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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

    I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

    I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)






  • So I looked up what “federalizing the National Guard” means in this case.

    The National Guard is a unique entity in that it answers to both state and federal governments. Troops can be mobilized by a state governor or the president, depending on need. The National Guard personnel restricting access to Shelby Park are on state orders as part of Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s sweeping border security initiative.

    In theory, the president or the defense secretary could divert those troops by tasking them with a federal mission.

    “There are a variety of statutes that allow the president to federalize the National Guard in different circumstances. But the only one that would clearly apply in this case is the Insurrection Act,” said Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

    Nunn described the Insurrection Act as a “nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code” and explained that using it would be politically costly.

    “The Insurrection Act gives the president sole discretion to decide whether the criteria for invoking it are met,” he explained. “There are quite literally no safeguards to stop it from being abused.”

    Historically, Nunn said, presidents have only invoked the act to federalize National Guard troops as a last resort. That was the case in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower mobilized the Arkansas National Guard to enforce a Supreme Court ruling on desegregation.

    So, this would mean USURPING the Governor’s control of the Texas National Guard in order to get them to do something else.

    THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT BIDEN TO DO.

    THIS IS A STUNT.

    THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SECESSION.

    They want to be able to point to Biden’s actions in this and say “Bad” in twelve different ways.

    They ALSO want someone to invoke the insurrection act so everyone can have carte blanche to use it whenever they want LATER, no matter who is in control.

    This is a horrible precedent to set.

    This whole situation is bad.

    Rep. Joaquin Castro said: “Governor Greg Abbott is using the Texas National Guard to obstruct and create chaos at the border.”

    The best option here might be to let his own idiocy backfire on him. I just hope there’s a way to do it without more loss of life.


  • Deference only applies where the law is not specific.

    But it only applies to to laws. Unless I misunderstand what you mean by “policies”, it shouldn’t apply there. Since it sounds like you’re worried about overreach due to application of chevron deference, I was trying to see if I followed your train of thought correctly.

    In my extremely limited understanding, the issue with the RIFO and Chevron Deference is that the gap is so damned wide with regards to how to regulate the internet that there needs to be a better test than “does the solution proposed in the RIFO fill the gap?” I would consider the RIFO to be such an outlier in cases of chevron deference law that it almost looks like a strawman when compared to other uses of chevron deference. We should definitely shore something up to allow future questioning of the wisdom of courses of action recommended by agencies when consulted in deference matters once the consequences of such deference have come to fruition, but that very possibility (as I understand it) is part of WHY the deference to agencies occurs instead of simply allowing judges to decide. The people at the agencies, being theoretically put in power for a set term, have more to lose from bad decision-making than judges-for-life do.




  • Household economics are both micro AND macro.

    The handwaving that typically occurs when people try to throw a layer of obfuscation into economic conversations is both disingenuous and counterproductive to actual fruitful discussion about the current state of things.

    You might as well just say “money is wealth” or “what’s good for the goose”.

    The reality is we’ve been chasing a short run fallacy for a really, really long time now and there’s more and more in the way of misrepresented statistics in order to keep everyone from examining all of the indirect consequences.




  • Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?

    In 2023, the U.S. economy vastly outperformed expectations. A widely predicted recession never happened. Many economists (though not me) argued that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment; instead, we’ve experienced immaculate disinflation, rapidly falling inflation at no visible cost.

    By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of “rich” are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.

    Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at “I DID THIS” sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they’re worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.

    All of these “new jobs” we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse “total compensation” packages.

    The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking “you look like a great blahblahblah” for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.

    As far as I can tell, we’re IN a recession, we’re just calling it a recovery for some reason.


  • It’s worth noting that the whole reason MTG wants to oust him (IN HER OWN WORDS) is because he’s reaching across the aisle to pass a bill that includes things that support Ukraine.

    Johnson is one of them in all aspects and they still want to oust him.

    Read this one correctly folks – Going against Russian interests is the real problem here.

    Some of these GOP folks are bought and paid for by Russia.

    It does not matter how hard you toe the party line, if you go against Russian interests, the far reachers of the party will try to get you removed from power and replaced with someone who can be bought.

    This is what takes them so long to find someone to fill the seat.





  • I think it’s a combination of all of the reasons you stated AND the sorting algorithm not being the same as some of us are used to on Reddit.

    I’m still getting used to finding content I haven’t seen when I’m not toggled to “Subscribed”.

    A way to mark something as “read” and not have it show back up for me unless I’ve posted in it would be handy, but as with all new paradigms, I’ll get used to this one eventually and likely wonder how I ever did things the “old way”.


  • Not even remotely.

    That’s how old I was when I started pursuing it seriously instead of just dabbling. Two decades and change later and it’s still a choice I don’t regret.

    The basics are fairly straightforward and the field is wide, deep, and mutable enough that everyone’s always picking up new things anyway. The only thing that’ll make you different from your peers is the ratio of how many birthdays you’ve celebrated v. how much direct experience you have. Thankfully that metric is spread out far enough amongst CS folks that it’s only useful as a point of conversational amusement and has no bearing on one’s ability to do the actual work.


  • It’d be cool, but I think any youtube clone that doesn’t have a large dedicated takedown staff is going to have a hard time sticking around. That and the fact that the servers would overheat due to lack of airflow as the building they’re housed in is buried under a mountain of printed out and snail mailed DMCA violation notices make things problematic.

    Then there’s the order of magnitude increase in resources required to serve up the content.

    Add to that the fact that the reason most content creators are on youtube is for the monetization portion of their platform and it’s a tall order to replicate something on that level.

    That being said, an alternative of some kind for non-copyrighted content would be awesome.