war1025

I like to think of money a bit like gasoline.

100 gallons of gas will last you pretty well forever if you ride around on a moped.

It will get you maybe an hour or two down the road if you're driving around in a fully loaded semi.

What most people need in order to be happy is somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, many people are determined to live in a way where their reach always exceeds their grasp.

You can't outrun financial idiocy.

The abandonment of religion and culture more generally has been a giant exercise in ignoring Chersterton's fence.

Culture is a basically "here is how we act so we don't die." People grow up in it, and they realize that some of it is perhaps outdated or inaccurate. That isn't by itself much of an issue.

The trouble comes when those people have children and grandchildren who were never immersed in the culture and so didn't have the backing of "here are our mutual stories" to know what to keep and what the get rid of.

It's basically burning down a library because, "Well I only read three or four of those books anyway"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

For example, on Facebook you can hide something dumb someone shares, and then as part of that process, there is an option to "Hide everything shared from this page".

If you spend a half hour going through and doing that, suddenly your feed is much less spammy.

It's why kids are able to devote so many hours to video games and other time waster stuff.

Only difference is this person managed due to luck / skill / timing to end up on a more productive path.

Time commitment is the big impediment for most open-source projects. Late adolescence / young adulthood is one of the few periods of life where you both are competent enough to do useful things and have enough free time to actually commit to that work.

I've always wished I had taken a hardware course or two while in University. I can't seem to think of anything practical enough to keep my motivation while I deal with learning about all the actual hardware bits.

I bought an Arduino starter pack a few years ago, and it was neat, but I never ended up doing much with it beyond the first week or so.

I guess this would maybe suffer the same fate.

What projects do people do with microcontrollers that don't just end up being silly gimmicks?

I see he kind of addresses it in his initial post. That description seemed pretty broad and open ended though.

I noticed the billing statement always comes through as from Tuwcows Corp, but I didn't realize Tuwcows was it's own thing that existed apart from just Hover.

According to Wikipedia, its been around since 1993, so a relative dinosaur on the internet. Wild.

The whole point of having two separate bodies is that it requires two groups that are chosen in a different manner to both agree that a piece of legislation is acceptable.

Objectively Trump is not a good person. That doesn't mean he wasn't a useful blunt instrument.

Many people on the right gave him far more credit than he deserved. But a lot of that was reaction to nearly everyone on the left spewing nothing but hate about him his entire term.

He's done and gone and won't be coming back.

The thing the left should actually be worried about is what happens when the next person comes along that also has the right song and dance to get elected, but once there actually knows how to govern?

History shows us that the line between "you are evil" and "the moral thing to do is to get rid of you" is vanishingly small.

The left spent four years focusing on the absolute worst aspects of a man, and refusing to give him credit for the several things he accomplished that were actually worthwhile.

That's a recipe for an unhealthy relationship, and it's also something you only get better at with practice.

I think they did more psychological harm to themselves over it than he ever could have.

It's not just the right that has walked itself into crazy positions. The country is in need of some serious regression to the mean on both sides.

Obviously it's not only that. It's a big moment for her and a great honor.

But also I think there was that flavor to it, and I'd guess her target audience thought it was great of her to put that touch in there.

> The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.

> We braved the belly of the beast.

> We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.

...

> We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.

> Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

> And this effort very nearly succeeded.

> But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

..

> This is the era of just redemption.

"Era of redemption." Gee, I'm sure looking forward to it.

Each state is supposed to be an equal member of the union, which is why they each get equal voice in the senate. Up until the early 1900s senators were appointed by state governments rather than being popularly elected.

It's sort of fallen out of fashion to identify strongly as a member of your state rather than just as a citizen of the United States, but I think this year has demonstrated that state governments still have a lot of influence and autonomy.

I for one have been very pleased with my state's handling of the situation and have been glad to live here rather than somewhere else.

I would argue the "false-positive" state that in this case is California.

Imagine if the entire Eastern seaboard was divided into three States. That would be equally imbalanced.

Every house district gets an electoral vote, and then each state's popular vote counts for the two votes provided by the senate seats.

They also just don't devote resources in heavily blue states for the Presidential race.

Why work to gain votes in a race you will lose anyway? Particularly given that you can win without putting in that effort.

Campaigns are optimized for the rules as they exist. Changing the rules changes the game. Just because the proposed rules look favorable to one side doesn't mean that they would remain that way if the changes took place.

There was a bunch of hubub on the Right in the fall about a Democrat win leading to Democrats tilting the tables in all sorts of ways that would lead to a "permanent Democrat majority".

I always came back to the same point as you, two-party politics will naturally self-balance at a pretty even split.

At a city / state level, you might be able to maintain one-party control through various levels of corruption / influence, but the nation itself is way too fickle to put up with that for long.

The weak link in the current majority will always tend to switch sides as soon as it appears that they might gain an advantage by doing so.

I guess that's the whole Gell-Mann Amnesia thing.

Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?

I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.

Where I live, we have more or less universal mask wearing in stores, but the only reason people wear masks outside is that they are about to head into a business or are just leaving one. What's the point of wearing a mask outside?

On the one hand, that's a lot of land. On the other, it's not really anything.

> A fatality rate of 0.3% also means that if everyone in the United States catches it, a million people will die

Exactly.

The first sounds completely acceptable. The second sounds unacceptable. They are exactly the same number, just worded differently for effect.

If you go with "Dunbar's Number" of 150 people that a single person can meaningfully maintain a social relationship with, that means if everyone in the US caught coronavirus, statistically you would have a 50% chance of knowing someone that died of it. Those seem like perfectly acceptable odds.

I think that cuts to the core of it. It's a tragic situation, but it is unclear whether it is catastrophic. That means we should be unsurprised that society is pretty evenly split over whether the measures we've taken have been too much or too little.