apsec112

Polls by Blueprint show that the main reasons for the right shift among swing voters were inflation and immigration; "Democrats are bad at running the places they control" was seen as much less important

Source: https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/

People who read "a great deal of" political news, from any source, went for Harris by 8%. People who never read any political news went for Trump by 20%.

Can we please change the title? "Chokepoint 2.0", from skimming, doesn't appear in the documents at all.

Quoth Patrick McKenzie:

"Nic Carter, a crypto VC and podcaster, who occasionally does very good work, has been steadfastly attempting to brand a constellation of regulatory activities regarding crypto as Choke Point 2.0. This branding is an attempt to delegitimize them by associating them with politically-motivated lawlessness. It has since become popular among crypto advocates.

Unlike Operation Choke Point, which actually was a centrally directed operation with written project plans, status meetings, ongoing progress reports, and a code name decided by the participants (who, in hindsight, should have talked to their own Comms department and picked something that didn’t sound nefarious to describe their plans), Choke Point 2.0 stretches like taffy to attach to any recent regulatory activity crypto advocates don’t like. So we’ll have to review quite an involved history of very disparate issues to give advocates a fair hearing."

(whereupon follows many details of crypto and bank regulation and what happened in 2023, which is much more readable than this pile of documents)

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

curious if you could link to relevant papers? Thanks!

o3 is still a transformer-based LLM, just one with a different loss function

"showing that multilayer transformers indeed cannot solve certain complicated compositional tasks. Basically, some compositional problems will always be beyond the ability of transformer-based LLMs."

Pretty sure this is just false and the paper doesn't show this. I could be misunderstanding, but it looks like the result is only about a single token/forward pass, not a reasoning model with many thousands of tokens like o1/o3

A US invasion of Canada would be militarily successful but result in absolute nightmare chaos. There would be a global move away from US trade, financial, and military cooperation; you'd see tons of rearmament and new nuclear weapons states; the US military would lose its logistical network as countries kicked out bases; the global economy would crash; there'd be a supply chain fire worse than 2021-2 as trade shut down; financial systems would get set on fire as the dollar lost reserve currency status and on and on and on.

This summary doc, "The Zizian Facts", is another collection of relevant information from various sources (including recent events):

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1RpAvd5TO5eMhJrdr2kz4...

The allegations were not true and the accuser retracted them. See MIRI's statement here: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1q0uv-sPpmvmm_5YH6zSB...

RFK Jr is definitely not a libertarian (even compared to someone mainstream like Gary Johnson or Jared Polis), he supports strong state intervention in many areas of the economy and society

The last four years have been nothing but a lesson in how much everybody hates inflation and how absolutely toxic it is to re-election campaigns

The political will is trying to balance a large existing debt at increasing interest rates, a significant primary deficit even in a good economy, rising military threats from China, a strong Republican desire for tax cuts, extremely popular entitlement programs that no one wants to touch, and an aging population with a declining birthrate

I don't think any assembly line exists that can manufacture and deploy SMRs en masse on that kind of timeframe, even with a cooperative NRC

$500 billion is a lot of money even by US government standards. It's about the size of all the new spending in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill.

AFAIK this is a purely private project, and Trump is just doing the announcement as a form of bragging/ribbon-cutting

More people support the TikTok ban than oppose it:

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/01/17/americans-banning-tik...

If you ask Americans to vote to make gas more expensive to stop climate change (eg. the Washington carbon tax referenda), they say no. America burns lots of fossil fuels because it's what the voters want. If every private fossil fuel company shut down tomorrow, there would be riots in the streets, and then oil and gas would be imported from abroad.

Trump won the popular vote; it's very hard, over the long term, to have strong social pressure from a minority over the majority.

"Inclusive language" won't stop anyone from being killed or harassed, especially with Trump in power in the US again.

Based on looking at the "Latest" feed (which shouldn't be biased by the algorithm), and on what newly created accounts see, right-wing posts on Twitter outnumber left-wing posts something like 10:1.

Yes, I mean if you got rid of H-4

You'd have a hell of a time convincing anyone to take a US job if you had to leave your spouse and five-year-old behind. (Parents, siblings, and adult children aren't eligible for H-4 status.)

The NHS structurally basically has to get worse no matter who is in charge:

- the cost of top healthcare will keep going up as new technology is invented

- the amount of care you need keeps going up as the population ages

- GDP can't grow because of various political constraints (Brexit, planning permission, Green Belt, environmental rules, etc)

- Tax revenue can't rise much because it's already ~40% of GDP

- NHS can't grow as a percentage of the budget because of competing commitments (pension triple lock must, in the long run, grow as a percentage of GDP)

I'm sure Labour and Starmer want to fix the NHS, but it's like trying to play chess when you're already mated.

Yeah, I don't think the selection into being a taxi driver is that intense though (at least in 99% of markets), it's a fairly low wage job

The study doesn't show the same effect for airline pilots, who definitely can't work while having Alzheimer's.

https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194

They adjust for overall lifespan in the study: https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194

They adjust for overall lifespan in the study: https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194

Here's a link to the actual study, which is very readable:

https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194

A non-trivial percentage of young Trump voters also supported the UHC assassination, presumably from some kind of general anti-institution vibe

We don't have AGI until there's code you can plug into a robot and then trust it to watch your kids for you. (This isn't an arbitrary bar, childcare is a huge percentage of labor hours.)