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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • Don’t forget that these restrictions also apply to the Americans living in Guam, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands, as they all have the same status as Puerto Rico. It’s interesting too because citizens of the 50 states can vote absentee from other countries, and American Astronauts have voted from space. That would make Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa the only places in the universe an American can’t vote for President



  • As other have said, housing, at least in the US, has always been seen as an investment, and investments are supposed to appreciate in value. It is difficult to sell to political bases that one of two things must then be true: 1) People who bought houses 20+ years ago will have to lose equity on the house which they potentially were relying on for some amount of retirement, or 2) The government will have to step in and fill the gap (a la systems similar to agricultural subsidies). Neither of those things would you be able to sell to a wide enough base that they could be acted on.

    In the end, this was caused by two things. On a practical level, prices continued climbing while wages stagnated over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, I personally don’t think that necessities such as housing should be commodified.

    This also brings up the fact that single family homes, the predominant home type in the US, are not good from an environmental standpoint or an urban planning standpoint. It would be better to convert into duplexes and such. In the end, I agree that buying a home is way too much, but in the long run it may be good that the market is pushing more people towards lower impact forms of housing




    • Accidental Tech Podcast: Three dudes talking about tech and (mostly) Apple
    • The Allusionist: podcast about language and linguistics
    • The Bruenigs: Matt & Liz Bruenig talk about random stuff
    • Cortex: podcast about productivity by Myke Hurley & CGP Grey
    • Factually: Interviews with interesting people hosted by Adam Connover
    • Hello Internet (Dead): two dudes talking, GGP Grey & Brady Haran (Numberphile)
    • Intentionally Blank: Random conversations with Brandon Sanderson & Dan Wells
    • No Such Thing As a Fish: Intersting and odd facts by the team behind the British TV show QI
    • Puck Soup: Ice Hockey News and information
    • Stuff You Should Know: Funny podcast about all kinds of stuff
    • The Tennis Podcast: podcast about tennis
    • Ungeniused: brief episodes about interesting Wikipedia pages
    • The Unmade Podcast: mostly random stuff, but about pitching ideas for other podcasts
    • Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me: the NPR News quiz










  • While it is true that most early astronauts were aviators, specifically test pilots, it’s also important to consider that it was the case then as it is now that the US Navy operates more planes and has more pilots than the US Air Force. Just percentage wise, that would edge towards more Navy pilots who use the naval terminology in their ranks (the Mercury 7 were 4 Navy pilots, 2 Air Force, and 1 Marine I think, though I could be wrong). I would assume that the culture would skew even more Naval as space flight progresses as early spaceflight was a couple of guys in a tin can to larger scale craft.

    Another weird quirk too is that common military rank terms like “captain” and “lieutenant” don’t line up between the Navy and the others (at least in the US). So the OG Star Trek guys would be Colonel Kirk and Captain Uhura under Air Force terminology, and that just sounds weird






  • Think it’s just a familiar form factor for the product given that most are used to how the former birdsite’s apps (both first and third parties) looked and operated. A few of them are even made by the same developers who had made third party apps. May eventually drift towards something else, but at least for the time being, telling people “instead of logging into this website, you log into this website” and everything else works and looks the same is an easier sell especially during the mass adoption and scaling phase of the platform


  • My degree and professional training is all in physics. Biggest one for me is that they use “high temperature” when relating to superconductors like we’re going to have superconducting phones next year, when in reality high-T superconductors are still colder than 100 K (-173°C, -280°F). Also they gotta stop flipping out over Water on Mars. That’s so passe, there’s a literal list on wikipedia on how many times that’s happened. On the plus side though, most have just stopped trying to explain anything around physics and instead go for a more “x does y cause physics” approach



  • I’m still soured by how the primary shook out in 2020. Before any votes were cast, all everyone said about all the candidates were that anyone could beat Trump. Bernie won the first 3 races, and the Democratic establishment fought anyway they could to kill the movement, including pressuring flailing campaigns to back out. Biden finally won and the only message is for the left wing of the party to get in line. Kind of a hard pill to swallow when the Democrats claimed to be the party of the youth, but the youth voted 80%+ for Bernie in the primary. Ended up voting Green in 2020. Will I do so again in '24? Who knows, but at this point it isn’t looking good. I don’t like that the right wing of the Democrats (center-right overall) expects the left to follow along no matter what they do.

    I’m not sure I buy this whole “third party votes are wasted votes” or “third party votes are a vote for the opposition”. The US system heavily heavily biases towards having a two party system, but third parties exist, and just because Democrats and Republicans are the two major parties right now, doesn’t mean they will be in the future. The Whigs were one of the two major parties for 25 years of US history, even winning the Presidency a few times, but now they’re not. It took people not willing to accept the party line and jumping ship to change that, which again the system biases against, but it still happened. Democrats aren’t the end-all-be-all of lefty politics. The next left wing party won’t be the end-all-be-all either. Democrats have no incentive to change the current system. By continuing to vote for them, whether you believe it or not, you’re approving and perpetuating the behavior. It isn’t a useful method of change to say “I don’t agree with anything the Democrats say, but that’s the world we’re in”. That’s how you end up in a situation where 70% of the country supports universal healthcare, but only 5-6 members of Congress do. Voting for a further left party than the Democrats will cause the Democrats to wise up to what their traditional base wants.

    Politics in Democracy is not a passive system. Passivity leads to what we have now, two parties that write the rules for the states and the governments that represent the interests of almost no one, but have convinced us that they’re the only and best options. There are agents of the Democrats currently in jail for breaking election law in their efforts to keep the Greens off the ballot. I’m sure the same is true for Republicans. Don’t tell them its okay by giving them your vote. Don’t give in to the political version of the Paradox of Thrift.