RAOF

It's a failure of imagination, really. Democracy *does* require at least two strong parties, and they cannot imagine anything other than “Republican” as the other one.

The *good* solution here would be to win 430+ house seats and 90+ senate seats and the AOC wing would break off as the other party

For my sins, I want to make some changes to how Ubuntu packages build, which means I'm poking around `debhelper`, which means I'm interacting with Perl, and woah, boy, is that not a task for being tired and bored in an airport lounge.

I don't think that's true; I think it's actually a fairly direct cause of the Coalition's thumping loss. Hardly anyone watches it *except* the right wing of the Coalition, and for *them* it projects their beliefs and desires *as if* they were widespread and popular.

It's somewhat of an own-goal in Australian politics, though. It has a *tiny* viewership, but that viewership contains every right wing politician, so it's a little like losing relatives to Fox News except the only people lost are RW politicians and everyone else thinks they're freaks.

Sky News After Dark¹ is this weird media project with low-5-digit viewership in Australia; it's primary purpose is to produce these sort of clips for foreign audiences!

¹: not to be considered with daytime Sky News, a reasonably respected news outfit

And radiation resistant hardware *is* radiation resistant partially because it uses dramatically larger features. But the AI chips are built on the smallest possible feature size so that they can fit enough transistors at a low enough power budget.

“You should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that,” says Mehdi.

Yeah, the problem in one simple advertising-speak package, isn't it. No one actually *wants* magic - capricious, dangerous - they want *technology* - reliable, dependable.

It is frankly uncalled for rudeness on human biology's part that one way to get a sore back is to lie down all day.

Ah, reinventing Catholicism from first principles. Gotta love it!

I think we're in violent agreement? I was just highlighting that your point goes further than the middle class to encompass virtually everyone.

“Working class” as virtue-signifier is basically a modern replacement for the Noble Savage, and no more useful.

The typical *billionaire* household includes two working adults. Performative idleness as a class signifier died long ago; what value is a class distinction that covers everybody?

My favourite stat for this is:
The NHS costs the UK less per-person at PPP than the US federal government spends on Medicare + Medicaid + VA.

And *then* the private sector pays about as much *again* for private insurance.

The US healthcare system is just wildly bad.

“Revolution is required to improve things” is very nearly an statement that things are not going to improve. Revolutions are hard to build and have a… mixed track record.

“There are ways things were better in the recent past; can we work out why?” suggests known changes (if you *can* work out why)

This is reasonable, but also not quite the point? The point of “virtually everyone is (materially) significantly better off after centuries of liberalism” is to inform discussions about how to make things better.

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry A look at history and popular culture

Oooh, if you've not read acoup.blog before then there's a *lot* of good stuff Bret's done. Memorable highlights include:
This Isn't Sparta: acoup.blog/category/col...
The Fremen Mirage: acoup.blog/category/col...
… and lots more!

Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem In this three-part series (I, II, III) we’re going to be bowing to reader demand and taking a close look at the nuts and bolts of maintaining an army in the field.  In our last series, after all, w…

You might be thinking of “Tyranny of the Wagon Equation”? The ability to keep armies in the field, pre-railway, was drastically limited acoup.blog/2022/07/15/c...

The. What.

On second thoughts, I am happier not knowing.

And His Dark Materials has big issues! And even with those is better than HP.

The people who set up the Met appear to have genuinely believed in these principles and to have structured the initial force accordingly!

“the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence” is a solid philosophical foundation for the establishment of a public police force.

And online communities of any size and maturity tend to mirror the structure of the state legal system - you have a formal group of community members tasked with investigation of breaches of norms and delegated powers to enforce consequences, often with a semi-court-like investigative process.

Even detaching this from the “state monopoly on violence” frame, “policing” is a task that *needs to be done* in a community of any size - community norms need to be enforced.

In online communities, we often call this “moderation” rather than policing, but that is the task.

Policing is a task that exists in a community of any size, and “the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence” is a fundamentally good way to think about it.

Police-as-practiced *where*? Clearance rate for burglary here is about ⅓ (statewide), which is substantially more than nothing.

I'll absolutely accept that the Peelian principles are observed more in the breach, but they're a *good* set of principles and policing *can* move more towards them.

I mean, these can both be true? There's a class of people who own property but not sufficient wealth to privately enforce that claim; bringing the protection of the law to them is more egalitarian than not doing it?

The rich will *always* benefit more from law, as they've the most to lose.

In the UK, public (specifically, *Peelian*) policing was an egalitarian reform of the justice system.

It's not like laws and courts didn't exist before the public police force, they did! You just had to hire someone to investigate and bring the suspects to court, so only the rich could. Not better!

I don't have a *solution* here, unfortunately.

I *suspect* that rejecting the framing - of mocking Republicans as terrified babies for their pant-wetting descriptions of the danger riding the *objectively safe* NYC subway - would help, but there's lots of obstacles to doing that, too.

Indeed, I think it's likely that attempting actually reduce crime via enforcement will *worsen* the perception of crime problem.

I think that throwing more money and prestige at cops *worsens* the problem, because they're now *more visible*, and it is the visibility that's driving the problem.

Right, and this is the key point. Democrats don't need to have a response to *crime* (which is historically low, and falling), they need a response to *perceptions of crime*.

And we can see, right now, that reducing crime will *not* solve the perception of crime problem, because *it hasn't*.

“AI isn't going away” in exactly the same way the AI *didn't* go away the last half-dozen times we did this; it'll be integrated into the systems where it's actually useful¹, like ML was for cameras.

It will invisibly make some stuff better.

¹: we don't currently *know* where it'll be useful!