I think people lose sight of the fact that there are quite a few people who move their votes back and forth, particularly in those swing states. He won in 2024 because a lot of people put cost-of-living, immigration, housing, and staying out of foreign wars as their highest priorities, and those were his main talking points. He's utterly failed to deliver on those promises (you could argue he did what he promised on immigration, but even the supporters disliked how he went about it). So, this vote is a rebuke. It's a vote against Trump's execution of the plan, not the plan itself. Importantly, those people still want those things, and prioritize those issues, and it doesn't look like the democrats have a believable plan to deliver on them, and they actually tend to talk around those issues. That means two years from now there's going to be an opportunity for someone else to come out of the woodwork and campaign on the same issues and re-invigorate those swing voters. A Trump 2.0. Most of these voters are working class people who are traditionally supportive of democrats, so I'd love to see the dems get their heads out of their asses and offer this group something real and tangible, particularly on housing affordability, but it seems like they openly despise the working class, and it's hard to shake that off. Fingers crossed.

Nobody supports everything their candidate stands for. That's completely unreasonable, and you know it. There are many people who voted democrat who don't stand for all the things their democrat candidate stands for. A good example would be the highly unpopular "defund the police" policies that were all the rage a few years ago. It's quite reasonable to vote for a democrat who pushes the defund the police movement even if you don't agree because on the balance of issues you'd prefer the democrat policies over the republican. Hypothetically if you had two Trumps running, are you culpable for their actions no matter which one you voted for? Are you saying that unless you agree with every single policy that your democrat candidate supports, you should just not vote? That seems absurd, and it would be hard to find anyone who agrees with your argument. Both parties are a coalition of groups, many of whom don't agree on fundamental ideas (e.g. Muslim groups and women's groups) and yet they agree to hold their noses and work together to push a certain set of policies. Traditionally the democrats actually have the much broader and less cohesive coalition, so the idea that someone voting democrat would actually support all the policies of their candidate is highly unlikely. The republicans (before Trump) were mostly a coalition of business interests and Christian groups. The business owners dutifully showed up at church despite not being very religious, and agreed to vote against access to abortion while knowing abortions were always going to be available for their daughters if they had enough money, and Christian groups agreed to promote a very un-Jesus pro-free-market de-regulation agenda in exchange. It was a smaller but tighter coalition, and was actually pretty successful.

No, that's incorrect. The guy who just thinks everything costs too much isn't "voting for violence". He sees two parties, only one of which is putting forward policies that address his concerns, and he votes for that one. You majorly over-estimate the amount of effort that the average person puts into politics.

There are people who don't know most of the things that you think are important. They have other things they think are important. They get to vote. Unless you want to take away some people's votes or you want to force everyone else to agree with you at gunpoint, then you're going to have to do the hard work of politics, which involves listening, persuasion, and ultimately compromise. It's harder but it's better for everyone than the other outcome, which is just violence.

That's interesting. It works for me. I'm located in Canada and it's a CBC documentary, and also I have a premium account. Maybe one of those details affects it.

I agree, but I also have to point out that depending on what priorities you have while voting, there aren't always any good options. Let's say you identify as a "worker" (unskilled) and you don't get too involved in the social politics and your biggest concern is that everything costs more and you don't feel like you'll ever afford a house. That's your biggest priority - a good paying job and cost of living. Historically, that's a pretty common priority issue. It's pretty easy to sell you on the idea that two reasons for this problem are that all the good paying jobs were shipped overseas during the globalization push (which is true) and that whatever basic labor jobs are left, that immigration tends to push down wages for those jobs (which is true to a first approximation, anyway). Traditionally this person would vote Democrat, the party that's supposed to stick up for the little guy, like him. But it's pretty easy to convince this guy that the ("neo-Liberal") Democrats are pro-immigration, and of course the Republicans have traditionally been pro-immigration. And on globalization, both parties are pro-free-trade. Mostly this just pisses him off and he sits home on voting day, not feeling like either one represents his interest. Now when the Republicans surprise-elect a guy who starts talking about tariffs and building a wall, and at the same time the Democrats are spending a lot of time talking about things that aren't his priority, I don't think it's surprising when that guy goes and votes Republican. You and I see Trump for the danger he is to the systems of the country, but that guy isn't even aware of what those systems are or how they work, and if he is aware, he thinks those systems are rigged against him. We're all coming at this with our own lived experience, and from that guy's point of view, Trump looks like the only candidate representing his priority interests after literally decades of feeling those interests were ignored. It's not enough that Trump is bad for ideological reasons. The Democrats need to offer this group something tangible that they really want. They want to own a house, and be able to afford to have BBQs and see ballgames and save up for a boat they can take down to the lake. And they know their grandparents lived that dream.

It turns out Everyone is Lying to you for Money.

What we're decrying is late-stage web 2.0 and we don't actually think web 3.0 can deliver on any of its promises. We just want web 1.0 back. I.e. an internet where you had to be fairly technically literate to be able to add your voice to the chorus.

"Hmm, your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." - Homer (Simpson)

When I give programming questions in an interview, I always say, "you can write the solution in any language you feel comfortable in" because the point is just to confirm that they know how a computer works, and can simulate the local state of the computer in their mind. "The variable is initialized with 0, and then after the first loop it contains 3," etc. I also usually ask them a question that involves figuring out the volume of a cylindrical tank, and I say "pretend I'm google if you need to look something up", not because I want to know that they can use Google, but because I want to know if they grasp the concept that volume is base times height. There are a surprising number of people who apply for programming jobs who have zero spatial sense, and certain aspects of this job require it. Heck, I interviewed a graduate of an electrical engineering program who couldn't convert an answer from A to mA. You can't just not ask technical questions in interviews. A surprising number of people get through life without a solid understanding of how the world works within the confines of their own field.

They were invited to join at the end of the cold war, and they kinda did, or at least they made advances in that direction. But I think Russia just didn't have the institutions in place to be able to follow through, and China did just enough to gain some advantage from free market reforms without also implementing the social freedoms that we thought would inevitably go along with it. You're talking about a society (Russia) where their cultural belief could be summed up as "endless suffering" and another society (China) where it's very low-trust. It was our folly to think you could build a western-like liberal democracy on top of non-western ideas.

I don't think we've used Airbnb, but we've used VRBO many times and they *always* require you to clean the place and take out the trash when you leave. Was this not a standard thing in Airbnb?

That's a pretty non-nuanced view of history. The reason that we had so much explosive growth in the west since the end of WW2 was because the US setup a system of international alliances and a rules-based world order with the goal of containing Russia and China. The sheer number of people who were lifted out of poverty over the last century specifically because of that is mind-boggling. But of course the game is still the game, and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US. No, the US is not a saint, but we can't forget that their actions during and after WW2 definitely made them and their allies the "good guys", at least until the end of the cold war, and I would argue even through the first gulf war, where the US military actually stopped the invasion of Iraq specifically because they didn't want to exceed the UN mandate. The thing is, we got used to it. We believed it was the new normal. Fukayama wrote a book called The End of History, and people believed it. He was wrong. But the reason he was proven wrong was specifically because Russia and China refused to see the obvious benefit of a rules-based world order, and refused to get their house in order. Russia's government is essentially run like the mafia, and China manipulates its currency, corrupted the WHO, and both of them installed a dictator for life. And when the American people became disillusioned, they elected their own leader in the image of Putin and Xi. That's how we got where we are now. I'm over-simplifying, for sure, but "US bad too" has never been an adequate explanation.

I'm certainly not sold on the idea that "government controls AI technology" is better than "bunch of silicon valley bros control AI technology". I don't trust either of them. I would absolutely rather have private development with more strict regulatory oversight, which at least keeps things relatively public and gives voters at least some say. The more groups involved in overseeing what goes on, the better. I get that red tape is out of vogue recently, but I suspect that's only a temporary thing.

I've only used Claude code for a matter of weeks at work. While it's supposed to stay contained in the folder you point it at, I've noticed that it has no problem *looking* outside that folder, and even acting outside that folder if you gave it implied permission. In one case it used the connection string from the application source code it was working on, and the fact that my windows account had read-only access to some tables in the production database, to connect to the database and query tables in order to answer a question it had about the potential ramifications of a code change. The problem is that while we're OK with this particular source code leaving the premises, we're not ok with data from a production database going offsite. In this case it wasn't sensitive data, but after that incident I only run Claude Code from a VM under a user with minimal permissions. Clearly it would have been prudent to do that from the start, but let this be a warning to anyone else who just downloaded Claude Code, turned off the "use my data to train future models" and gave it a go... it will *not* keep itself inside the folder you give it. Put it in a sandbox. I heard a similar story this week from an IT friend who said devs at his company were using Cursor.ai and it was doing scans of the network drives, so they did the same thing and moved it all to VMs.