• 0 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Other similar polls in the timeframe put “would want to” at about 9% as well. Some are even phrased as “would vote to”.

    What surprised me was the 18-34 demo who are apparently about 17% for it.

    That being said, the quality of a lot of these polls aren’t great. Many aren’t random samples and come with a big disclaimer.

    But, still, none have been as high as 20%. That’s crazy high as a national average. Really curious breakdown by state. The most support for joining to USA is AB and it’s still around just 13%. This suggests the most “I want to leave” state wants to join Canada much more than the most “I want to leave province” wants to join the USA.






  • When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was kinda a “fire sale” of government assets… They just got “sold” (effectively handed) to people who were favoured by the leaders of the time. This was how these Russian oligarchs came to be.

    I think this is where the wind is blowing in the USA. Tear apart anything the government does and hand the responsibility for those things as private contracts, and to just hand those contracts to whomever seems like they’d be a good soldier.

    Basically, rip all of the copper out of the walls, sell it at 10% market rate to the PayPal mafia, and then let them sell you copper-as-a-service.




  • They’ll just go buy what they want tomorrow. By the time the company is reporting quarterly earnings it’ll have averaged back into place. Doesn’t scare investors at all. Literally zero pressure applied.

    And like, do you think anyone of consequence is looking at intra-day sales? By the time anyone actually gets hard data, it will be over.

    Honestly I can’t think of a better analogy than my toddler having a tantrum in his room holding his breath when I’m not even in the room. He’ll have made up for it with some deep breaths after and I won’t even know it happened until it’s over.





  • I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a “general” problem?

    I think it’s still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.

    But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once you’ve mastered you’ll be sitting on a 160+ result.

    So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.

    But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences don’t provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right either…

    A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of “athleticism”, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.

    To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe that’s how they pitched it. It isn’t. Tough shit.

    But that doesn’t suddenly imply it’s nothing.

    Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesn’t mean they’re not measuring something.

    So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isn’t “innate general intelligence”. But to say it’s as irrelevant as “freshness of breath” is maybe hyperbolic.



  • I mean, there probably is: you can’t have trillions of dollars moving through that many hands without something shady happening.

    But like, DOGE isn’t going to find it. They can’t. They’re operating as if fraud means money just “vanished”. Like they’re going to find some account is missing a billion dollars nobody can account for. That’s not what fraud looks like at scale.

    It’ll be more like, contracts awarded (or not awarded) based on listening to businesses say things that they know not to be true, intentionally misrepresenting information and their positions to shape public spending. For example, convincing California to not build transit because you promise you can dig them tunnels, when you know full well you’re never going to build them tunnels.

    That’s what fraud looks like, and there isn’t a DB query for that.

    Not saying he hasn’t tried. “SELECT * FROM government WHERE fraud_flag = ‘fraud’;”

    “Damn, didn’t work”

    “Maybe the flag is ‘secret_fraud’…”






  • It’s amazing to me how willing people are to play the part of the shrill reee-ing blue haired archetype foil that Republicans created.

    I’m going to get drunk and ruin a wedding. THAT will fix the world.

    No, dumbass, it’s going to validate everything fox news has been telling their base about the left. You have absolutely no self awareness, and will ruin your brother’s wedding as if he was the CEO of Shell even though he’s a construction worker in rural Montana.

    Be the strawman the Republicans want you to be!