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Joined 12 days ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2024

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  • Never trust a corporation, period. Their incentives are to maximize profits from whatever revenue streams they have, no matter what they tell you. There are ways they can do this that are at least in the gray area of legality,such as:

    A class-action lawsuit was filed against CVS Health Corporation (CVS) in May 2022 accusing the company of “deceptive fund-raising in a campaign it held for the American Diabetes Association,” according to The Boston Globe. Also according to The Boston Globe article, “Prior to each customer’s transaction, a checkout screen prompts the customer with several options for pre-selected dollar amounts, as well as an opt-out option, allowing donations to the diabetes association. Yet, the plaintiff alleges, CVS did not forward donations to the diabetes association, but instead applied the donations toward a legally binding $10 million obligation CVS made to the diabetes association.”

    Side note: I’m not an expert on these donations or anything, but rather the practice of corporations exploiting everything they can is so predictable that I knew all I had to do was search…


  • It’s not one-sided because Trump is what one-sided looks like. Democrats still support trying for a Palestinian state, while Trump wants Israel to not stop at Gaza but take what remains of the West Bank too. You don’t get to define the sides the way you want, we’re still dealing with the American public here - and the American public is very anti-muslim and militaristic (I mean we do have to live in a world where 9/11 happened - which, by the way, was one of the more egregious examples of the counter-productive effect of attempts to make Americans care about Palestine).

    I’m the last to justify continuing aid to Israel, but if you don’t understand the political difficulty of removing that aid you’re just not paying attention. This will be seen as a win for Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah and the backlash will be massive with lots of accusations that Democrats are embracing anti-semetism. And Democrats know from past causes like BLM that the same people advocating very forcefully for changing policy will morph into crickets when it comes time to defend those changes from backlash, having moved on to more exciting causes. So yeah, I disagree with aid to Israel but I can’t really blame them.





  • Yes but that’s not the biggest problem. Selfishness is the biggest problem as far as relationships are concerned. Every Republican I’ve ever known has this attitude that their view of things, which is invariably biased in their interests, is the only possible correct one and that anyone who disagrees is both extremely dumb and morally inferior. With friends this is not the biggest problem because you don’t have to share stuff with them. In a relationship though, it becomes really problematic fast.




  • As I use copilot to write software, I have a hard time seeing how it’ll get better than it already is. The fundamental problem of all machine learning is that the training data has to be good enough to solve the problem. So the problems I run into make sense, like:

    1. Copilot can’t read my mind and figure out what I’m trying to do.
    2. I’m working on an uncommon problem where the typical solutions don’t work
    3. Copilot is unable to tell when it doesn’t “know” the answer, because of course it’s just simulating communication and doesn’t really know anything.

    2 and 3 could be alleviated, but probably not solved completely with more and better data or engineering changes - but obviously AI developers started by training the models on the most useful data and strategies that they think work best. 1 seems fundamentally unsolvable.

    I think there could be some more advances in finding more and better use cases, but I’m a pessimist when it comes to any serious advances in the underlying technology.



  • Do a hostile takeover of the GOP instead. Many states don’t care why party you register as, and if they do just register as a Republican and vote in their primaries. Pick a socialist candidate and get them to run as a Republican, and vote for them. This is in essence what Trump did, but of course he did it for fascism and got Nazis to vote Republican. The same strategy can work for anyone else. This can start in safe blue states where no one votes in the GOP primaries and spread from there.

    This is a far more realistic strategy because third parties are vulnerable to the spoiler effect and will always fail due to people being worried about electing Republicans.







  • I upvoted you because I think you’re about the one person stating the reasons a lot of people give for voting Trump. However, I do quite strongly disagree with all of them:

    A worldwide pandemic was not Trump’s fault.

    Trump loves to take credit for the low inflation and low gas prices after the pandemic in 2020. So if he’s taking credit for that, he should be taking credit for the cause too. Of course, that’s spin. The fact is reality is complicated, and none of this things can really be attributed to Trump.

    Latinos voted for trump because they were sick of smug elites telling them they needed to alter their own language

    Ok so we’re talking about the person who is going to run the federal government that sets tax policy, handles emergencies, etc. and has utterly no power over people’s language. And honestly, whoever these people saying others “needed to alter their language” are, if they exist at all, I’m pretty sure it’s not Kamala Harris. I get that maybe you’re trying to provide a justification that isn’t necessarily yours in particular, but this example is a particularly egregiously silly reason to vote for president.

    Top it off with claiming that even though butter in places like CA is $7 and eggs are $6, the economy was actually better than ever before, and they were just too stupid to understand that.

    Ok so tell us then, what policy of Biden’s caused inflation? Here’s a chart of Monthly CPI data, as you can see the rise in inflation was basically Jan 2021 (the month before he took office) to June 2022, before it started to come down. So what policy of Biden’s was impacting the economy over that period? Keep in mind you’ll also have to explain how it impacted the whole global economy in a similar way.

    For example, if I were arguing the other way, I would say that Trump’s tax cuts for the rich in 2017, which dumped trillions of dollars into the economy, have had ample time by 2021 to alter the balance of production lead to price increases in multiple consumer goods. As the investor class tends to spend money on a global scale and the US has by far the most extremely rich people, it’s unsurprising that it would impact other countries. There, now you try, but with Biden instead.

    Or don’t. Because the reality is in the overall aura of your comment. “Smug elites”, one of many labels used very successfully to paint Democrats as undesirable and disgusting. It’s about what team people wanted to be on. Trump painted himself as Team Alpha Male, complete with Hulk Hogan there to cheer him on. And he painted the other side as, to be blunt, a bunch of gross trans women. That messaging is no different from what beer vendors, truck makers, etc. have used successfully for decades. And it worked again here.