I don’t think New England is a useful category anymore, since modern-day Maine doesn’t have more in common with the Boston area than it does with upstate New York. I’d extend what they’re calling the “NYC Metro” area from Boston in the north to Philadelphia (or maybe even D.C.) in the south as a sort of east coast mega-city.
I don’t think that Trump is easy to control. The Republican party in 2016 totally failed to do so, and so did members of his administration (both the extremists and the ones trying to be a voice of reason). He’s not interested in the day-to-day business of governing but he is interested in power and I think he has good intuition about people who would try to limit his power or have power over him. He uses people; people don’t use him.
I’m not sure that you and I actually disagree. I’m just saying that maybe he really doesn’t know (or care much) about the ideology of Project 2025. If you asked him to explain what their policy goals are, I don’t think he would be able to. If so, he’s actually telling the truth here.
Was this shelling by the Russians (from when there was a Ukrainian cross-border raid) or is Ukraine shelling targets inside Russia now?
Humans as a whole have never had any trouble killing other humans who looked just like them. I don’t think such an instinct would have been necessary. And anyway the uncanny valley has more to do with revulsion than aggression.
Not just humans - I think it’s not unusual to see a sick animal, notice that it’s “moving wrong”, and feel a revulsion that motivates staying away from it. It’s a very handy instinct if, for example, that animal might have rabies…
Edit: I agree with you, I’m just expanding on what you said.
Call me crazy but I think he might be telling the truth. His main priority is self-aggrandizement and he has no respect for any institution that stands in the way of that, but his political positions were actually fairly mainstream for a Republican. I don’t see Romney, McCain, or GWB giving the speeches (or provoking the mobs) that Trump did because they acted with respect for America’s democratic institutions, but I can see them supporting similar laws and policies. My guess is that Trump doesn’t actually care much about the practical reality of governing a country and in 2016-2020 the existing Republican establishment did most of the policy work. Now extremists are putting a lot of effort into becoming the ones who influence him, and maybe they will (which certainly frightens me) but that doesn’t mean that he currently cares much about their policies.
San Francisco (for example) has spent a billion dollars a year attempting to address the problem and apparently not succeeding. I think people would be entitled to ask where the hell the money is going if it isn’t dealing with homelessness the nice way.
Some groups of people will be hurt, and other groups will be helped. The groups that will be helped are the ones that vote and pay taxes, and even in liberal areas these groups are running out of patience with being on the giving end of expensive but apparently ineffective local programs to deal with homelessness the nice way.
“I don’t care where you go but you can’t stay here” doesn’t work if it’s the policy everywhere, but the alternative appears to be a situation where cities that do more to help the homeless simply attract homeless people from other places until they too are overwhelmed. (It’s a big issue in NYC with the large numbers of migrants arriving here, but the city is required to provide them with shelter by the state constitution so the Supreme Court ruling won’t have a direct effect.)
I think local and state level solutions are fundamentally unsuited to actually solving the problem but I don’t expect a federal solution either, especially if Trump is elected. So it seems like LA, San Francisco, and other places with an insurmountable liberal majority and good weather all year are simply screwed.
I never got tired of telling my rats “Aww, despite all your rage…” when they rattled the bars like that.
I had to do a lot for my dog that could be considered gross in an abstract sense but it never bothered me much. I suppose that was because he was my cute dog and not just because he was a cute dog, but being a cute dog certainly helped. It’s notable that I did not feel that same way about my little sister when I was 11 and she was born. She’s a great person now but I didn’t like helping take care of her even though I didn’t have to do it much; I think that’s a big reason why I don’t have my own children.
I was in the emergency room in early July once and it was full of guys with ice packs on their hands. It wasn’t even the fourth.
A friend of mine has a baby and he’s certainly in that joy category. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me because it was essential for the survival of the species, but I’m still surprised that people like babies. Kids can be cute when they’re old enough to talk and use the toilet, and even then they’re only cute if they’re the charming kids-say-the-darnest-things sort and not the tantrum-throwing sort. Meanwhile puppies and kittens are cute from the moment they’re born.
(Why do humans babies make such horrible sounds when they need something? A puppy whimpering makes me want to give it whatever it’s asking for. A baby crying makes me angry. I suppose the crying is harder to simply ignore.)
I don’t think that’s an impossible problem. Existing models can reliability distinguish between, for example, different languages. Most of their training data is presumably in English but while this may make them better at generating English text, it doesn’t make them randomly switch from other languages to English. A sufficiently advanced model would likewise distinguish between descriptions of reality and shit-posts because the content of shit-posts would not be useful for predicting descriptions of reality. Some fine tuning would teach it to produce just the descriptions of reality.
Or look at it this way: the folks developing these LLMs aren’t ignorant of the fact that Reddit content is often false and meant to be funny. They’re not going to make the sort of silly mistake that someone who isn’t an expert can still easily predict and they’re not going to train their LLMs on that content if it makes the LLMs worse, although we’re still going to see some glue on pizza while the technology continues to develop.
In a market with expensive housing, that would have effects similar to simply making renting illegal: a dramatic drop in property values, conversion of multi-unit rental properties into condos, and no apartments available for rent anywhere that isn’t a slum. I suppose it would be good for home-buyers, since people owning (former) rental properties would be desperate to sell, but it wouldn’t be good for renters.
My non-joke answer is apprenticeship. Kids could actually learn how to do a valuable job rather than graduating from high school with almost no useful skills.
Hah, I expect that Mitch McConnell is still going to vote for him.
defense attorneys argued that Manhattan prosecutors had placed “highly prejudicial emphasis on official-acts evidence,” including Trump’s social media posts and witness testimony about Oval Office meetings
It’s unclear to me why an official act cannot be used as evidence that a different unofficial act occurred. Let’s say candidate Trump shoots Bob on Fifth Avenue and then, after being elected, threatens to “kill Joe the way [he] killed Bob” during his State of the Union address. He can’t be held accountable for threatening to kill Joe, but he did just confess that he killed Bob while he wasn’t president. Why couldn’t this confession be used as evidence in his trial for killing Bob? Or, for that matter, in his trial for killing Joe if he went on to kill Joe after he was out of office?
Dwarves literally only want four things and it’s f—ing disgusting.
Trump seems to admire Putin and there is reason to think that Putin wants Trump to be elected, but despite all the accusations there is no evidence that Putin has any sort of control over Trump. And I haven’t even heard anyone else claim that Salman or Kim control him.