Time will tell, but after more than two millennia this might have been the last significant announcement made in Latin.
Revealing much?
Readit Newserror_logic commented on The Vatican's Latinist (2017) newcriterion.com/article/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
error_logic commented on The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet maxwellforbes.com/posts/d... · Posted by u/jxmorris12
There is right now a thing that you believe strongly that is false. If someone were to point it out to you you would get angry. C'est la vie.
I actually really want to test your theory on myself. . . I wonder how I could best do that.
error_logic commented on 'Profit-Enhancing Middlemen' Fuel $200B Health-Care Chaos bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/petethomas
> what else can be undone with a midnight tweetstorm?
I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.
Such a pity that this is "easily" remedied via campaign finance reform and revoking Citizens United.
It's not that easy. The deeper issue is plurality voting and duverger's law, with people being incentivized not to vote for something but to vote against a perceived evil, as that's what the campaigns get more traction with on the whole.
Plurality voting applied to the tragedy of the commons, i.e. the nash equilibrium decision matrix, results in the worst possibility if there's no basis for trust. If we could vote on the results of that matrix, by replacing {+1, 0, 0, 0...} voting with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} voting, things might actually improve with 3-4 viable, local parties, with smart selection of candidates actually representing districts constructively and campaigning accordingly.
But we don't have that. I fear its absence at all scales from local right on up to resolution of international conflict may end up being the Great Filter: The coordination problem of solving the tragedy of the commons in all its forms.
error_logic commented on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams spectrum.ieee.org/10x-eng... · Posted by u/jnord
This post is so weird on so many levels. I'll focus on this part:
> You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.
As a reminder: Bill Gates, who is certainly old school tech, was born and raised in an objectively wealthy, well-connected family, then went to Harvard. This is nearly made-for-TV silver spoon stuff.
It is telling that you considered their post to be about class warfare rather than different values.
The original focus of this thread was on technical precision vs. market efficiency, and how quality was sacrificed for faster conversion to sales.
That shift compromises products for everyone by creating a race to the bottom toward the minimum viable product and safety standards. When the consequences eventually hit, the aggregate responsibility and emergent effects lose direct attribution...but they exist all the same.
error_logic commented on PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store chromewebstore.google.com... · Posted by u/dvh
It's just the social media process - find drama, blow it up to a ridiculous scale, profit.
In this particular case the creators were also harmed the most - the users didn't strictly get the "best" deals with Honey, but something is still better than nothing.
Harm to the creators is eventual harm to the users if it results in some of the creators they enjoyed watching no longer being sustainable.
error_logic commented on TSMC expected to announce $100B investment in U.S. wsj.com/tech/trump-chip-m... · Posted by u/perihelions
All the data available supports the conclusion that the majority of Americans prefer progressive policies. The problem for Democrats in 2024 was the candidate, and thus, turnout.
- Biden won more popular votes in 2020 than any candidate ever (81.2M, versus Trump's 62.9M in 2016 and 77.3M in 2024).
- Trump's second term was the first Republican presidential candidate since Bush's second term, 20 years prior, to win the popular vote; and Bush had 9/11 to campaign on.
- If you discount that you have to go back to his father in 1988 to find a Republican Presidential candidate that won the popular vote. Seriously, again, I cannot stress this enough: Americans prefer progressive policies. We just tend to prefer cults of personality more.
- Many congressional districts swung Republican in 2024 by only four or five figures of votes, and Republicans only gained Congressional majority by a couple seats.
- Its very likely the United States is currently experiencing or will soon experience a recession. Its likely this would have happened with or without Trump, but the person in charge gets the blame, and it'll be very difficult to fight that claim when tariffs have been such a hot topic.
- Its also the case that DOGE's cutting of the Federal workforce has alienated a ton of Trump supporters who worked for the Federal government or related NGOs.
I think this is pretty clear when looking at the administration's actions: They know that they have to move quick on a ton of stuff in these first two years, because they only have two years with Congressional majority. The last two years of Trump's presidency will be a Republican executive branch and Democrat congress, and nothing will get done. Then whatever happens in 2028 will happen; hard to predict that far out.
You can go read my other comments if you think this position is coming from some crazed TDS democratic lunatic; I'm not. I'm generally pretty moderate and understanding of the more complex macroeconomic and sociopolitical context which has influenced Trump's policies. This is just the facts; anyone with money to bet would absolutely be betting that the American left is more pissed than they've ever been, and the blue wave in 2026 is going to be pretty decisive.
You're underestimating how much the media landscape has changed, and the groundwork being laid even within the states themselves.
error_logic commented on TSMC expected to announce $100B investment in U.S. wsj.com/tech/trump-chip-m... · Posted by u/perihelions
Regarding your #2, yes you're right; the cost of playing world police was at the top of my mind when I wrote that.
The other equally important thing in my mind which seems to get a bit less popular attention is trade balances. There are certain countries the US is engaged with where A) the US puts very low tariffs on them and they do not reciprocate; meanwhile B) the US provides some form of economic assistance to them whether it may be through military support, contribution to NGOs etc.
Those specific relationships I think the US can and will eviscerate or at least play serious hardball when it renegotiates, because what is it gaining today? Do you want a CIA listening post in northern Thailand or do you want to home-shore production of some of the things you've been buying from them, creating some working class jobs along the way? The US is not a one party state so its direction on these questions may be unclear for a while, but I think I know how Trump, Gabbard, Rubio etc. will answer that question as the working class very much put them in office (and there are plenty of Democrats who would be sympathetic to this approach too -- they just seem to get sidelined by their party leadership a lot).
> The US is not a one party state so its direction on these questions may be unclear for a while, but I think I know how Trump, Gabbard, Rubio etc. will answer that question as the working class very much put them in office
Endless misdirection of targeted greedy promises and opportunism did. The coins launched right before the election blew through the emoluments clause, and the tweet threatening removal of funding from universities with "illegal" protests is targeting the first amendment along with news organizations that are feeling the pressure.
The opposition will be but a token, and the bargaining power of the average person is the ultimate target for destruction.
error_logic commented on Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud bbc.com/news/articles/cgr... · Posted by u/tartoran
Too complicated. Americans don't even understand the much simpler and (IMHO) sufficient ranked choice voting [1]. Alaska, a deep red state, sent a Democrat to Congress because the voters split their votes between 2 Republican candidates because they didn't rank both candidates.
While I think RCV would be better, I still don't think it solves the problem. There are a bunch of ways in which our system is designed to create a two party system, such as what constituionally happens if no candidate gets a majority of votes in the electoral college [2].
That aside, look at other countries. Has more than two parties really helped in practice? Germany, the UK, Israel and France all have 3+ parties in their house of representatives equivalent and all have swung to the right.
Practically speaking, we could solve a bunch of our problems by simply repealing the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 [3], which set the number of House members to 435 and a district size of 700k+. This would take a simple majority in the House and Senate and would revert district sizes back to 30,000. This would kill gerrymandering, practically speaking.
[1]: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/3624553-re...
[2]: https://www.usa.gov/electoral-college
[3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
Ranked choice for single-seat elections can create situations where your ballot backfires, which is why it has been tried and rolled back. It works for proportional representation, but then you've got people divided ideologically rather than by region and their local communities.
The divide by ideology (proportional), or into "safe" one-party states and "battleground" states (plurality in the US) is the biggest issue, the two parts of the human experience losing touch with why the contrasting values exist in the first place.
That said, good point on the issue of the size limitation on the House.
error_logic commented on Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud bbc.com/news/articles/cgr... · Posted by u/tartoran
There was a Tiktok trend where (typically) women were shocked to discover the (typically) men in their lives thought about the Roman Empire as much as they do, often on a daily basis. The question is why.
To me, it comes down to Rome not being the oldest or even the necessarily the largest or longest-surviving empire. It's that it's the most well-documented ancient civilization. Sites like Pompeii and Heculaneum provide a time capsule into ordinary existence that is often missing from ancient accounts that typically talk about kings, emperors, wars and so forth. In addition, we have a ton of texts from that time, including the direct writings of the likes of Julius Caesar.
Rome continued to influence European history beyond the fall of Constantinopole up until the 19th century through the Holy Roman Empire.
But the impact is still felt today. Classics such as Marcus Aurelius have arguably been co-opted into the alt-right pipeline.
There's also interesting psychology at play here. People like to imagine themselves in such a world. Where in the real world they might be just an average working Joe, people rarely imagine themselves as being peasants or slaves or a grunt in the army despite those being the majority of people.
I find that last point needs highlighting because there is an effort to reshape our current society, driven by real yet misplaced legitimate anger. Human ego being what it is, nobody acknolwedges the statistical likelihood that if you're suffering or oppressed in the current organization of society, you're probably going to be oppressed or otherwise suffer in a new society, particularly one built around an autocrat.
But when the central organizing principle becomes cruelty, perhaps aspiring to being a Brownshirt is the goal.
When the only perceived means of winning is making others lose, most people are going to lose.
The US should never have used plurality voting. It functions as the inputs to the Nash Equilibria decision matrix, our individual votes being against a perceived evil rather than for a value which supports civilization.
If instead of {+1, 0, 0, 0...} we used {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} with each non-zero value used at most once and without duplication of candidate, we would be able to vote for the outputs of the decision matrix--our combined decision--and avoid the tragedy of the commons. I believe the coordination problem is the Great Filter, and going interplanetary won't solve the underlying math of shooting first being incentivized by winner-take-all, and the risk of mutually assured destruction.
The Partial Vote system as I call it would still be one voter one vote, it would just be easier to express it in separate components rather than listing all permutations.
Edit: Also, try applying ranked choice to a nash equilibrium matrix. There are some pathological cases to using rankings for a single-seat (result) selection process, where a voter might have had a better result for them if they hadn't voted. That can't happen with the partial votes described above.
https://insidethevatican.com/magazine/pope-benedicts-resigna...