It's funny (in a really dark way) because every time I've contacted the on-call nurse for my insurance I've been told approximately "I can't comment, you need to head to urgent care or the ER". It seemed less like an on-call nurse and more like an on-call councilor only there to talk down "patients" who didn't actually have any observable symptoms.
Except for the industries where it does matter. Trivializing the needs of complex and energy hungry supply chains, is bad faith. They are one of the many reasons fossil fuels are so widely used.
It's not really bad faith when we could make enormous progress in an enormous number of industries, and this in no way stops any of that progress in those economies.
It's specifically bad faith to say it as if it does somehow matter in the grand conversation, when the actual fallout is extremely small. Pretty much nobody is saying we must remove 100 PER CENT OF ALL FOSSIL FUEL USAGE EVERYWHERE FOREVER, just that we need to move off it.
If we stop using fossil fuels for the >90% of usage where fossil fuels are easy to replace, it'll make it much easier & cheaper for the <10% where it's difficult.
You're saying Trump doesn't want tariffs? And the SCOTUS judges who went on record supporting executive powers to tariff was all just a big insider trading scam? And corporations were willing to risk a hundred of billions in tariffs fees on the odds it might get refunded just because some finance company might get a small cut of refunds?
To clarify, POTUS being short for the group POTUS in-crowd of the actual POTUS and cabinet, who act in sync.
I'm saying the public tide shifted and the legal reality set in that they weren't going to get sympathetic rulings...which they don't care about anyway since it's not their money and the tariff threats already had any desired effects sought.
POTUS was floated the idea that they could enrich themselves, so the decision was made, communicated to the Secretary of Commerce and to the SCOTUS judges.
> And corporations were willing to risk a hundred of billions in tariffs fees on the odds it might get refunded just because some finance company might get a small cut of refunds?
Nothing to do with them. Narcissists don't worry about the future of others, except as a narrative to sell their personal ambitions.
Some people don't believe the administration is that flippant. I think it's obvious they are having fun.
Focusing on the metrics you want to focus on, does not make the data unambiguous. eg This analysis has not accounted for cohort sizing. Are there more or less pedestrians? What is the average distance? How many bicyclists? et al.
> The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.
This is true now, with or without copyright reform. If the author fears, they can make a will or trust, just like it is today. Not sure why this consideration would factor as a negative signal.
> my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn.
So did my mom, in Oregon.
Maybe no so ironically, my wife lived on a 2 trailer desert compound on a plot 2 miles from visible city infrastructure and 5 miles from any sort of built structure for most of her childhood.
Nobody cherry-picked anything. Per capita, single-event, it's the number that answers
the claim that was actually made — that October 7th was a "blip."
What you're doing now is a different argument entirely: aggregate conflict deaths over
77 years vs. one morning. That's not context, it's a category error dressed up as one.
For what it's worth, the full Palestinian death toll since 1948 is ~136,000 [1] — a
Palestinian source, so spare me the bias complaint. That's across eight decades, multiple Arab-Israeli wars, three intifadas, and several state actors. October 7th still isn't a blip. It's a massacre inside a war.
"I've not made an argument" is a fascinating claim immediately after quoting someone
who used aggregate scale to call October 7th a "blip"- and agreeing with them.
Providing context in support of a conclusion is making an argument. That's what
arguments are.
The goalposts that moved: "blip" (single event framing) -> "scale of the conflict"
(aggregate framing) -> "I wasn't arguing anything." Three posts, three different
claims, now apparently none of them count.
Rockets regularly target Israel. If that happened to USA the war would start with the first one no matter if it was intercepted or not. Same with any other self-respecting country. Israel is fully justified trying to eliminate threats to itself. It's not only about October 7th.
> Term limits are anti-democratic, and it's just a way for voters to not take responsibility for their voting.
That is one aspect, but not the important one. The most important element is anti-corruption. Legal bodies can always entrench themselves and their own interests. Term limits significantly weakens entrenchment...excepting when the same legal bodies inevitably gut it.
That's in fact not at all what the research says. There's a decent amount of research that suggests that they actually increase corruption. There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
This is a classic one of those ideas that many people intuitively "feel" makes sense but is actually just terrible policy.
> That's in fact not at all what the research says.
> There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
There are a lot of factors beyond term limits that influence this kind of research. The most important detail is to remember that corruption spans more than external influence. Institutional ossification has benefits and drawbacks. The drawbacks have outweighed the benefits, historically in the US and England. It was literally baked into the US Constitution to ensure this would not repeat for the US head of state. Notably the Supreme Court was baked in as a lifetime appointment. Granted, the remaining political bodies have not followed suit, I think it's clear that this has had a negative consequence due to the aforementioned entrenchment of the political parties.
> There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
It is incorrect to claim that is the only effect. I also don't believe that the conclusion is correct. I do believe it's closer to your initial statement.
> it's just a way for [legislators] to not take responsibility for their voting.
ie It shows a lack of care in executing the responsibilities of the elected position, which is why they barely do anything but campaign at the federal level.
It seems logical to me that a term limit could increase vulnerability to corruption in your last term. If you can't be re-elected, there is less incentive to be loyal to the people you represent.
It's interesting how different stories have different underlying religious underpinnings in different parts of the world. It's important to consider that these themes are precisely because the stories are born from the surrounding culture.
Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental, given the expected familiarity of the intended audience (american white male young men). eg The Matrix trilogy started with the obvious messianic hero's journey, then attempted to expand it in the following films (karma, cycles of death and rebirth, etc).
For some, these religious messages can be a turn off, I agree. I happened to be raised in a culture that allowed me to ignore it more or less and I can recognize that.
Not sure if I agree with the christian references being incidental ... the first book is literally a retelling of the The Canterbury Tales, all the characters are on a pilgrimage. there are a bunch of religious groups with at least one being central to the story, there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life.
I still think you can enjoy it without caring much about religion.
>there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life
Without giving away any spoilers to the books, the parasites are only that on the surface. If anything, the books present a wary picture of religion, especially the last two Endymion books, but also a wary picture of technology.
>Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental,
They're not at all incidental. The themes and the literal Catholic Church don't just make it into the books by osmosis, they're central to it and deliberate.
Like Gene Wolfe he's part of a pretty small group of US authors who wrote Catholic speculative fiction. Like Wolfe his writing is also fairly un-American. If Heinlein or Asimov are examples of archetypal US science fiction, Simmons is about as far as the other end as you can be, with the post-modern structure, the Canterbury Tales as a template for the story and so on.
Small but significant. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller comes immediately to mind. (And readers of this thread who did appreciate the religious themes of Hyperion may be interested.)
I had recommended Hyperion to a friend, and they loved it. I recommended Canticle as a follow-up and they hated it. I never figured out how that can be.
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