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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I don’t disagree they did a bad job. Clearly. Again, I don’t even like them in the first place for similar reasons. What I’m saying is there was exactly one way to avoid all of this this week, and we all signed off on it. The democrats didn’t make anyone stay home. The democrats didn’t make anyone vote for Trump. Individuals can’t take the action you described above, but they had an option to stop it from getting worse, and chose not to.

    If you think the party is busted fine, I freaking agree. It’s not picking evil from the lesser of the two, it’s picking who you want to fight.

    Again I’ll say, the dems didn’t do this, we all did. The dysfunction of a party doesn’t excuse individuals had a choice, and chose this.


  • Yeah no. I hate the democrats, I’m a registered libertarian. The popular vote said they’re fine with project 2025.

    I don’t really care what issues anyone had. It was exesetential. We failed. That’s not a party issue, it’s an American issue. I don’t care about turnout, if you didn’t turn out you don’t care. Thats not on the party that’s on you. I don’t care about policy, it’s all about to get worse, we’ve seen it. Parties cease to matter when there’s dead bodies in the halls of government. We all saw the worst fucking coup attempt in history… And it worked. There is no party to blame for that. 2016 came down to poor leadership, this is just… deserved.

    We’ll see what’s left to re-build with.













  • I guess what it comes down to is there a plenty of things, big and small, that I don’t have an issue with as an American but I know matter to the other person. Usually it’s small stuff (how people comport themselves in relation to work, the line between direct and rude, etc) , but when it comes to things where people died, I think it’s best to defer to the people involved.

    Maybe that’s a trap of my upbringing as well but I don’t see that as American lens, I see that as recognizing there are a lot of lenses.

    And again, the original joke is decent, its a role reversal and punches up not down, but I wouldn’t want an American paper making jokes about Finnish biathalon Olympians spanking the Russians.

    Any joke with cultural baggage carries the risk you miss context. Again, I don’t think that’s just true for Americans.







  • how much you can build without a complete understanding

    We’ve never actually never had one. I’d have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing “there’s a bad bug or bad gene that’s making me sick”. Like you may not know the details, but you’ve got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked… sometimes.

    My favorite example of “knowing without fully understanding” is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is… because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as ‘half a base pair’) it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

    Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

    So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like “well I don’t remember much about quantum tunneling, but…”.

    And that’s all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it’s easy to fall into the “Terrance Howard” style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we’re discovering, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn’t actually supported. It’s like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could “fast forward” to the future, because time moves “more slowly” for you when you’re going faster, right?