Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

It shouldnâ(TM)t really be surprising that the compulsive liar was lying.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

...you realize that pennies don't solve that "problem," right? We already have to round the final total for virtually all purchases after calculating the tax.

You say that like you know a damn thing about masculinity. There is nothing masculine about being an incel you little twit.

That's one narrative you can tell. Another would be that the Republican party really only thrives when their candidates are brazenly corrupt and immoral. There's a fundamental dishonesty to candidates like Goldwater, Ford, Bush Sr., Dole, McCain, and Romney, who feel duty-bound to pretend to be moral while pushing the same aristocratic bullshit as Nixon, Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump. I would argue that the latter were much more successful because of their shamelessness.

Constantly morphing coalitions consisting of odd couples is just the two party system. The right-wing pairing of racists and religious extremists is a much better fit than Democrats trying to get union members and the trans community to see eye to eye. The Venn diagram of racists and religious extremists is practically a single circle. One could argue that it was the Civil Rights Act that really got them to lock step.

Identifying a singular genesis for our current problems that can be articulated in a couple sentences sounds nice, but we can always move that back to something else. For example, "This whole mess started after WWII ended and the Cold War began, because the military industrial complex has made us economically dependent on a system incentivized to embrace fascism." Or, "This whole mess started when the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans set the precedent for a two party system." One I like is, "This whole mess started when Truman's political cronies pushed him through as Vice President." How about, "This whole mess started when Joe Biden had the hubris to run for re-election and no one in his inner circle had the courage to vociferously insist he step down before the primary?"

History has no single narrative. It's complicated and messy. There are pivotal moments, but there isn't A pivotal moment.

When people describe DEI as hiring unqualified minorities what they mean is that people should be considered unqualified if they are a minority.

Brought to you by Facebook.

It could be interpreted as either biological, nurture driven, or both. The idiot parents who are reproducing en masse raise their kids to be idiots. The warning of Idiocracy is valid regardless of where one stands regarding the hereditary nature of intelligence/IQ.

With a president who solves an existential threat by finding the best expert he can find, and using his own formidable political skills and charisma to run interference for that expert.

Seriously, Comacho was a meathead, but Iâ(TM)d vote for him.

but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

But NextCloud and OpenCloud already do this while providing the software as FOSS. Set it up yourself and it is free. Want them to host it or support it? Pay.

Those seem like better, more mature solutions than this Open Desk thing.

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.