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I agree, though I am super disdainful of any argument that is sort of reskinning “other people are really stupid”.

On the other hand, participation in a congressional primary is pretty low and should weed out the casuals. Nobody who is going to the polls without much info is probably going to show up for these right?

Further, when you have “safe” districts for your party, you sort of invite people from the entire political spectrum to participate in your primary. The parts of the American electorate that WANT muscular support for Israeli military operations are on the right. If those folks skip this primary, they have no influence over their representative at all. Activating conservative voters is probably easier than changing minds.

As a voter you are compelled to vote for the candidate with the largest campaign budget. Oh… wait, that isn’t true at all.

Money is important, but you still need to find voters that are interested in your message. If you have the money to activate them you can win, but they have to be there in the first place.

If there is somebody willing to pay more for what is ultimately a limited supply of potatoes, why not sell to them. If the price per ounce of chips is too high for you, you’ll buy less chips. People who just can’t live without those chips might buy less candy to make sure they can afford them.

All the while people who make chips are asking for raises because the chip market is hot and the boss just can’t get enough people into the plant to make them. The workers know their boss needs them badly so they are comfortable asking for more. The boss relents because he needs them in there making those chips or he’s gonna lose money with potatoes rotting in the warehouse.

Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.

This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.

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My people are here!

Nvidia is making a thing and selling it. No matter what happens with AI tech, they are going to keep their winnings.

Everybody else… well they borrowed/raised and spent a FORTUNE on R&D, chips, and electricity to make a product that has no realized commercial value (yet?). They are either going to figure out where the money comes from soon or the bills gonna come due. The next 12 months are going to be popcorn worthy if you like watching the tech industry.

I have to know what the Detroit soccer team did to get so high on that list. Somebody here must know. Please!

I mean the problem is that on an international level might will always make right. You cannot solve that unless you force every human being on earth to submit to some single authority…

So I suppose it will be solved up all nice and tidy if an alien race comes and enslaves us. Until then, we surf the rising and falling waves of human empires just like we have been doing for 10s of 1000s of years.

Making institutions that have “authority” but no power to enforce that authority except against the defeated isn’t really doing anything except encouraging some of humanities worst instincts (revenge, feuding, and making all conflict existential)

If you want to maximize peace and safety for civil populations, you de-escalate conflict by offering face saving off ramps to the belligerents. Affording grace and forgiveness to people who are probably complete shitbags who don’t deserve it. Humanism is hella hard though, I’m not sure we’re up to the challenge.

I managed to amass a pretty good horde of downvotes the other day with a sentiment that mirrored this comic. I probably meandered and missed my meaning but the comic author nails it

You arrest the leader of a belligerent faction by forming an army and defeating their army. Not by knocking on their door and serving papers. The ICC really doesn’t have any purpose except punishing the losers once the war is over. The winners always seem to walk free, no matter what heinous shit they did to get that win.

Play out the game theory of that in your head and think about what effect the threat of war crimes prosecution for losers (only) has on how and when leaders commit war crimes. (Hint: it strongly encourages doing ANYTHING to make sure you win)

I mean it’s only 30ish seconds so it’s not a lot of investment, BUT, it really is just noise, you can barely pick out the trombone until the last 3seconds.

It is grating and unapproachable, but the rest of the album feels like it could have had half a dozen radio hits in an alternate version of the early 90s.

Edit: just re-read my comment and noticed the ambiguity in my closing sentence. Sigh… sloppy writing. Anyway I was playing with the fact that phish fans are known to be a little bit evangelical (not unlike trek fans tbh). And if one tells you not to listen to a song you should listen to THEM, and avoid the song.

Jonathan Frakes fun fact:

He has a gold record for an album he appeared on as a trombone player. Apparently the band phish saw an unusual mailbox when they were driving up to meet a record company guy and the guy from the label told them that his neighbor with the strange mailbox was in fact Lt Riker. Knowing he played trombone from the show they asked to be introduced and invited him to join them in the studio on a record they were working on (Hoist). Well as Jonathan tells it he got to the studio and pretty quickly realized that the charts for the part were probably beyond his ability, but he bravely recorded a few attempts and everyone was very nice about. The band did not use the his takes for the intended track but they did cut them up and make a track out of them called “Riker’s mailbox”. When the record went gold the band made sure that a gold record plaque was also sent to Jonathan.

Story pieced together from interviews with Jonathan and Trey, heard on a podcast at some point but I would have a hell of a time sourcing it further. The song, which also feature bela fleck on banjo, is pretty much just noise and not worth the effort to chase down. If a phish fan tells you NOT to listen to a phish song you should listen!

Anybody who tries to arrest him will be at war with Israel and probably the US and probably a lot of other nations. They will break their treaty with ICC before they start that war and everyone fucking knows it. Why do we pretend?

No, it means they were ONLY held accountable because they lost the war.

Nobody prosecuted Churchill for Dresden

People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.

The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.

The average lifespan for wild passerine birds is probably a lot longer than 3 yrs.

In general, birds live a weirdly long time. Banding studies show us song birds that have lived up to 15yrs or so. Assuming they make it to adulthood, a cardinal can probably expect to live 6-8 yrs but that is a wild guess since it’s almost impossible for us to really measure that.

Anyway, that’s enough zoology time, back to the memes!

RTS did go mainstream and it indeed turned into games very different from old school SC et al.

Plants vs zombies and LoL are the descendants of the genre and are or at least were, HUGE. Tower defense and moba are the two evolutionary paths that RTS took.

Tower defense is super mainstream, but moba, while huge isn’t really mainstream in my opinion. But one things for sure, they don’t have much in common with SC except the lineage.

Your body is essentially an oxidation reaction that it ponders its place in the universe.

A slowly burning fire that pays taxes.