fz3n

@fz3n

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It's so weird that we keep reminding people that he's pushing fascist ideas, and they keep moving the goalpost for him. Maybe they like fascism, but they don't know what the word means?

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Another lens that the model might fit would be a toddler. They similarly don't take the time to understand something before acting, and often end up making mistakes and breaking things. There exists a model for making some of the changes he's interested in making -- the framers of the constitution called it Congress.

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I think a lot of people view the US Government as a monolith -- a single entity that marches in one direction with a coordinated plan. But it isn't. It's the result of a lot of individual actors that all have their own goals and motives. I think USAID is an example of the people that want to do good things. Keeping people from suffering and dying globally definitely has some powerful self-interest arguments, and that's what is used to justify the funding, but in the end it's just an organization full of people trying to help others. Congress could cut the funding to the agency if they wanted, but when you sit a few hundred people together to discuss the impact of the work, they seem to come to the conclusion we should keep it. The real topic is whether it's legal for a member of the executive branch to perform impoundment of congressionally approved funds, or for the executive to unilaterally reorganize an agency created by an act of Congress. It is not.

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It was created by The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, a bill passed by Congress and signed by JFK. Every time Congress passes a budget, they choose to appropriate money to it. Just because you first heard of it last month doesn't make this news. Also, check out this thin skin:

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Congress appropriates money, and the Executive branch spends it. By the time it has been written into law with a passed budget, your tax dollars have already been assigned. Talk to your congressperson to change it. Impoundment is unconstitutional, even moreso when it's done by an unelected bureaucrat like Elon.

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I don't see it that way at all. Most people who want to vote for Republican policies are quick to express their dislike for someone like Trump, but somehow find find a way to compliment him in the same breath. Democratic systems function around voters choosing candidates based on the substance of their policies. The theatre of personality is a scapegoat and background noise to the uglier truth: the folks enamored with this guy want a patriarchal, classist society where they feel like they're on top. That's just the harder thing to admit, so you talk about liking his media strategy.

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I guess it's easier to say you prefer someone's personality than it is to acknowledge you have vile political opinions.

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From the countries shown, it seems like the losses came from local currency devaluation against USD. It looks like the sentiment is that everyone could just solve this by using a digital currency backed by the US dollar. Great topic for /geopolitics, but honestly, crypto isn't the cure here, government policy is.

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Are you just reading the Wikipedia article on dumplings and trying to pass it off as a hot take?

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Calling any of this civilization scale infrastructure with fewer than a billion users is a little tongue in cheek. There are a lot of things that look great on paper, that begin to fall apart at larger scales.

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Yeah, super cool to see school yard bully bullshit blooming in an already small and non diverse community.

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Finally, now I can understand what my Furby was trying to tell me.

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Have you ever thought about how you look at the most common problems of older generations and think to yourself, 'oh, that's probably going to happen to me', but when you look at the most common problems of your similarly aged peers and cohorts, you think to yourself, 'what's wrong with these people?' You might be ok.

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Symbols are not equivalent to the ideas they represent, they are merely references to them. This isn't unlike how pointers behave in programming languages. In your examples, you follow the life of an object used to represent an idea. In each state of time and for each question though, there is a single truth.

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Sure, assigned interpretations exist and are real, but to wrap back to the original image, there does exist a truth, meaning the interpretations can be true or false, and not all equally valid.

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Symbols exist to communicate ideas, and the communicator of the idea is the creator. That's why we care about intent. '6' and '9' are ideas larger than their arabic numerals. Focusing on intent is a key underpinning to how communication works at all. Or a worm did it, and it means the worm crawled that way.

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Then it is neither a 6 or a 9, it is worm pattern.

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Now look at what laptop batteries are made of. Then look at car batteries. It's turtles all the way down.

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In both definitions, context matters. If you're writing a scholarly article, you can probably get away with the original definition without complaint. If you are having a conversation with a stranger on the Internet, the more modern definition probably applies.

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'Meme' is a portmanteau coined by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" in 1976. The original definition is just an idea that spreads by imitation. Text would count. But there's a new definition of the word from the last two decades. 'Meme' now also refers to a reusable image that is paired with a themed text message.

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