alyeska2

Why aren't Small Government and Free Market Republicans more outraged at the current administration's betrayals of these core components of American conservativism?

The budget deficit is the largest in history, the federal government size has increased, taxes on imports (tariffs) have increased in politically manipulative ways and now the government is meddling with the market price of commodities.

Even if you don't care about Europe or democracy or pollution or foreign policy... this is still just bad capitalism and bad big-government manipulation preventing the free market from correctly solving problems and establishing an optimal price for goods.

Perhaps you should take a moment to understand what people on the left actually mean, instead of taking memes as sources of truth.

For instance, "men can have babies" is a simple result of politeness and observable reality. Transgender people exist, and can become pregnant and have babies. The polite, sympathetic and decent thing to do when interacting with a transgender person is to use their preferred gender terms. This is true whether you're a small-government, live-and-let-live libertarian conservative (you live your life, I'll live mine) or a Christian values social conservative (Jesus spent his entire life around lepers, beggars and prostitutes and washed their feet as an act of love and compassion).

Combine those two facts 1) you've got a person who had a baby at one point in their life and 2) who should be referred to as a man today, and the result is you get a man who had a baby. Nothing left-wing or liberal about it, just basic civility and politeness to another person, which are values we should all embrace.

> Why? Why???

To find cures for diseases faster, find new ways to produce useful chemicals, find ways to make crops resilient against changing climate, etc

> Isn't this one area you'd want extreme human intervention?

No? There are an essentially infinite number of potentially useful experiments that could be run that have no risk or downside. It's not like they're doing this in a BSL-4 lab mutating smallpox.

I tried that once.

Then when I tried to log in to my Gmail account at my destination, it flagged it as a suspicious login attempt and wouldn't let me in without entering a code they texted to my American phone number, which meant I was locked out of my email for the duration of the trip.

Plus travel day realities often require your phone and accounts - plane tickets, Uber/Lyft, hotel reservations or updates from Airbnb with check-in instructions, door codes, etc.

It's a tremendous challenge and hassle for any regular person. We really just need to push back on the government overreach. It's tragic that half of the Trump voters proclaim to be "small government" and "Don't tread on me" but then tolerate things like this. There's certainly a bipartisan group of people opposed that are large enough to effect change if we work together.

The linked site shows me two subscription options, $289/year or $29 every 4 weeks. Expensive latte.

The economics of online new seem challenging. Bloomberg is $399/year. Wall Street Journal is $715/year. NY Times is $390/year. Washington Post $140/year.

That's a couple thousand dollars a year, just to have a handful of mainstream news sites. Add in local or regional sites, or content focused on hobbies, niche interests, etc and a person is looking at a huge chunk of their income (keep in mind median individual income in USA is $40k) going to reading the news.

Perhaps the more accurate description would be that as a kid, you misunderstood descriptions that petroleum was from decayed organic material from long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

"Both sides" is such an absurd claim these days.

It's like saying that a murderer and a jaywalker are both criminals, so they're basically the same.

> that apparently their vast majority of eligible voters prefers

The 2024 election was 49.8% Trump vs 48.3% Harris on a turnout of 64.3%.

So essentially, only 1 in 3 eligible voters preferred Trump (the other two were split between not voting and voting for Harris).

God I hope not.

We (the collective "we" of all humanity) clearly lost massively when we let a handful of billionares get richer by saying they got to control all sharing, remixing, performing, using or expanding upon any music, art, or other media.

Not that it's any real justice for Swartz or the countless others who've had their lives ruined by copyright laws or for file-sharing, but it's a tiny step in the right direction if we drastically expand fair-use and rethink if we really want a society where the 0.01% control music, film and art.

Your bias and/or obsession are blinding you to the situation here.

There are hundreds of Standord dropouts running startups. And if they do fraud, people call it out, the media reports it as fraud, investors and customers leave, and that's the end.

But Holmes successfully marketed herself with gender as a central part of her story, so that people like you would defend her, promote her and dismiss criticism against the company or product because you're so sure that it's sexism and not legitimate criticism.

The only reason the Theranos fraud got as far as it did was because everyone calling it a fraud got silenced and cancelled as sexists. Now that it's finally over they're saying "See! We told you!" and yet you persist in "No, you're just a sexist".

You also won't find this for future female founders, because the comment you're replying to is a random internet poster imagining things. You can say "I can imagine VCs saying..." and then complete the sentence with literally anything nonsense, it doesn't mean its real.

A big part of the Theranos story is that gender was used as a shield - when people called it a fraud they were dismissed as sexists and Holmes got a lot of easy positive press coverage from media that was dying for stories of about a female visionary founder.

No women are going to have to "carry the baggage" of Elizabeth Holmes. At most, maybe they just won't have the magical protection against all criticism that she had for a number of years. But realistically, people have short memories so we'll probably have a new "The female Elon Musk" hype cycle start around someone new in a year or two.

I didn't back up my statements with numbers because I'm old enough to have lived through the times I'm talking about and it's as obvious how much things have changed in my lifetime, but here:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco... shows houses have gone from 3.5x median income to 6x median income since 1985.

Or here's a source that makes the comparisons via number of hours worked, showing that people today need to work thousands of hours more than Boomers did to afford the same things: https://dailycaller.com/2026/08/29/life-mainstays-college-ho...

Or here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bf5814b4262c498fb73303b... showing that college tuition has gone from 8% of household income in 1968 to 20% in 2020.

The 90s wasn't a utopia, but also, look at the media landscape of the time as a reflection on society - Fight Club, Office Space and American Beauty were reflections on the unfulfilling banality of life being too easy to find purpose. Married with Children (1987) and The Simpsons (1989) center on men who are supposed to be relatable-losers in low status, low paid dead end jobs (shoe salesman and power plant worker) and yet both have two story houses and are supporting multiple kids, because that was just normal and relatable to the blue collar average Americans watching the show at the time. Rocky (1976) has a protagonist who owns a house in Philadelphia despite being "poor", if it were filmed today they'd have to make him sleeping in his car for the character to represent the same level of desperation that audiences understood him to be in at the time.

Who cares? A modern worker is on Zoom meetings for multiple hours a day, if one of those hours happens to be talking to a recruiter or hiring manager, so what? People also sometimes talk to their kids school or their dentist or the plumber at their house during the work day.

I'm a people manager, and I wouldn't bat an eye at a candidate I was interviewing joining the zoom from their work laptop and I wouldn't care if someone on my team used their work laptop rather than their personal device if they were interviewing elsewhere.

You seem to be confused about the point people are making. The point is that from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".

People owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores. A single income from any white collar job supported a stay-at-home spouse. Teenagers bought cars by working part time. College kids paid their tuition and living expenses for the full year by working summers.

That today's below-poverty-line job still leaves someone better off than being completely destitute is beside the point.

Everyone sees "AI writing style" everywhere online now. I thought it was interesting when someone linked to Reddit from like 2012-2015 and all the top-rated comments were in the same style.

It might be that the author used claude to generate or edit this. Or, they might just write like the bloggers and Redditors whose messages were trained on to create that style.

> AI doesn't make programmers 100x productive and it never will

I can't wrap my head around the AI naysayers at this point.

We've had the equivalent of watching the tech go from the Wright Brothers plane to supersonic stealth fighter jets in the span of like 4 years, and yet people keep claiming it will never do things that it clearly will do in like... 6 months.

Or in the case of 100x programmer... it's literally already there. You should try it.

I had the idea to extort Anthropic before the music publishers did. They have blatantly stolen my idea and owe me all the money they collect.

It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).

I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.

Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.

I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.

Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.

This isn't something that could be caused by a mutation in a single nucleotide or a segment being deleted or inserted, the way normal mutations happen and get passed on. This would be an entirely different set of (mirrored) machinery composing (mirrored) structures from (mirrored) subunits.

Whatever caused life to begin in the first place would maybe be the right place to look to recreate this naturally. If life began again from step 0, but with the opposite chirality, it could then progress forward towards mirrored bacteria.

Interesting perspective, I'm used to seeing the exact opposite observation, that British people are famous for saying things meant as insults that sound positive at a surface level and that people are often unsure if they're being mocked/ridiculed or not.

Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying something concretely that might be contentious or cause problems.

I don't understand what you're arguing here.

A fund went up 400% by making a few highly leveraged, concentrated bets. The market moved against its leveraged positions and it was forced to quickly sell to a rival fund, at only an 80% profit.

Nothing about that is meaningfully the same as Lehman Brothers other than the most superficial aspect of "A financial thing went down fast"