I'm less convinced this was planned because I've met people like this in real life. Criticizing someone for showing disrespect while being incredibly disrespectful yourself seems like abusive parent 101.
Also, the fact they talk down to him about the war in Ukraine of all things is pretty shocking, like he wouldn't be there if he didn't understand the situation in Ukraine (it's not like he was there being extorted for minerals because he thinks things are going amazingly). It seems weird from a global policy perspective but on brand if you're just an asshole. Either way, truly an embarrassing day to be an American.
Yes I hope this wakes people up and inspires the country to elect sober thoughtful people again. I'm pretty cynical though so I've learned not to expect much from modern politics.
One thing that gives me hope is that politics has always been a mess (there are some times of stability but they never last forever). Though I think a big thing we need to do is strengthen democracy in the US, get rid of first past the post elections, gerrymandering, the necessity of large donors required for campaigns, unequal representation in Congress, etc. I think if we break the two-party system politics in the US would look better.
The only way that can happen is if several red state legislatures agree to the Compact. This Compact is useless to replacing the Electoral College if only blue states sign up; these states would have voted blue in an election, anyway. It tips over to 270 if several red states sign up and allocate their electoral votes against the wishes of their own red state constituencies. Would that be democratic? It is obvious why the growth of the compact has stalled at 209 votes; it is irrational for a red state to join it. It is also true in the mirror image if it were a "red state 270 vote compact," no blue state would join it.
Restructuring the elections, congressional seat allocation, etc. would require Constitutional amendments. Unlikely to happen. It is baked in the cake that individual votes are weighed unequally between the 50 states of the Republic. The only other way to do it would be an organic mass migration of voters that equalizes the population in all 50 states. The Census would eventually reflect this and the seats and electoral votes would be equal in all states, as I understand it.
We already have a "third party" now in the sense the GOP is unrecognizable from 20 years ago; the old GOP died out, like the Whig Party.
> Restructuring the elections, congressional seat allocation, etc. would require Constitutional amendments. Unlikely to happen.
As a Brazilian, I think it's unfortunately more likely than you think. Here in Brazil, we got a completely rewritten constitution (the 1988 constitution) after our USA-backed military dictatorship ended. So if the current USA government becomes a dictatorship (which unfortunately does not seem unlikely enough right now), there's a good chance the USA will also get a brand new constitution after all that mess ends, hopefully one with better electoral mechanics.
> Restructuring the elections, congressional seat allocation, etc. would require Constitutional amendments.
That's not always true. Proportional representation in the House would help a lot, and that could be done by passing a regular law. (The current "one member per district" law is only from 1967: [0])
I agree, but we're essentially asking for a unicorn for each of those favors. Just getting one of those done with the current societal setup could easily be a decade+ of very heavy campaigning. I'm not convinced I'll see all 5 in my lifetime, and I'm not super old as is.
It is more possible now than ever though with unprecedented communication. But to paraphrase Warren Buffet a bit: "We (the rich) are a lot better at this and we're kicking your ass right now". Imagine if we could have even a fraction of the youth anger from Tiktok aimed at such issues above.
You underestimate how important it is for people who perceive themselves as alpha males not to admit they were wrong about someone for eight years. Ain’t going to happen, they are already falling in line.
I have seen some people start to realize that Trump isn't this infallible hero over this, so it is working. But Some fans will diehard, very very hard over trump. Just gotta keep chinking at the armor, almost everyone will have a breaking point.
You must recognize some irony in how disproportionately democratic party supporters are being punished by the current republican government, whereas before, the chance of you losing your job for supporting Trump was nearly zero (as it should be). Yet here is your government, explicitly seeking to weed out politically non-compliant people for 'efficiency'. Public service is supposed to be apolitical; this witch hunt is patently unconstitutional.
I don't understand how you can write that comment in good faith. It is demonstrably illogical.
The only Trump supporters I know of who lost their jobs due to politically motivated incidences were January sixers, to which... I'd say it's unsurprising to see people let go from their jobs for breaking into the capitol building.
Your talk about power structures is also ironic. Power structures are being built right now. Some are torn down, but don't be fooled; something is taking its place. You may not notice because you think it serves you, but consider for a moment at least that this could be exactly what the structure builders want.
Can you clarify this assertion? If a lot of public servants are left leaning, make no mistake about them: they’re working for their incomes, regardless of political affiliation.
As other commenters have pointed out, a staggering amount of federal funds are paid to red states who are not working for these payments.
If this doesn’t debunk what you’re saying, then what exactly are you saying?
They're going to Liz Truss the budget. Economic chaos will be bad for everyone with a 401k. Probably that's the route to getting rid of them, just as people used the price of eggs against Biden.
I'm definitely glad that Trumpism has brought the dark underbelly of America so out in the open. At least I'll be able to avoid horrible people like you IRL.
I'm an American and what's actually embarrassing to me is the hundreds of millions of dollars we have spent keeping a meat grinder running that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands to a million good men and women. Likewise the Biden family's involvement in corruption in Ukraine stinks to High Hell and I cannot be moved to regard these two phenomena as coincidental.
I actually do not care one bit where the line on the map is drawn between Ukraine and Russia and I find it very weird that so many of us claim to. Think what could have been done instead, with all the wasted lives, time, and money. THAT, is embarrassing!
They literally said: “This makes great TV” - and both right-wing Fox and the Russian media are cheering.
It worries me that no-one in the Republican Party looks at it and says: Russia is our enemy right, why are we doing exactly what they want and benefits them?
> It worries me that no-one in the Republican Party looks at it and says: Russia is our enemy right, why are we doing exactly what they want and benefits them?
Why would they? GOP senators literally spent independence day in russia a few years back. Multiple GOP congressmembers voted against various resolutions to support the people of ukraine[0], condemn russia for its kidnapping of ukrainian children[1], or direct the administration to collect evidence of russian war crimes[2].
The GOP has had a strongly pro-putin wing for a decade, and Trump has been in russia's pocket for longer than that: ignoring claims that he's a hard KGB asset, the trump family has been reliant on russian money (investments and loans) for at least two decades. With trump being the uncontested leader of the GOP, the party is very much pro russia.
> I believe this is exactly what sebazzz finds worrying.
But none of these are anything new. This is all years old stuff. It does not make sense that it "worries", either you've never cared before and things have not changed, or you should be several steps beyond "worry".
But the votes you cited have 3, 9 and 7 republicans? How do you arrive at "the party is very much pro russia" if for all this time republicans have always voted for Ukraine military aid? What about the other almost 200 people? The pro-Putin freakshow has the White House sure, but can he really turn the entire republican party to side with our enemy? Against all the interests of the military industrial complex that pays for all their campaigns no less.
Russia is an enemy of the Left and "wokeness" specifically at this point, for sure. I'd oddly posit that Russia is at least semi-aligned with the "sane & conservative" values that the MAGA movement represents, so it all makes sense.
Personally, I think all Western nations need to be in partnership-with and promoting Democracy in a relatively-sane and ethnically-white country like Russia. Short of a few eastern-European countries and Israel, Russia has until recently been the only such country that hasn't fallen prey to "pretty please invade us we'll even pay you" kind of left-wing socialism that's fallen upon most of the west. A movement that oddly hasn't fallen-upon any non-majority-white country around the world.
I agree. I'd even go further; I suspect this show was about redefining the term "diplomacy" for the conservative base.
I think it's a step in a larger plan to start moving the Republican foreign policy platform into include a greater emphasis on diplomacy. Since diplomacy's been seen as the "weaker and less effective" path for so long it needs a rebrand in order to sell it to a strength-worshipping constituency.
It's Putin's plan to isolate Ukraine, and what a stroke of luck Trump and Vance are completely on board with Putin's rhetoric. Soon he can affect Ukraine elections and retake it. The war angle didn't work as he wanted.
Ukraine’s constitution doesn’t allow for elections during martial law. This is pretty reasonable, and the UK did a similar thing whilst we were under threat of invasion by the Nazis.
Realistically it’s not possible to hold a free and fair election while:
- A foreign power would bomb polling stations
- An invading power would try to interfere in other ways
- Millions of voters are displaced (within and outside the country)
- Millions of voters are in the armed forces at the front line
- Voting districts are occupied by an invading force and can’t really vote
That last point is pretty key, too. How do you ensure only Ukrainian citizens vote and aren’t doing so with a gun to their head? What if you manage to do this and Russia refuses to recognise your election because “you counted votes from legally Russian citizens” (which Russia claims the occupied regions are)? Then if you don’t count those votes, those Russian oblasts suddenly become Ukrainian and Russia claims you disenfranchised legitimate votes to rig an election.
All of this is why Russia (and by extension the USA) position of holding elections in Ukraine is complete nonsense.
This is relevant to HN because I'm probably paraphrasing this incorrectly but pg has said the following about why it's hard to launch a startup: the vast majority of ideas that sound stupid are, in fact, stupid. The ones that sound like great ideas have most likely already been done. Thus, the startups that have huge growth potential tend to be the ones that sound stupid given the conventional wisdom (so unlikely to have been tried yet) but are, contrary to the norm, actually great ideas in disguise. These ideas are basically by definition very rare.
Better yet, let customers decide if it’s reinventing the wheel. Many times, founders prematurely decide it’s duplicative, or delude themselves into thinking it’s not.
We all guess at the value customers receive, but only they can say for sure.
Also there isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before either in Balatro, it’s just a nice combination of deck builder tricks applied to poker. And the presentation is also well done which has nothing to do with the mechanics.
Balatro took the basic game mechanics of a very familiar game and said “what if they were dynamic”. The world’s a big place and I’m willing to believe it’s been done before… but I can’t think of one.
It’s the combination of familiar scoring mechanics with fun meta game modifiers that made Balatro so successful. What happens to poker if two of a kind is suddenly the most important hand? Or if not playing face cards leads to incrementally better scores every hand?
Again, I can’t claim it’s never been done, but saying it’s just another deck builder is missing the point.
What's the proportion to breakthroughs that are easier with familiarity? How many accidental discoverers do we need to match the output of a Terrance Tao or an Erdős?
That seems like the wrong question to ask. After all, there's no shortage of people who are unfamiliar with Yao's conjecture.
Or alternatively, even the most well-read person is not au fait with the state of the art in almost all subjects, so they have a chance to make an accidental discovery there.
But this kid wasn't an outsider: he was already studying computer science at perhaps the most rigorous and prestigious institution in the world, and it's not a coincidence that he made this discovery rather than an equally talented twenty-year-old who works in a diamond mine in Botswana. There's no risk that we'll reduce the number of accidental discoveries by educating people too much.
> That misses the point that there may be breakthroughs that are much harder or near impossible to make if you're familiar with the state-of-the-art.
If that's the point, you should maybe try and find even a single example that supports it. As the article points out, Krapivin may not have been familiar with Yao's conjecture in particular, but he was familiar with contemporary research in his field and actively following it to develop his own ideas (to say nothing of his collaborators). Balatro's developer may not have been aware of a particular niche genre of indie game[1], but they were clearly familiar with both modern trends/tastes in visual and sound design, and in the cutting edge of how contemporary video games are designed to be extremely addictive and stimulating. To me, these examples both seem more like the fairly typical sorts of blind spots that experts and skilled practitioners tend to have in areas outside of their immediate focus or specialization.
Clearly, both examples rely to some extent on a fresh perspective allowing for a novel approach to the given problem, but such stories are pretty common in the history of both math research and game development, neither (IMO) really warrants a claim as patently ridiculous as "the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before."
[1] And as good of a video game as Balatro is, there are plenty of "roguelite deckbuilder" games with roughly the same mechanical basis; what makes it so compelling is the quality of its presentation.
I wonder if there would be as much pushback here on this article if the conclusion to these 10k words of cited historical analysis had been to discourage the phrase's continued use because “we're besmirching our reputation as engineers using this idiom inaccurately” vs. “we're inadvertently maligning and hurting people by using this idiom inaccurately.”
In addition to the great lighting, the new design also has much improved acoustics. The sound dampening is impressive. I can have conversations without straining to pick up words through the din of echoes, and the ambience has a nice warm sense of quiet.
FAA through the National Academies did a research study a few years ago [1] to provide guidance on improving the intelligibility of PA systems and also improving the overall acoustics of airport terminals. The idea is that this guidance would be used for terminal renovations and new construction. It looks like they may have put this to use! (I was on the team but not an author of the final report).
I'm really glad that recognition of acoustics in airport design is gradually gaining steam. As a Seattle resident I'm pretty jealous of people who fly through SFO regularly, because that airport is a joy to wait in because of how quiet it is. Now apparently I get to be jealous of PDX as well.
