I read just yesterday they jave many permanent effects and are not reversible at all depending on the age started. But that in some cases that is the lesser issue.

But you succinctly stated the playbook. Spot something unrelated to the issue you feel your party is in the minority opinion on, but that the opposition, will defend emotionally and make that the issue. It helps if you are in the majority opinion on that issue. It is mostly a weakness in the democrats. They have The Groups and they maintain solidarity, so you only have to find an issue that one of them cares about to get the rest to hold the line, even at the expense of the issue they would have won on. In this case the left didn't just stop campaigning on the other issues, they stopped fighting for many of them altogether. That is what killed them.

That is it in short. Also looking at the states they run, their current playbook is broken. It isn't like TX can build housing anymore either but from the 90s until a few years back it did pretty well. California can't build anything and hasn't been able to for years. But, the disease of letting absolutely any niche group (or individual!) stop any action whatsoever has spread from the left to maga leadership. Along with centralized one size fits all federal government and deficit spending. Maybe the left will recover from it first having had it for longer. But it looks more like they will fight fire with fire and bring their own authoritarian populists out to take our freedoms instead.

Except the employers know this and tequire more work. Anecdotes are of people writing prompts that mostly specify a handul of testcases and to have the agents self prompt with the output of the compiler, linter unit tests etc. until it passes. Then they verify the tests cases are still right and move to the next ticket never even looking at the code, commiting the prompts into git. I've tried this with cline and a corporate hosted mistral. it works. My employer doesn't know it works yet but at some point we'll all just be writing prompts and verifying tests as fast as we can...

Saying there is no difference is incorrect. But it is surprising how often completely different motives lead to the same behavior. There are many overlapping factions with differing goals that sometimes align and sometimes oppose each other. Complexity is annoying, but it is real. Thiel for example has views that are largely incompatible with any faction involving manufacturing, but he wants enough of the same things that there is compromise. There are even different generalizations you can make about the parties that hold up. Red states have lower median incomes, lower education, more gerrymandering, about the same federal investment, lower gdp per capita, higher wealth inequality, but can actually complete building projects and infrastructure when they do invest in them. Causation and correlation as usual, but correlations are useful in partitioning groups.

I found your post difficult to parse. Is your assertion that profits are down or are expected to go down due tariffs? And that this is the primary driver of the layoffs? I'm not disagreeing, I just genuinely couldn't tell.

Mosquitos form a tiny portion of the diet of the animals that eat them, including bats. Mosquitos are pollinators, but again. Many othe pollinators pollinate the same species of plants. Making mosquitoes extinct might actually help honey bees by decreasing competition for shared resources. There have been multiple studies, and surprisingly, there is no evidence that removing mosquitoes would cause a trophic cascade, and a great deal of evidence that it would not. We should do it.

Well they started out as a diabetes drug which is one of the major correlations, so there is that. And anecdotally it does decrease desire to eat bad foods. The primary issues are insufficient protein intake and all the things that come along with rapid weight loss. Also, suddenly changing your diet, even for the better, can be hard on things like the gall bladder. So it is not risk free. Which is why doctors supposedly should only be prescribing it when the health risks pf obesity outweigh those risks.

It is the whole can't vs won't thing. Because someone could have a completely different personality dropped in there head complete with new brain chemistry, and make the other choice. But as you say. That isn't very useful. They won't. Not sure if it is related to free will vs determinism, but it is something like that. Not every decision I could make, is a decision I *can* make.

Tariffs would take a long time, but chaotic trade policy could wralen the dollar until it doesn't hold the sole position of world currency reserve. Nothing can completely take its place unless some other countries start doing some politically impossible things, but losing that spot would make labor in the us much cheaper. Combine that with politicizing the bureaucracy even more than it already was using schedule F means the dollar stays weak as the prospect of whiplash regulation scares off investors. The idea would then go to start printing money to build infrastructure for onshoring, and then keeping moderate stable tariffs to protect those onshored industries whilst you let them compete mostly with each other. Then in 30 years you can start transitioning back to a service economy but keeping the industry this time. That is the idea anyway. It won't work because of how normalized corruption has become. The nascent industries won't be forced to compete, they will buy monopolies so that they never become competitive on the world stage. From a working class perspective it is actually a horror show even if it does work, because worker protections would have to go to be competitive. But we aren't demanding accountability from either party on corruption, so it wont.

Yeah Russell Vought wants everything back like the 50s, including our gdp. Seriously though, he does not care if the economy craters and stays bad for generations as long as male protestant Christians of European descent are in charge and the Paulian interpretation of the Christian bible is the law. It is basically the Taliban with a slick talker as a frontman to get them in the door. Next big protest is june 14. Don't count on it working out. That is what Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary thought. Poland got out in the streets peacefully and turned it around. This isn't about conservative values, it is about a theocratic electoral autocracy. And we are already there, no democratic rating org in the world would call us a democracy if we got rated today. They would all say hybrid regime or electoral autocracy. It will be hard to get back to choosing between competent but corrupt politicians that want to look like they follow the law, but it is worth the effort.

There is also a lot of evidence that type 1 diabetes gets triggered by a childhood virus. A nun noticed kids with type 1 who got tb vaccines often stopped having type 1. She was called a quack and ridiculed until, posthumously the establishment medical community issued an apology and admitted there was likely something there. Figuring out how to reprogram the immune system would be huge.

They aren't entirely wrong, they just drew the wrong conclusion. We have plenty of evidence of autoimmune issues arising from various viruses. We haven't put enough research into them as a whole. We studied this one more and found more of the problems it causes. If we knew the entire gdp cost of the disease burden due to the common cold, or particularly mono, we would be devoting far more resources to stopping them all.

If they want to pass their orals, they could have an AI test them as they go along, using only material up to what has been covered. It is probably as good a teacher on many subjects as the one they are paying for. The new skill they need is knowing what to prompt and how to verify what it is telling them. Especially spotting logical fallacies and unstated assumptions. AI is oddly bad at that. Probably because it was trained on billions of interactions by people who are no longer taught those skills.

I find it irritating. I tried a prompt to get it to stob being obsequious and to brutally criticize my assumptions and arguments. It worked! Until that prompt left the context window...

This! I think ai should absolutely be a standard part of education, including recognizing when it is being used to target your emotional responses. The fact that so many people can't recognize the autocrat's playbook as it is so unsubtly followed is horrifying. The fact that it took this obvious instance for me to recognize so many previous instance is even more so. When I read old comments I made here in the 90s, the naivety is so embarrassing. My code from that time is less embarrassing, and that is saying something. If my government class had been more than explaining why our form was the best one, maybe it would be? Class project, design an electoral system to create 4 parties, one that will allow the tyranny of the majority, but be stable, and design one that will disguise oligarchy. What sorts of propaganda will work best on someone who feels inadequate about their skill level, and what type to appeal to someone overconfident in their skill level? What percentage of the population should a scapegoat group encompass to generate sufficient ire, without being large enough to risk empathy?