If you’re going to make excuses for Democrats, at least get your basic facts right…

They’re fine…until you see the monolithic concrete dome home!

https://www.monolithic.org/

I want a house that laughs at tornadoes, earthquakes, and the rare simultaneous tornadoquake.

I’m going to enjoy torturing my 14-year-old self. My 14-year-old self was a shithead. But I was raised in a conservative Catholic house, and at that age I firmly embraced the version of reality common among the Fox News set. I was that annoying conservative high schooler. Sure I was repping hard, but I was still an idiot.

Now I’m a late-30s trans woman, about to celebrate 8 years of marriage to my wonderful husband.

The things I can say. I’m going to haunt this kid’s dreams.

The former Venezuelans will be declared illegal immigrants and deported to South Sudan.

Your country will be invaded. You will be declared an illegal immigrant in the place you were born. You will be deported to a third-party nation you have no connection to whatsoever.

You asked a question no one can answer.

Instead of asking impossible questions, I suggest just using a bit of logic. Officially, YouTube removed the like/dislike because they felt people were prejudging videos before viewing them themselves. Unofficially, people speculate they did it to have greater control of what people watch. But in either case, such a change would only make sense if plenty of people were checking the ratio prior to viewing. If no one ever paid attention to it, then there wouldn’t be anything to be gained by tampering with it.

Pass a new law. Make “it was an AI datacenter” an affirmative criminal defense against charges of arson. An affirmative defense is when you go to court and say, “yes, I did the act, but it was necessary because reason X.” “Yes, I shot and killed the guy, but I did so because he broke into my house and was trying to kill me.” That’s an affirmative defense.

Fuck it. Ultimately the law is subordinate to the will of the people. If they’re going to just ignore the voters, the voters should make it so people can’t be prosecuted for burning down AI data centers. It just won’t be illegal.

Yeah that’s what I figured. I was just really baked last night. This thought came into my head based on a conversation I was having with someone, and I just thought the idea hilarious. Just imagining some guard getting sentenced and going, “wait…I still get to keep my job, right?”

I always remember the classic Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the pre-9/11 days, the game had a helicopter that you could take off from the roof of the World Trade Center. You could only access that takeoff location via a helicopter. However, once the map was loaded, you could switch your aircraft. Our favorite thing to do was to start with a helicopter on top of the WTC, then swap it out for a jumbo jet. All of a sudden you’re piloting a 747 trying to take off from a dead stop off the roof of the WTC.

You can apply some common sense though. Women opening bank accounts was not some fringe thing only available to a few in 1975. It was the norm. In a city, the vast majority of banks would be open to women. Maybe there was one old fuddy duddy bank that refused to do it. But the vast majority would.

This is how anti-discrimination laws always work. The only way an anti-discrimination law can pass is if the vast majority of the population is already onboard with it. Laws tend to be passed banning discrimination when the tolerant majority gets tired of putting up with the bullshit of a bigoted minority. Until that threshold is reached, the standard is always “let people and companies decide on their own.”

Jim Crow was defeated when the vast majority of the US population had come to the point where they believed racial discrimination was wrong. It was the rest of the society collectively telling white people in south “we’re tired of your shit.”

If most women in the US could not open a bank account in 1975, then the vast, vast majority of banks must not have been offering them accounts. The only way that would happen is if the vast majority of the population opposed women having bank accounts. And if that was the case, there would have never been the political will necessary to pass an anti-discrimination law. Anti-discrimination laws tend to only be passed when they’re banning forms of discrimination the majority already opposes.

The purpose of a system is its outcome. If the elections only ever produced comically landslide victories for the ruling party, then that is a guarantee of a sham election.

Even if you assume every Soviet voter was a full-on true believer Communist, you would still never have such outcomes in fair elections. You would end up with multiple communist parties, each practicing a slightly different flavor of communism, vying for the vote.

Any voting system where the ruling party endlessly wins overwhelming victories is guaranteed corrupt and a sham.

This is a gross over-simplification. The gender pay gap in the USSR was larger than that of the US in the 1970s. In other words, the US had better pay equality than the USSR. And they managed to do that in a planned economy where all the wages were directly set by the government!

I suggest reading the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_Russia#The_Revolution_and_Soviet_era

It’s more complex than this. First, obviously the bank account thing is a myth. When people cite that women couldn’t open a bank account, they’re mostly referring to the date that a law was passed that prevented banks from discriminating against women. Plenty of banks were already doing business with women. The law just required all banks to do so. Hell, the first bank for women in the US was opened in 1879. It was still a very important victory to have anti-discrimination laws passed. But if a woman wanted to get a bank account in the 1950s or 1960s US, she could.

https://daily.jstor.org/a-bank-of-her-own/

But more critically, as the article I linked notes, the Soviet Union was not a paradise for women’s equality. Here’s the polit bureau in 1975:

But beyond top leadership, the problems were more fundamental. Yes, the Soviets were an immense improvement over what came before in terms of women’s liberation. But women’s liberation in the USSR was never a cultural movement like it was in the US. The party opened up some career opportunities that were previously closed to women. And cosmonaut was a high-profile example. But in the 1970s, the Soviet Union had a higher gender pay gap than the US.

I mean, what exactly is wrong with it? Age gap aside, I really don’t see anything wrong with say a young faculty member getting with an undergrad. Imagibe a prof in their late twenties and an undergrad in their early twenties. As long as the student isn’t one of their current or likely future students, I see nothing morally wrong with it. Now if it’s a 50 year old prof with a 19 year old student, that’s a different matter. But the problem there is the age gap, not the prof/student status.

In a just world, you’d have been bumped up a grade, moved into an advanced track, or given time in advanced sessions with other gifted students. That said, your teacher would have been responsible for making those recommendations.

Oh that did end up happening eventually. I did go down that track. Ended up taking calculus freshman year of high school.

Google:

“No need to sue us. Mr Maclsaac was listed in Google search as a sex offender, but wasn’t actually on the sex offender registry. But no worry, we’ve fixed the problem! We have several government records contracts. Our LLM simply corrected the record and added Ashley to the sex offender registry. The error has been resolved.”

A fool and his money are soon parted.

This is Paul Harvey…Good Day!

When I was a child, I was told that Communism failed because it gave no incentive for people to work hard and better themselves and their society. After all, if everyone is paid the same and has a guaranteed job, why worker harder than than anyone else? As an adult, I learned the same thing applies to workers in capitalist societies. In most companies, there is little reason to do more than the bare minimum needed to keep from getting fired. Promotions never happen as companies prefer to hire externally. Real raises and bonuses don’t happen; you have to move companies to get a real raise. And of course, workers don’t get any direct reward for working more. The owners just pocket all the profits and tell you to work harder.

I turns out both American Capitalism and Soviet Communism wasted colossal amounts of human potential.

“How do bird’s fly?”

Mostly horizontally, a bit vertically. 😂