Absolutely. I consider that to be primarily Biden's fault for not announcing in advance that he would not seek a second term. After that point, I think each decision made was the best that could be done at the time to minimize the damage.
There have absolutely been cases of VPs becoming President without ever winning their own primary though, and I doubt most would describe those cases as DEI despite demographics often playing a large part in VP picks.
Though Harris was an unserious VP pick in the first place (2020). Given that Biden was 183 years old at the time, he should have picked a VP that Americans or at least Democratic voters had demonstrated at least moderate acceptance as a President in the primary, instead of picking essentially the least popular Democrat in the race (just to pander? Why else?). I guess the DEI dogma told him that it's better to have a Black woman on the ticket even if she was the worst choice by any measure: ability to get votes, relatability, or political experience. The funniest part is that Harris was most unpopular in the primary with the 'wokest' Democratic voters -- they hated her for being a decent D.A. and charging criminals with crimes, even ones who were 'disadvantaged minorities.' DEI forced her selection anyway because she checked two identity boxes.
Indeed. The biggest election win she had outside of San Francisco prior to her coronation as the nominee in 2024 was a Senate special election where she drew 40% of voters. 3 million Californians voted for her out of 7.5 million voters. California has 39 million residents, but about 5 million are non-citizens.
Actually more Californians voted for the Republican against her in the 2014 election for attorney general, than voted for Harris when she later ran for Senate in the special election.
Obama by contrast had won 3.6 million votes, in a smaller state, for a decisive 70% win in his Senate race.
Harris was a joke of a candidate who was obviously unelectable outside of a deep blue state, but she was forced on us so the DNC could virtue signal. It was a slap in the face to every qualified Democrat, many of whom would have had a chance to defeat Trump (a low bar if there ever was one).
They do. They understand you cited ADL in lieu of an argument. If it could stand on its own you wouldn't need the citation and guilt-by-association. They understand the culmination of all the surrounding context reduces to a schmittian friend-enemy distinction where you are placing yourself as enemy. Everything else is sophistry.
I read what you wrote and read it as sophistry. You reply by adding more.
"It's why you believe [...]" But you don't know what I believe.
"Scott Adams claimed [...] because of a response to a survey question [...]" But his statement is, if one applies some very basic "media literacy" (as you like to call it), clearly rhetorical, with the underlying message that there seems to be a lot of racial hatred from blacks towards whites in the United States in 2023, and that this racial hatred seems to be institutionally supported, and that as a white person of means he'll use his means to avoid this racial hatred and suggests others do the same. The cited survey is merely one data point he presents to support this belief. Arguing as if he arrived at this conclusion purely off of that alone is total sophistry.
I don't live in the US, so perhaps that will give you some reprieve. Scott Adams might well have been wrong. I don't claim to know here if he was, just that you haven't actually contended with his position at all despite writing a lot of angry words, and that this excess of sophistry justifies a dismissive response.
Wait, there are hundreds of cases of American citizens being deported? I've only heard of the one guy (whose name I have in a text file somewhere). Where's a good list of the others?
This demonstrates where a lot of the mismatch in impressions of this tech arise. The thousandth amateur Wonderwall rendition is not at all interesting as a piece of recorded music, but for the performer (and those listening around them) it can be a fun and playful experience. The same could be said for AI generated music: it could be a fun and playful experience in the present moment, even if the resulting product is totally worthless to the market. This would still be a valuable thing for the human experience.
Arguably this is a return to a more traditional way of experiencing music from before the invention of recorded music. Before this, music was an entirely transient and often communal experience. Once the musician stops playing, the music is over. Songs from these times have largely unknown authors, and likely don't even have any single author or for that to even be a coherent concept. They were simply part of the shared culture that many had contributed to. Now music is owned by specific people and you can play back their performance as much as you like (for an increasingly insignificant price).
This tech may be a negative thing for the market of recorded music, but it needs to be argued that recorded music is the only authentic way to experience music, and that this is why that's how most people experience music currently, rather than that being an historical anomaly due to the technology available. Once you step away from treating music like it's only valid when it's a product for a market, the problems of AI music seem a lot less catastrophic.
Not that this affects the political calculus (where perception may as well be reality), but the cost burden specific to universal healthcare is actually opposite this intuition.
Things like obesity, smoking, and alcoholism all kill you before you can get too old. Healthy citizens end up using far more of the far more expensive end-of-life care, to the point where it outweighs the extra healthcare the unhealthy citizens use in their youth.
This (French) study [0] published in 2023 on data from 2019 calculates that the costs from legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, including higher helthcare spend during the life of smokers/drinkers, are still higher than revenue from unspent money on pensions and taxes, and cost of healthy person living years.
> It took me a weekend to write the initial Perl script that made this site. It took me another weekend to do the Rust rewrite (although porting all the content took two weeks). These are not complicated programs.
My last Hugo site took 30 minutes to deploy, not a whole weekend. Picked a theme, pasted in content.
> You want free web hosting? Hugo might be the right option.
An extremely good reason to pick Hugo especially if you don’t have the know-how to build your own SSG. You don’t need to know a programming language at all to use it.
Again, I have to throw criticism toward this idea that everyone who wants a static site generator already has the skills required to make one.
And I’m not saying it covers every use case like the kind of person who is willing to pay $100+ per year on a full blown solution like Shopify and Squarespace. It fits a niche: someone who wants their content online without coding with no hosting cost and doesn’t want to rely on third party platforms like Substack.
I have practiced "street photography" for years, where I purposefully take pictures of people on the street. Sometimes people ask what I'm doing, I tell them, and they say "cool can I see the pictures"? Sometimes I send them a file or whatever. No one's gotten all out of sorts over it.
Vendor lock-in is a thing. Switching costs are a thing. They know this. That's the whole business model. They're expecting that the cost of switching to outweigh the cost of the subscription.
I get that this business model is fashionable amongst wannabe rent-seekers, but it's still antisocial and should be shunned.
Evaluating the risks of vendor lock-in is a buyer's task, unless it is a protected market or there is a monopoly abuse involved.
In this case, nobody forced (generic) you to use Bitnami's Docker images, you probably just thought "how convenient, always updated and easy to pull, one less thing to worry about". Which is fine, but it's always a bet on what will happen in the future.
Yes, yes. And a person who's pick-pocketed may well do better to protect their pockets. This does not absolve the thief.
Reasonable people can disagree about the degree to which vendor lock-in is antisocial or the degree to which there even is vendor lock-in here. But telling victims of such behavior to just suck it up and price it in only serves to distract from and abet actors abusing positions of power to rent seek and create low trust environments. It's not a systemic solution and it's not a serious engagement with the criticism levied.
> Yes, yes. And a person who's pick-pocketed may well do better to protect their pockets. This does not absolve the thief.
Freedom of roaming without having to worry about pickpockets it's one thing. Deciding that you go with the opensource offering of a company because it's convenient for you is another.
I know it's just one example but the entitlement here is _the key_. You are entitled to go to whatever zone of a city and it's not right to blame the victim in that case. You are not entitled to have part of the business decisions of a company you were a "client" without paying a dime or signing any binding contract.
You would be entitled to that if they were breaking some opensource license, for example.
Just because you want that to be "the key" doesn't make it so. You make that your singular focus and you let antisocial behaviour off the hook. That is your prerogative.
For me, the key is the bait and switch. It's like a drug dealer offering first time customers a discount. It's a good business strategy to get people hooked. Very enterprising. Nonetheless, I would prefer a society without such behaviour.
You mean society where I can benefit at cost of other party indefinitely but when other try to stop I berate them for changing conditions which benefited me.
So if you put up a bridge, people start using it, and you one day realize it's too much work to maintain, then it maybe the responsible thing would be to engage with the community, maybe someone will step up to maintain it, not to just blow it up one day without not much of a warning.
Sure, in this case the bridge is still there, and it started as a toll-bridge with free lanes. Now the free lanes are closing.
Crying orphans will be stranded on one side and their mothers bereaved on the other side, corporations will starve without new updates, millions of innocent businesses will wither away all because *they* closed the free lane without a consultation first, and with just one month notice. A total cybercide.
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OSI licenses should come with indicators to signal affiliations with a preferred theory of justice, so when the eventual grievance event triggers people will have the correct framing at hand.
This is not rent-seeking: Rent-seeking is leveraging your position to garner economic rents, like putting a toll gate across a highway in which the only value received for the toll is the opening of the gate.
Rent-seeking would be Broadcom saying that you must run a Bitnami image in CloudFoundry or pay a penalty for not doing so. They are in fact doing some work here. We may disagree on whether or not they're being compensated fairly for that work, but that disagreement doesn't turn this into "rent-seeking"
The penalty is the work of migrating away and redoing any integration work on a month's notice. That might seem trivial to a small deployment, but I know some people that use these images everywhere, including in places that aren't immediately obvious.
Not to mention a lot of people that are going do be doing this work are the same people also spending the year swapping out hypervisors which is also no small task.
People got used to using a highway that was free. They started doing business moving freight there, or taking jobs and commuting on that nice fast convenient road, and ... now suddenly there's a gate.
Note, the work gets done anyway. The highway is still there. (And marginal cost of more people using it is ... low.)
That said, it's a matter of definition. Usually rent-seeking refers to manipulating public rules, public spending, etc. Here that seems close to impossible. (Broadcom exploit their vendor lock-in business position as much as they want, it's a purely private arrangement, no one is and no one was forced to start using Broadcom's shit.)
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That said 2.0, rent in "rent-seeking" refers to a part of income (based on Adam Smith's division of income into profit, wage, and economic rent). Where economic rent is payment gained that's not justified by natural costs and market forces. (Of course, good luck coming up with a reliable model for this.) ...
However, here it seems we do know how to come up with the right numbers for profit and rent. Profit was what they were earning before and now ... any extra income is rent that they get by putting the gate down on the free lanes. (And, of course, as people will migrate away we'll see this rent decrease, likely substantially.)
Surgeons mark where on the body they're operating. This didn't used to be a standard practice.
Asking "Did I mess up my left and right?" or "Is this the right patient?" feels like a stupid question to ask. I'd certainly rather they ask those questions before operating on me! But turns out it's very hard to get them to do that, so we do surgical site marking instead.
I've been struggling to explain the principle behind the "stupid questions" and your example illustrates the point perfectly. Thank you. I'll be shamelessly stealing this point from now on :)
Stopped reading at the graphic. None of those descriptions for dishes sound anything like what a developer would write. Just pure obscurantist nonsense. "Cow secretions" to refer to cheese? Really? Even though that's more ambiguous, wordier, less helpful, and less descriptive? The author tells on their own shoddy writing skills. A developer might be guilty of writing "Pizza - goat's milk mozarella, wood fire oven" instead of "Cheese pizza" but certainly not that nonsense.
