His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools.

This kind of idiocy is why people tried to build airplanes with flapping wings. Way too many people thought that the best way to create a plane was to just copy what nature did with birds. Nature showed it was possible, so just copy nature.

This is actually great news. The national debt went down last year. I mean, just based on those headline numbers, the national debt is smaller than it was before.

The nominal debt grew by 5% according to those numbers. Meanwhile, in that same period, US GDP nominal GDP grew at about 6% over the last year.

The raw number for national debt is meaningless. Only brain-dead morons care give a single fuck about the raw number. The raw number is for illiterate yokels who are scared of big maths in the way a caveman is scared of "fire! hot!"

For those who aren't brain-dead hicks, the only figure that matters is national debt as a share of GDP. That shows whether our debt load is increasing or decreasing in proportion to our economy. And over the last year, the value of the debt as a share of GDP went DOWN. We could sustain a $1.8 trillion deficit literally forever.

ماذا قلت عني للتو أيها الحقير؟ أريدك أن تعلم أنني تخرجت في المرتبة الأولى في دفعتي في قوات النخبة البحرية، وشاركت في العديد من الغارات السرية على القاعدة، وقد قتلت أكثر من 300 شخص. لقد تدربت على حرب الغوريلا وأنا أفضل قناص في القوات المسلحة الأمريكية بأكملها. أنت لست شيئًا بالنسبة لي سوى هدف آخر. سأقضي عليك تمامًا بدقة لم يسبق لها مثيل على هذه الأرض، صدقني. هل تعتقد أنك تستطيع الإفلات من العقاب بقول هذا الهراء لي عبر الإنترنت؟ فكر مرة أخرى أيها الحقير. بينما نتحدث، أتواصل مع شبكتي السرية من الجواسيس في جميع أنحاء الولايات المتحدة ويتم تعقب عنوان IP الخاص بك الآن لذا من الأفضل أن تستعد للعاصفة أيها الحقير. العاصفة التي ستمحو الشيء الصغير البائس الذي تسميه حياتك. أنت ميت يا فتى. يمكنني أن أكون في أي مكان وفي أي وقت، ويمكنني قتلك بأكثر من سبعمائة طريقة، وهذا فقط بيدي العاريتين. لا أتمتع بتدريب مكثف على القتال غير المسلح فحسب، بل إنني أمتلك القدرة على الوصول إلى ترسانة كاملة من أسلحة مشاة البحرية الأمريكية، وسوف أستخدمها إلى أقصى حد لمحو مؤخرتك البائسة عن وجه القارة، أيها الحقير الصغير. لو كنت تعلم فقط ما هو العقاب غير المقدس الذي سيجلبه عليك تعليقك "الذكي" الصغير، ربما كنت لتلتزم الصمت. لكنك لم تستطع، ولم تفعل، والآن أنت تدفع الثمن، أيها الأحمق اللعين. سأصب عليك غضبي الشديد وستغرق فيه. أنت ميت يا صغيري.

The homeless population needs to start arming themselves. Their government has utterly abandoned and betrayed them. As the article notes, the "shelters," when they're offered at all, are little more than rat-infested sewage-filled holding cages. To go into these shelters, families are separated and people are required to give up their pets and belongings. The shelters themselves are in flagrant violation of state laws and face no consequences for it.

These people are homeless because the wealthy in these states have prioritized their own personal profit over the well being of their fellow man. They chose and continue to choose to restrict housing construction that would make it so everyone can afford a place to live. These people are homeless as a direct result of wealthy homeowners voting to put their own profit and property appreciation over the basic housing rights of the poorest among us.

And now they face criminalization and endless sweeps from one location to another. I'm sorry, but at some point, enough is enough. People have a natural moral right to resist flagrant abuse by their government. What can this kind of flagrant state abuse be called other than tyranny? The government long ago enclosed the common lands that provided anyone a place to set up a place for themselves to live. Then it sat back and allowed the cost of basic shelter to rise so high that entire swathes of the population become homeless. Now it wants to endlessly bully these people, making their lives a living hell, forcing them in an endless nomadic wandering from one place to another.

I'm sorry, but this is the exact kind of government tyranny that the 2nd amendment is theoretically meant to protect people against. The people in these homeless camps need to start arming themselves. History has shown that cops will be much less reluctant to bully poor people when they're met with armed resistance. If the state, through no fault of your own, has abandoned you and become your enemy, you have an irrevocable natural right to resist that tyranny by force of arms. Every homeless camp in California should be guarded by a local militia of residents armed with AR-15 and similar weapons. Any attempt at sweeping away a camp should be met with with semi-automatic weapons fire. This is the US. Housing is expensive, guns are cheap. If the government has so thoroughly restricted your ability to make a place to live for yourself, at some point you simply must TAKE the space that you need.

The state has bullied these people to the point where arming themselves is now the best option available to them. Yes, they would have to flagrantly violate the law in order to do so, but they'll have to flagrantly violate the law just to exist anyway. When you criminalize someone simply for existing, you have abandoned the rule of law entirely. And at that point, your laws mean nothing, and all we have left is might makes right.

The homeless need to start arming themselves and protecting their communities with lethal force if necessary. They have a natural right to do so, and they have little to lose at this point. Maybe when the wealthy find themselves neighbors to fully developed shanty towns protected by armed militias, they will decide that they're willing to finally let the supply of legal housing grow to meet demand.

Seriously. It's just another attempt to manifest their preferred reality into existence. It's no coincidence that Musk and his ilk have been running around saying that betting markets are actually a better measure of public opinion than polls, as people actually have to put money on it. But the obvious flaw in this reasoning is that betting markets can be easily manipulated to make a candidate look better than they are. Republicans are already spending tons of money on bullshit partisan polls. The actual nonpartisan polls aren't showing Kamala in a landslide or anything, they show her with a tiny edge but in what is really a true tossup. But conservatives pay for all these ridiculously biased polls. They try to flood the zone, dilute the polling average projections and make it look like Trump is doing way better than he really is. They want to make it seem like they're winning so they can drive out the vote.

This is the only reason to bother spending millions on comically biased partisan polls. If you're a campaign and want to actually plan out an effective strategy, you want a true unbiased poll. You want to know how well you're really doing in order to plan your campaign and GOTV effort. The ONLY reason to spend millions on partisan polls is to manufacture a sense of Republican inevitability.

And if they're willing to spend millions on fake polls, there's no reason they won't spend millions to tilt the betting markets as well. They do this to create the impression of winning. Also, it serves to bolster post-election bullshit claims of voter fraud. They can point to their own laughably biased conservative polls and their rigged betting markets and say, "look, the polls showed Trump way ahead, and the betting markets had him at 10-to-1 odds. Obviously if Kamala won it was because of voter fraud!"

The median household income in Norway is 590,000 NOK. The median total housing expense is about 158,000 NOK. Thus the median Norwegian household is spending about 27% of their income on housing. This is pretty comparable to the US, where the median figure is 26%.

This is the median across the whole population, and of course, for younger people that amount should be higher. Really it seems that the US and Norway are about the same when it comes to housing affordability.

It gets worse however if you look at actual home prices and not just monthly payments. The average home price in Norway is about 5,000,000 NOK.. That means the average home costs about 8.5x the average income. In the US, the median home price is about $430,000., while the median household income is about $77.5k. The average home in the US thus costs about 5.5x the average income.

Homes in the US are cheaper than in Norway, while US incomes are higher. The median household income in Norway is the equivalent of $54,000. Also, the median home in the US is larger than that of Norway.

This is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that US consumers have to pay more out of pocket for healthcare, childcare, and commuting costs than their Norwegian equivalents do. But really, it shows that even after the subsidies, Norway is no more affordable for new parents than the US is. If anything, it's probably more affordable in the US. Yes, you can always move to a rural area in Norway to get cheaper housing, but you can do the same in the US. People live in those bigger, more expensive, cities because they provide better job opportunities and better salaries.

My real point is that we can't just point to the more generous welfare state of the Nordic countries as an example for how birthrates can't be solved with financial incentives. A lot of people like to point to countries with generous welfare states like Norway and say, "look, even countries like Norway, who heavily subsidize healthcare, childcare, and have generous parental leave still have low birth rates!" Typically people who make these arguments want to argue for restricting women's reproductive autonomy.

But it really does come down to housing. And in both Norway and the US, the cost of homeownership is getting way beyond what people of childbearing age can afford. That is the fundamental problem. There's something very deep and instinctive about the places we live in. Having a truly stable place to live, ideally a place you own and can easily afford, is the single greatest way to encourage people of childbearing years to have children. People want to provide a stable environment for children to grow up in. They don't want to live in a place where their landlord could kick them out on a whim. They don't want to be reliant on a government-subsidized apartment that could be taken away from them tomorrow if eligibility rules are changed. People want either very reliable and affordable rental space or ideally a home they own on their own and can't be evicted from. That is the kind of stability people seek before they have children.

I don't buy this. What will really happen is that the value of anything AI can produce will drop to near zero, this freeing up money to spend on things only humans can provide. And if you think AI can literally do anything a human can? Well at that point, using that AI should be incredibly illegal, as you're just enslaving a digital person.

Maybe we'll end up with a weird economy where everyone is employed as teachers, caretakers, mentors, life coaches, fitness instructors, physicians, and any other job that people really would prefer to interact with a human while interfacing with.

Would you let your child be taught by an AI teacher? Not worried about what type of sociopathy that might introduce? No, there are many jobs, specifically those around the growth, development, maintenance, and improvement of human lives that will always be preferable to be done by actual humans. Humans can do the human work, and we can slough the drudgery off to the machines.

People want stability before they have kids. Generous government benefits matter little if you're living in a cardboard box. No one wants to raise a child in a cardboard box. Look up the cost of housing in the Nordic countries. They aren't the socialist paradise you're making them out to be.

Who knew Trump was such a fan of classic anime Ranma 1/2?

Because it's a meaninglessly vague phrase that is just a mirror into what you already believe.

It's certainly possible. The polls are showing it's effectively a tossup. But my real theory is that things are fundamentally different after the death of Roe, and that the pollsters really don't have a way to capture that. Yes, it is a harsh year for the Senate, but there are some dark horse races, namely Texas and Nebraska, that may really surprise us.

There have been a lot of Republican polls posted, part of their "flood the zone" strategy. But I think even the nonpartisan polls are underestimating Dem support a bit.

I think we'll have a Dem trifecta after election night. I feel the even the nonpartisan polls have overcorrected in favor of Republicans after 2016, and since the overturning of Roe, polls have been underestimating Dem candidates.

Yeah, people tend to miss the point of this place. This isn't "so crazy it just might work." It's "this idea is legitimately insane, but it's so ridiculous I love it."

Sure. But you're completely missing the point of this post. This isn't, "c/seriouspolicyproposals," this is "c/crazyideas."

And this is a gloriously crazy idea. With one simple change, simply publishing the results live, you can cause incredible chaos and turn elections into a complete circus. It's a wonderfully crazy idea!

This is actually an interesting legal edge case. What happens if someone casts an absentee ballot, but then dies before election day? It turns out that it's actually very state-specific. Half of states have no provisions for how such a case is handled. Of those that address it, some explicitly allow the votes to be counted, and some explicitly prohibit these votes to be counted.

https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/counting-absentee-ballots-after-a-voter-dies

It's a pretty interesting bit of legal trivia. The whole principle of absentee ballots is that you are not really casting your vote 'early.' It's not like they publish the results of absentee ballots ahead of time. Really you're effectively saying, "I can't make it on election day." An argument can be made that they shouldn't be counted. Why should someone who happens to get a ballot in early and dies be able to have their vote counted, but someone who was planning to vote on election day, but died in the interim, won't have it counted? On the other hand, a good argument can be made that we shouldn't punish those who plan ahead, and as a general rule we just accept the ballots out of respect for the recently deceased. It's interesting that the states that count them or don't are distributed fairly randomly across regions and the political spectrum; it's not really a partisan thing.

But it is a bit of legal trivial that yes, in some states, the dead are literally allowed to vote under certain very specific circumstances.

He disappears in a flash of light. In his wake, he leaves an affordable housing complex behind.

Not the person you replied to, but 58% of Pennsylvanians support a ban on fracking. It really shouldn't be surprising. Pennsylvania may be a great hub of fracking, but very few people actually benefit from the wealth it creates. Meanwhile, they're the people actually on the ground, living there in the areas most affected by fracking. They know its effects better than anyone. It's their ground water and their wells are being contaminated, all so a few companies owned by out of state wealthy interests can profit mightily. Plus, it's not like Pennsylvanians aren't also worried about climate change.

I'm supporting Harris, but I think people miss the real argument for Trump on Israel. Honestly, a good case can be made that Trump has a better chance of pulling US away from Israel than Harris will. Historically, Republicans have actually stood up to Israel better than Democrats have. Reagan for instance wasn't afraid to use US military aid as leverage to rein in Israel.

But moreover, I think the core of the argument for why Trump might be better for Harris on Palestine is that fundamentally, it is extremely unlikely that Harris will do anything to rein in Netanyahu. She will likely continue Biden's policies and continue to give him carte blanche to do whatever he wants. Anything short of complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank will see Kamala continue aid at current levels.

Trump will largely do the same. However, there is a small, but nonzero, chance that Trump will pull aid from Israel for simple self-serving reasons. At his core he is extremely doubtful of any kind of foreign aid. And at some point he might simply pull aid not because he supports the Palestinians, but because he's at his core an isolationist and doesn't want to give money to either side. From the press I've read, it seems that Israel would actually prefer Kamala to win. Why? Because while Trump might overall be better ideologically than Kamala, Kamala is at least more reliable. Trump is erratic and could just pull US aid entirely on a whim. From Israel's perspective, Kamala is expected to reliably deliver the current level of support regardless of Israel's actions. Trump is a wildcard. He might give more support, or he might just pull the US out of Israel entirely. He's is chaotic to his core.

Again, I'll be voting for Harris, but there is a very good argument that Israel would prefer Kamala over Trump. Yes, there's a chance that Trump would give them even higher levels of support - joining hand in hand in a ware against Iran, giving them full blessing to completely expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, etc. But it's not like Trump at his core is some friend to the Jews. He's an old-school anti-Semite at heart, despite what he says. It's entirely possible that one day he just decides to pull all aid, simply because he's tired of the US paying for it. He is again, at his core, an isolationist, "America first" type. From Israel's perspective, Kamala represents a guaranteed steady supply of aid at current levels. Trump represents a gamble that could see a massive increase of support or a complete collapse of it, simply depending on how Trump's mood evolves. And really, Kamala is probably a better bet for them because of it.

And don't forget the grand irony of Zionism. The people currently being genocided out of Palestine actually have a much closer genetic relationship to the actual Biblical Hebrews that the people genociding them. The people who formed modern Zionism were mostly the descendants of people who converted to Judaism during its more evangelical phases. The historical events like Rome conquering Judea didn't actually expel the vast majority of the population, mainly just some of its leaders and intellectuals. Most of the historical Hebrews remained in Palestine, and they mostly converted to Islam over the centuries. Zionism can largely be approximated as the destruction and displacement of the actual descendants of historical Israel by people who later converted to Judaism. The Palestinians have a much, much closer genetic relationship to the people that Jesus would have been interacting with regularly than the average IDF soldier does today.