregious fuckup by AIPAC and both the fact that it happened and their absurd response are representative of what's been really catastrophically bad politically decision-making by the pro-Israel community over the past two years" Quoting @UnitedDemocProj: "The outcome in NJ-11 was an anticipated possibility, and our focus remains on who will serve the next full term in Congress. UDP will be closely monitoring dozens of primary races, including the June NJ-11 primary, to help ensure pro-Israel candidates are elected to Congress."

LMAO! Even Matt Yglesias can recognize AIPAC is fucked (though I think he's overemphasizing failed politicking on the pro-Israel side rather than successful efforts by the pro-Palestine movement).

Marianne Williamson?

Like she mostly seems sincere but at the same time woo shit leads to some dumb things (like the anti-vax stuff she used to promote before 2020).