immutable @ immutable @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

I wonder what kind of plane Syria gave him

I get sometimes going “I’ll roll the dice”

• Me: I’d like my steak medium rare
• Government: That could expose you to some health risks because it’s not cooked well done.
• Me: Yep, I’d rather enjoy a medium rare steak and take my chances.

What the fuck was the logic on this one though?!

• RFK: I want to swim in sewage
• Government: it’s a bad idea to swim in sewage
• RFK: I LOVE SEWAGE!!!
• Government: you are a Kennedy right? You all dont have a pool?
• RFK: worm in brain need poop, poop in water, yum yum poop

Good thing we are saving so much money we can afford to hire 20,000 brown shirts.

The median annual salary for DHS personnel is $72k

That’s an annual expense of $1.4B in payroll alone. Billions of taxpayer dollars so trump can have his own little army.

Not to sound like a starry eyed idealist, but it’s both.

It sucks that it’s just a weird mandatory box, but if you don’t cheat your way through college you should better yourself in lots of ways. Learning how to independently organize tasks and time and research and challenging your preconceptions and struggling to really grasp complex ideas.

It should be all those things.

Americas relationship with our military is weird.

It’s something we actually have poured tons of resources into so it has impressive stats. You get this kind of weird split brain where you are impressed by the immense scale of what we’ve built, and horrified by the massive expense, but then kinda glad that you have the biggest stick on the playground.

As for conscription, the last time we had a draft it was deeply unpopular. There is a good sense of national pride that we have an all volunteer armed forces. I think most Americans are aware that a draft could be instituted but consider it so unlikely and think that if it really happened it would be because of a serious threat that people are mostly fine with the idea.

All men are theoretically eligible for the draft, but with no draft in a half century and with drafts only ever targeting young men, it’s something you kinda vaguely are aware of for a little bit and then you establish a life and realistically aren’t going to get drafted even if they instituted one.

Especially because there no mandatory service requirement in America, most citizens can pretty safely ignore the possibility of serving.

Growing up in America, at least back when I did, you get taught about America as this mythical thing.

• A shining city on a hill
• Manifest destiny
• Defenders of democracy

And when I was young we were also taught how these were our ideals and how we had failed to live up to them and done horrible things to get them.

I was always pretty happy with my public education, we learned about all the aspects, manifest destiny and the trail of tears and the overall genocide of our native Americans to get the land that god said we could have (he said it in secret to some white people doing the genociding). The blight of slavery, the birth out of compromise, etc.

The message I took away from my education was that America was an idea, one we have failed to live up to but one that we forever strive towards, making slow painful progress towards a more perfect union.

And maybe that was true, maybe that was propaganda. What I know now is that my fellow countrymen largely don’t want to consider the bad parts, wouldn’t it be easier if instead of having to do work to live up to our ideals we actually already had it all figured out. We actually aren’t shit, we are great, but we just let some bad stuff get in the way of our greatness. We don’t need to grow and struggle and grapple with how to solve these problems, we actually are already perfect and the most powerful and the bigliest and all we need to do is get rid of this damn scapegoat that ruined it.

And the scapegoat can be anything you like, trans people, Mexicans, an unfair trade deal with Canada. Don’t worry, no one is going to really think too hard about what these things are or how they ruined our perfect greatness, we can just say “hey it’s bad and if we get rid of it we will be great” and that’s just how it is now.

I always thought America’s true greatness, if it ever had any, came from our willingness to confront our problems and strive towards our ideals. All around me I see cowards now that are afraid of the real world and retreating into a fantasy. I loathe them.

Do not forgot this betrayal. My fellow countrymen, a large amount at least, are unmoored by reality, unbothered by reality, living out an infantile fantasy. People like that will hurt others to keep their make believe world going. You should not trust us, for your own sake you must not.

As an American that still has love in my heart for my Canadian neighbors, protect yourself from us. Protect your nation from becoming what we have become. The forces that broke our people will try to break yours too. Stay strong Canada, elbows up.

Being an American right now is so consistently embarrassing.

I worked hard my whole life, went to school, volunteered to help my fellow man, love my wife, support my family, voted against this fascist.

Now I have to listen to every moron that asked in school “teacher when will I ever use fractions in the real world!?” opine about their take on global economic theories.

Canada has been our stalwart ally, good neighbor, and economic partner since that little dust up when you burned the White House down a couple centuries back. And we are blowing it all up for fucking nothing.

We are a stupid nation, don’t bother trying to salvage this relationship. Take the time you have now to shift trade away from this fucking dumpster fire.

I never really understood the idea of the popular kids in high school. I wasn’t popular but wasn’t unpopular, just sorta a regular dude.

I remember thinking how odd it was that people liked people simply because a lot of people liked that person. Or that those people felt like they were better than others because a lot of people liked them.

Then I graduated and got into the real world and there were celebrities but beyond that there were no popular kids anymore. And celebrities were generally well known for some actual thing they could do exceptionally well, acting, singing, sports, etc.

Then social media gave us influencers which are just popular kids for adults. People follow them because lots of people follow them and some of them are genuinely talented but a lot of them are just flexing with wealth (or pretending to) or just attractive.

I remember being relieved that the “popular kids” was a thing people grew out of, and kinda appalled that we somehow engineered it back into adulthood.

I like how trumps entire negotiating strategy is “this will work great if everyone just blindly follows exactly what I say”

Hey Hungary, close your borders to China and you can have access to all the wonderful things America makes. Do you need sports betting apps? We got a shit ton of those. How about cash for gold strip malls? Would you like some insanely expensive private health care that delivers average results?

Under what authority?

Is the emergency authorization he’s been using and saying the imports are bringing in fentanyl somehow applicable here?

Does the fentanyl somehow shoot into my eyes when watching a foreign movie?

Have we just completely stopped the part where we go “hey, that doesn’t seem to be something you have the power to do” and moved fully into the dictator era?

Black people around the nation wait to find out which Haitian gang they’ve always been a part of as part of their deportation.

Truly America is the land of the free*

*terms and conditions apply, may not actually contain freedom

McDonald’s is so expensive now that if my family is going to eat out there are lots of better options at the same price point.

That’s why people came to you McDonald’s, cheap food.

A combo costs $13 here in Ohio, for that price I could go get a burrito from chipotle, or a bowl from bibibop, or a sub from Jersey mikes, or a hundred other better options.

If I want something cheaper I can go to Taco Bell and get a $5 box.

So at the price point I can get better food, there’s also equally quality food at lower price points, why does anyone still go to McDonald’s

Can you fight them as hard as they fought you

Nope

Filibuster maybe?

Only when there’s nothing pending

Procedural moves that slow them down

Nah

Could you at least not vote to enable them

Votes to enable them silently with intense eye contact

What the fuck can you do?

Pulls out phone, texts you for $20 for their battle fund

Jesus fucking christ

Well that makes more sense than LLMs I suppose. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense why musk would want that given the one thing he doesn’t run is an ad network.

As someone that works in the tech sector though, this idea doesn’t really seem super compelling. The advertisers already have this data, so it just seems like a weird kind of heist to go pull off.

Advertisers already know how much money you make, what illnesses your suffering from (based on things you search for), I mean we live in an unprecedented surveillance states.

Maybe musk wanted his own version of that to sell to people, that’s a somewhat plausible scenario. This just sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and the rule for a conspiracy theory is “someone has to make money” for the theory to be true.

Is musk a piece of shit, sure. Does the government have data, yep. Does taking the data from the government make musk money, maybe? I guess in the world where it’s a play for him to close the gap on a bunch of demographic information people can already buy from google or X, which he owns.

So I suppose if we see X or xAI offering significantly improved ad targeting or data brokerage that would make this all hang together.

I’m open to the idea it’s for something else. Data to feed into AI is the thing people are willing to pay heaps of money for right now. And musk has an AI company so I thought the thinking was “musk is taking data for his stupid ai company”

If that’s not what he’s doing, then what data and for what purpose?

I loathe musk, but having some trouble connecting the dots.

So if not for feeding into xAI, what data do people think he’s taking and what’s he doing with it?

The thing I’ve never really understood about this is what kind of data would the government have that would be any use to an LLM?

I’m sure that musk wanted that government data, but you all ever work with the government? Every data set is some weird pile of forms encoded in fixed width field, wrapped in json, plopped into the cdata of an xml node. Fucking enjoy parsing that shit and when you do you realize you have a form some guy filled out in 1972 to register a trailer.

Is the government sitting on some treasure trove of data that you could feed into an LLM as training data? Because that’s what would actually be valuable.

But musk is a fucking moron so I wouldn’t put it past him to break into an empty bank vault and then scuttle away like the fucking roach he is.

Do it Canadian maga people, split the right vote between PP and trump, give Carney a massive win!

We investigated, seems like a lot of people fucking loathe you. Hope that helps!

I think the comment you are replying to is not about the unordered list — but your use of em dash.

See the above sentence for an example

It’s extremely interesting to watch them give trump leeway here. I saw polling recently that many of the trump faithful believe that the tariffs will bring short term pain but it will be worth it for the long term benefits.

What’s going to turbo suck is that they will take the exact wrong lesson from this. It will enforce their short term thinking because they will remember this time that they experienced short term pain for long term gain and the gain never materialized.

I just wish we had the ability as a society to have a more nuanced conversation than sound bites. Ok we disagree about tariffs, one side thinks they are real fucking dumb and the other thinks they are great and will have long term benefits. It would be amazing if we could have an adult conversation about this, how it’s expected to work, how likely that is, what issues might be in the way, etc.

Perhaps it’s decades of being an engineer, but I propose designs that are meant to achieve goals and other engineers check my work, ask questions about things I might not have considered, help play out scenarios that aren’t accounted for and at the end of that we have a better design. As a nation we now seem so incapable of having an honest dialogue between the two major parties that not only are we advancing ideas that obviously won’t work but it’s clear we have no feedback mechanisms to correct course. So now we will just blow up the economy because a group of people think it might, somehow, using mechanisms no one can identify, lead to a future that is “better” where no one can meaningfully define “better.”

And that’s the state of discourse.