Do you think the blanket-pardon for J6 was ethically justifiable?
To me, a blanket pardon appears very problematic because I firmly believe that the underlying action (violent protest directly aimed at government representatives) was and is still a crime (I think that a group of protestors similarly storming the capitol or white house now would --and should-- not be pardoned either).
The whole thing is even more problematic because it basically directly rewards for loyalty to a person over the country/democratic ideals.
Personally, I have no doubt that a lot of them were honest, well-meaning protestors that caused little harm-- but definitely not all of them.
Commutations done for individual cases would have been much less problematic in my view.
> Yes, because the governments in 2020 have shown that rioting, setting building on fire, attacking police departments and declaring shit like CHAZ was totally ok and won't be persecuted.
Are you sure that this is not a distorted perception, fueled by media that profit off of outrage? There have been >14000 arrests following the George Floyd protests; I don't think it was ever established that setting public property on fire was fine (legally), not during the last administration and most certainly not now...
> But since Trump JD is not trying to put people from that summer in jail - I am totally fine with both group of thugs being free
Even if people had not been arrested during the protests (they were), this is still super iffy. This is a bit like saying "since Trump never did anything against Pelosis insider trading, its fine if he engages in it himself"-- in my eyes, thats not "morally cancelling out", thats him failing twice...
The best solution would have been for Biden to pardon everyone non violent (in violence defined something greater that what you would find in a hardcore mosh pit) and leave the rest - but that is long gone.
As a person that has set fire once to the building of my country parliament and overthrown the government - honestly it is not such a big deal
That is extremely simple, because there is less money to be made compared to just going into pure software/finance/etc, which is why all the US talent shifted there in the past.
Economically speaking it was a big advantage because you could get all the gadgets manufactured at chinese wages for the last decades-- electronics made in the US will be more expensive even after all the necessary investments are paid for (duh).
A possible model sector for how this could look like is agriculture:
Most nations subsidize the shit out of it to keep a good chunk of it local (~$20 billion/year for the US). You could treat heavy industry/electronics manufacturing the same way, it would just cost taxpayers a bunch and also increase prices in general (because you then poach manpower and capital from other unsubsidized industries).
What I would love to see is a public payer heath plan paid with a VAT. Then every startup gets subsidized as do large corporations. It sucks when you have to think about health care costs when doing a startup or rolling the dice.
> The USA will likely address climate change directly through technology (geoengineering) vs rapid degrowth (the only two plausible means of stabilizing the climate)
How is "rapid degrowth" a solution to climate change? we have "degrowth" in population in basically every industrialized country already anyway, but more extreme rates like South Korea are already destabilizingly low, and still not even close to enough for keeping CO2 emissions in check: That would probably require us to slash population by at least 60% (and quickly, even if we kept enacting CO2 reducing measures).
There is already a "solution" for climate change on the table-- electrify everything, de-carbonize electricity generation and help roll out this change globally, but all the major players are dragging their feet because this is obviously not free...
> Trump got a majority because eggs are too expensive.
I think this trivializes the outcome in a dangerous way.
From my view as an outside observer, these were all big factors:
- Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
- Having an impossible platform for a lot of single issue voters (mainly: people that want immigration reduced, but also firearm availability)
- Thoroughly uninspiring middle-east policy (not a personal opinion, but I think that cost a bunch of votes that would have been democrat)
Personally, I also think that some sexism was also a significant factor and that Harris would've had an easier time had she been male. I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
If the democrats main takeaway is that they just need to campaign for lower egg prices next election they might well lose again IMO.
> I also believe that the media smear campaign depicting Biden as completely senile was really effective (and a bit ridiculous considering the age of his replacement). Another very effective strategy in riling up their base was the "democrats want to transgenderize all the children" (exaggerated).
I'm not sure what they could actually do about these; if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem. We see the same thing in the UK. You can't fight a thing that people have made up in their heads with facts.
(I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them)
> Bad handling of the candidate selection for the democrats (switching to Harris too late)
Many of the democrats are simply too old. Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84. Feinstein died in office at 90. There's an entire missing generation, the party should be averaging 50-65. People are supporting them because there's no alternative, which is .. not durable.
> if the media (or their owners) want to lean heavily on the scale, this is always going to be a problem
100% agree. But I think you don't even need heavy bias on media ownership to get the whole political landscape distorted; I think the whole attention/outrage-driven ad-economy systematically pushes all reporting on both sides toward the fringes, and this is inherently more helpful for the right side of the political spectrum.
> Nancy Pelosi, world's greatest stock trader, is 84
Is this tongue-in-cheek? Because IMO the whole insider-trading exemptions for congress are deeply unethical (and unlikely to get fixed). To be fair, though, it barely even registers on the scale compared to the whole "You get to design and lead a government agency after donating 250M$ to my campaign"-thing... Whole situation just feels a bit like the gilded age is making a comeback right now, just strictly worse :/
> I note that there is a platform split on H1-B between Trump and Musk, but that doesn't seem to have been a problem for them
I think this is a really big lesson and something Trump is excellent at: His non-stop BS (annex Greenland, rename the Gulf, take over Canada) keeps media busy and many of his voters from realizing that the whole platform is neither self-consistent (see H1B) nor in the voters interest.
It is a really bitter lesson though, because after seeing how "effective messaging" looks like in our current media landscape, I'm absolutely certain that I don't want more of that not even from parties that would perfectly represent my interests :(
Propaganda was a problem in this election, and many of the points you make touch on this.
For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would not elect a president who campaigned heavily on tariffs and clearing out illegal immigrants, both policies which will tend to make things more expensive. But that was not the propaganda.
If you are concerned about Palestine, you would not elect the president whose inner circle was floating around ethnic cleansing fantasies about Gaza well before Trump made the current remarks yesterday. But that was not the propaganda.
Many issues (like immigration, firearms, and transgender topics) are difficult to talk about these days in America because propaganda (in any direction you choose) has turned them into absolutist binary views. Binary views that happen to be tied to identity. It is difficult to try to reason with identity-tied views.
Social media has only made such worse. Everyone huddles in their silos, cheers when their identity issues go one way, and rages when their identity issues go another. Contrarian viewpoints to the silo get downvoted en masse. It is pretty clear that there are nefarious sorts out there that know this and try to manipulate the crowd. And this isn't even an American only problem these days. America's just one of the places where the democratic backsliding is the most visible, due to our former position.
My main worry in fact goes beyond mere politics, and more to the anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise wave that is also part of the above. How can progress move forward when the propaganda turns vaccines into a boogeyman, when the propaganda politicizes climate change and also ties such to identity, and when (at its worst) the propaganda attacks science itself? To me, such is far stronger concerns to worry about compared to who wins the next American election.
Bigger predators and sheep/goats/etc don't mix well in general (should not be a surprise).
Protecting the rights of bigger predators over those of shepherds/farmers is something that rich nations can afford, but it still meets a lot of popular opposition (=> see wolves/brown bears in central Europe). An economically weaker nation like Egypt can not justify a move like that, especially if the animal in question is useless for tourism, too.
Don't worry too much tough, spotted Hyenas are not threatened.
Another thing to consider about South Africa is that wealth inequality is insanely high; it seems very plausible to me that most money is spent on like the rich 30% of population, and the majority of the country is basically on Namibian levels of care.
Public healthcare expenditure is also likely to be wasteful; governmental corruption and languishing infrastructure is a comparatively big problem there (compare power infrastructure, rail network, postal service), so the pure dollar value spent on healthcare is systematically off.
Thanks for the link btw-- I would not have expected such a clear trend in this, especially given how noisy metrics like life expectancy are; very interesting.
Thanks for the source of the quote. It's very interesting: Seeing "a computer can never be held accountable" is something where the cynic in me immediately expected "we just solved accountability, boys!", and not "this must never be allowed to happen". Especially from IBM...
On topic: I think our whole current Ad-economy is cancerous-- the decoupling of incentives between platforms and consumers/customers is IMO a bad trend for all of us long term (both sides), and having public attention/sentiment basically permanently on sale is yet another can of worms. I really hope we can learn to deal with this before it ruins our society. On the other hand, there are so many possibilities opening up, and generally just things improving without anyone much noticing, I'll still take unaccountable, capricious corporate overlords any day of the week in exchange. I would not want to live in any other time in the past if I had to make an honest choice.
Maybe the "customer support via HN/twitter" model can save the day here at least for this (as ugly as that whole concept is).
Note that loading (maliciously crafted) bytecode is generally not safe in Lua; sandboxing can be escaped in more ways than what's possible when loading plaintext sourcecode, and there are no full mitigations for this currently as far as I know (and would probably be highly interpreter/version sensitive anyway)-- the only "real" mitigation strategy is to just not `load` bytecode at all.
But this is probably a non-issue for a lot of usecases.
If you insinuate that %q obviates the need for ldump then you are wrong.
There is not even significant overlap in what they do; all that %q does is sufficiently escape Lua strings so the interpreter can read them back. It does not serialize functions nor even tables in any shape or form.
edit: Sorry for being unreasonably harsh after misunderstanding your message.
Thank you, it is really nice to hear. Though, I have to give credit to Lua's standard library -- the basic function serialization (without upvalues) is implemented there as `string.dump`.
Be aware that you're gonna have a bad time in scenarios where code is serialized using one Lua version and deserialized using another. Bytecode compatibility is not guaranteed between different versions of Lua(JIT).
I've shipped Love2D games as bytecode that wouldn't run on many Linux boxes because their LuaJIT installation (which is not part of Love2D but part of the system) was too old, or they stopped working after the user updated their system. There's a plethora of situations where something like that can happen.
I'm also wary of the "upvalues are preserved" feature, which sounds like a huge footgun, but I haven't looked into the details of your implementation.
To me, a blanket pardon appears very problematic because I firmly believe that the underlying action (violent protest directly aimed at government representatives) was and is still a crime (I think that a group of protestors similarly storming the capitol or white house now would --and should-- not be pardoned either).
The whole thing is even more problematic because it basically directly rewards for loyalty to a person over the country/democratic ideals.
Personally, I have no doubt that a lot of them were honest, well-meaning protestors that caused little harm-- but definitely not all of them.
Commutations done for individual cases would have been much less problematic in my view.
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