cherrycherry98

How many CVEs are in the software you're not updating in a timely manner if at all?

I'm not an NY Post reader but I respect them for breaking the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. The "credible" outlets tried to claim it was disinformation at the time. It took the NY Times 17 months to acknowledge that it was true.

I view them all as ideologically captured propaganda and tools of political interests. I'm also perfectly fine with that. What bothers me is denial from them and their ardent readers that they are not actually "fair and balanced" or objective on stories that can be used to score political points.

Not sure why the snarky response, obviously most people have very little direct influence over these things.

So you oppose green tax policy on the grounds that it isn't punitive enough against rich people? A rich person living a miserly life would pay little in taxes, I see no problem with that.

I assume that you are alluding to someone specific with the rocket launching trillionaire quip. That would be the same person who helped make electric vehicles viable and also helped develop reusable rockets, far greener than one time use ones, no?

If you want less of something, tax it. Support consumption based taxes like the FairTax in the US which would tax new goods at a high rate while used goods would be tax free. This encourages keeping items for longer, repairing rather than replacing, and purchasing used goods over new ones.

Western European nations have gotten a pass in recent history because they've been deferential to the US, are liberal democracies (ideologically aligned), and are not especially rich in strategic assets like oil. The same could be said of South Korea and Japan, highly civilized and in ideological alignment with the US.

In its history the US has engaged in military action against western and white majority nations: Great Britain (twice), the Confederate States, Spain, Germany (twice), Italy, and Yugoslavia. Not mention the perpetual rivalry against Russia/Soviets since the end of WW2 which has meant doing things like backing the "brown" mujahedeen against the predominantly "white" Soviets. Today it backs Ukraine against Russia, arguably making that war of "white" nations more deadly than it otherwise would be.

The US may have never fought against lilly white Scandinavian countries but neither has it done so against "brown" India or sub Saharan Africa.

Anecdotally, the person on my team who is producing the most output and the highest quality happens to explicitly shun LLMs and is also relatively young. Other team members embracing AI spend their day being misled by chat bots, trying to get their agents to work properly by toying with contexts (just needs a little more knowledge!), and producing verbose code that's hard to review and with obvious bugs when you actually think about what it's doing. My favorite is how everything is excessively commented but more than once I've caught the code not matching what the comment said it would do!

FWIW I find it useful if I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to prompt it than type it myself. Also for research and building understanding it's generally good. I still catch it being wrong on details of you're really paying attention or literally contradicting itself between prompts. That gives me a lot of pause about trusting things it told me that I just accepted as fact without having enough knowledge myself to question it.

Libertarian principles encourage relationships built on mutual consenting parties rather than coercion. This implies that both parties have the freedom to choose. Imagine being stuck with a small dating pool of undesirable partners, the choices may not be good but that doesn't make it authoritarian.

The shortcut is fine if it's a bog standard canonical arrangement of the piece. If it's a custom jazz rendition you composed with an odd key changes and and shifting time signatures, taking that shortcut is not going to yield the intended result. It's choosing the wrong tool to help which makes it unreliable for this task.

I also like the idea of sales taxes over income and especially wealth taxes for a number of reasons.

1. It limits the opportunities for the government to use force on the general population. Today, if you do not file your annual taxes, men with guns come and put you in jail. A sales tax does not require this level of enforcement to be inflicted on the average citizen.

2. It's voluntary to a degree. Today if you don't like what the government is doing and want boycott paying taxes you cannot practically do so because of point 1 above. With a sales tax you can decide to defer unnecessary spending as a form of protest.

3. In theory it's vastly simpler to reason about and plan for. The myriad of tax advantaged accounts that have proliferated over the years in the US is daunting: IRAs, 401k/403b, 529s, FSAs, HSAs, Trump Accounts, Roth variants. We ask citizens to best guess how to allocate investments between these vehicles for goals decades in the future. If you need emergency access you're often looking at paying penalties. Not to mention the poor user experience baked into many of the designs. 401ks put the burden on your employer to restrict your investment options to their curated choices and their chosen plan administrator. You have to leave your job and roll it into an IRA to finally have the freedom to pick your own investments and who you have the account with. FSAs have the annoying use-it-or-lose-it rules. 529s are bizarrely state sponsored but you can choose a plan from any state. Like your state's plan but want to have the account at your broker? Too bad, you have to use the administrator your state chooses.

4. It's widely understood that if want less of something you should tax it. By taxing income and wealth it discourages work and saving. A sales tax discourages consumption instead, which encourages saving and is also pro environmental.

5. Changing asset allocation is free. Today, changing investments in a taxable account, where there are gains, triggers a taxable event. This discourages the movement of that capital to other investments.

6. In theory it's harder to dodge taxes as the simpler system has less loopholes.

7. On average, people with more wealth should have more expensive lifestyles which translates to them paying higher taxes.

I understand the arguments that sales taxes are regressive, let rich people dodge taxes by living frugally, etc. I accept all that may be true and I'm ok with it. Many seem fixated on using the tax code as a mechanism to level inequalities, as if that were its primary function, and a sales tax doesn't advance that goal enough for them. I think I can accept that some people are going to be vastly wealthier than me and are going most likely live a much easier life because of it; much like I can accept that some people are going to much prettier than me, taller than me, less genetically disposed to certain medical conditions, have been born to better families/circumstances and those things can all provide significant advantages in one's life.

They brought it back this year as Mickey Mouse Clubhouse+. Same vibe, the animation is more polished but still simplistic.

If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals. This seems to be a hard thing for many to understand or accept because it is largely a second order effect, the capitalist primarily concerned with their own personal gain but winds up improving the lives of others as a side effect.

This is the essence of Adam Smith's often misunderstood invisible hand metaphor. Of the individual he observed: "By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Second order effects stack up and improve quality of life for more people better than trying to do so explicitly.

Multiplying capital creates abundance and that abundance allows for improved standards of living for and the means to spend excess resources in support of charitable endeavors. Growth is good because it means more abundance and opportunity. I would argue that pursuit of growth is not an ideology but a force of nature. Life is opportunistic and will expand to wherever there is fertile conditions, and often adapt even when they are not. We are part of nature and understand this intuitively, seeking growth opportunities. As an example, one is better off being part of a growing company (more wages and opportunities) than one that is stagnant or declining (fighting for scraps and survival).

Nothing the government provides is free. It's paid for with taxes that are forcefully collected and would have been spent or invested privately otherwise. I'm not someone who's against taxes but it's a myth and propaganda that the government can just magically provide free stuff. I'm ok with the government providing things but I want them to be honest about what the costs are.

Netscape 6, which was released in 2000 and based on the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) recommended 64MB of RAM. The Mozilla Suite was the basis of the Phoenix project (later renamed to Firefox) and they shared the same technological underpinnings: Gecko engine, SpiderMonkey JS engine, XUL interface, XPCOM, etc. Phoenix/Firefox was about using the Mozilla technology to deliver just a browser, independent of the suite, with aim of being lighter weight. So while Firefox didn't exist yet its heavier predecessor did.

How I yearn for when their marketing had everyday people touting how "Windows 7 was my idea!" Every Windows release since then has felt like they are hostile to user input.

Thank you for that.

I agree, the data does indeed show that Republicans have more voting power per capita, as they have advantages in the bottom 3 quintiles. However, I don't think the correlation of population to party (at the state level) is as extreme as some try to portray it. There are high population Republican states as well as low population Democratic ones. Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire are Democratic states in the bottom quintile.

The top has 11 Democratic votes and 9 Republican votes. The bottom has 9 Democratic votes and 11 Republican votes. If they all vote on party lines it's a tie. So it's really the middle population states that give Republicans their current edge.

It's a frequent criticism that smaller states have outsized representation relative to their population. The US is not alone in this, the EU also has the same characteristic. Germany, the most populous, has over 150 times the population of Malta, the least populous, but only 16 times the amount of representation in parliament (96 MEP vs 6 MEP). By comparison, the largest state, California, has 37 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming, but 18 times the representation in Congress and the electoral college (54 vs 3). Granted, it's not an apples to apples comparison as the votes are divided between houses and the relative power of the EU vs the US federal government but it's a comparison nonetheless.

It's a compromise when trying to form a union of political entities that differ so greatly in size. The smaller entities obviously give up some sovereignty to their larger counterparts. The larger ones seem to have to have to reciprocate in a meaningful way to keep a voluntary union.