nednobbins

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Where do the Thunderkittens fit into this evolution?

Or Fritz the Cat?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not aware of any major predictions he's gotten wrong. As near as I can tell, he's very focused on ex-post analysis.

Ukraine is still in the fight but it's clearly loosing. Ukraine is still rich in subjective resources like "spirit" and "determination". When it comes to hard metrics the picture is pretty bleak; casualties, ground gained, artillery production, depth of reserves...

The "we" wasn't a quote by Colonel Reisener. I did put it in quotation marks but I thought it would be clear from the vocabulary that I was paraphrasing him. I'm sure you already know that Austria is constitutionally obligated to remain neutral. While Austria is barred from providing military assistance it has participated in sanctions and provided humanitarian assistance. That's earned Austria a spot on Russia's official Unfriendly Countries List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfriendly_countries_list

I try to keep a more complete set of facts in mind when assessing the reliability of sources.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

He has a lot of videos like that. One of them is him in a room full of cadets. He goes through all the drone innovations that the Russian and Ukrainians have made in the past year and passes around a (disarmed) working €321 drone.

Then he points out that Austria still has the same expensive drone they had years ago and tells the cadets they should be a bit stressed about that.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

I've found that Colonel Maruks Reisner provides some of the best information available on the war.

https://youtu.be/IDRjughhXMg

He doesn't update frequently but all his analysis are sober, detailed, and realistic. He states his pro-Western, pro-NATO, pro-Ukrainian bias clearly.

If I could sum up the general trend of his presentation it's, "The status quo favors Russia. If we don't get our heads out of our asses and step up Russia will win."

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As a multi-national, multi-ethnic, mutt, I am too.

Given that part of my mutt-makeup is Austrian, I'm offended that Austria and our northern neighbor have greatly contributed to this. Our deserved guilt over the Holocaust blinded us to decade after decade of human rights abuses by Israel.

We've seen this coming for a long time and, as a taxpaying contributor to the biggest funder of Israel, I'm ashamed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Maybe. "Allowed" suggested that they wanted or welcomed it.

A bunch of formerly powerful people in the Republican party are now much less powerful. Many of them have been sidelined in the Republican party and replaced. Several prominent former Republicans have effectively switched to the Democrats.

The Republicans and Democrats have differences in how they structure their organizations but neither one wants to intentionally allow outsiders to take over.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with "de-duping" as a database operation either.

The main components would probably be:

  1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
  2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that's where existing duplicates would get removed)
  3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn't valid any more.
  4. Decide when you're going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

There's a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on "de-duped" databases.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The Democratic party, as it stands, is dead and the Greens are stillborn.

There's nothing but hopes and prayers to support the idea that the Greens will ever get anywhere in the US. They have neither a policy platform nor any individuals who inspire broad support.

It is absolutely possible to take over parties from within though. We've seen it happen twice with the Republicans. They tried, and failed, to keep the Tea Party from taking over. Then they tried, and failed, to keep Trump from taking over.

History suggests we have a better chance getting AOC to take over and clean house with the Democrats than we do waiting for the Greens to make any headway.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I think that’s the point of this tour. He isn’t running for president. He’s trying to build a support base for a real alternative.

That’s presumably AOC but it’s still too early.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.

“De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.

It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.

It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.

A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

There might be some advantage in electability advantage for old white guys but the outcome doesn't really seem worth the effort.

AOC would certainly have a bunch of biases to overcome but from everything I can see, she would be a great leader. She seems to have a solid understanding of many spheres including economics, international relations, people, politics, marketing and more. She also seems to prioritize the good of the people over her own power or pocketbook.

She might be harder to get in but it's absurd to dismiss her as a clown.

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