jfengel

6 ms·

1.
by jfengel 8d ago
I didn't realize that open math problems were a finite resource. I recall a story about some famous mathematician (Gauss?) dismissing interest in Fermat's Last Theorem claiming that he could crank out problems of equivalent intere
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by jfengel 10d ago
What worked was getting people stirred up to the point that some would turn to violence. Even now a majority of their party believe they were justified. That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people t
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by jfengel 10d ago
If the extremes are unelectable, the center party should split eventually. They'll find something to disagree about. As long as they are more terrified of losing to the extremists they'll try to keep it together as long as they ca
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by jfengel 11d ago
The grammar is more straightforward. It has some extraneous words, and makes conspicuously bad choices of vocabulary, but it's still a more direct statement.
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by jfengel 11d ago
It is remarkable how much it resembles the medieval T&O maps, including putting Jerusalem and the Mediterranean at the center of the world. (Which is what Mediterranean means.) And the East at the top (where we get "orient" fr
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by jfengel 11d ago
America won Iraq and Afghanistan in a walk. They didn't do a great job of nation building afterwards, but the actual war part was very successful.
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by jfengel 12d ago
The jargon term "exercise mimetic" is really badly named. It means only that it mimics some of the effects of exercise -- in this case, appetite suppressant. So the term does distinguish it from the GLP-1 drugs, which target end
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by jfengel 13d ago
“Give House Democrats an ounce of power, and they’ll use every bit of it to fundamentally transform America into an unrecognizable socialist hellscape,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the House Republicans’ campaign arm. I don'
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by jfengel 14d ago
I'm unclear on why you're asking. You're written the question to presuppose an answer, but I'm not clear on the point you're making. It doesn't seem germane to my comment above.
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by jfengel 14d ago
America's far-left is marginalized, with practically no power. Whereas this is about the Minister of National Security. American right wing propaganda loves to describe anybody who opposes them as "far left", but Democrats ar
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by jfengel 15d ago
I thought that untreated rabies was almost invariably fatal. The symptoms are quite obvious. Is it possible that there are a lot of asymptomatic rabies cases, who end up dying from some other cause?
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by jfengel 15d ago
I thought the entire point of a jury is that they do live under a rock. You seek out people who know nothing about the case, and then (if necessary) sequester them to ensure that they continue to know nothing. As I understand it, lawyers se
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by jfengel 15d ago
OK. And now you've spent that notoriety. What now? It's clear that the US attack did not cause regime change. It may have delayed Iran's nuclear ambitions again, but they will presumably restart immediately after the attack e
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by jfengel 16d ago
It includes children, who were not aware that the law was being broken. We used to have a carve-out for them, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The administration eliminated that. For them, the analogy is even more apt. Inciden
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by jfengel 17d ago
Why not? When the world is ending you take what joy you can, while you can. When all you have left is having been right, there's not much else to keep you busy.
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by jfengel 17d ago
And whatever they imagine "imperial democracy" is. They should ask some indigenous people.
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by jfengel 17d ago
They had factions, which turned almost immediately into parties: the Federalists and Anti-federalists, which morphed into the Democratic-Republicans. There were always two after that, until the former died off and the latter split into what
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by jfengel 17d ago
A non-hack I learned about yesterday. I was taking apart an IKEA dining room table. The screws and bolts were obvious, but the top would not separate from the frame. After much parsing of the assembly manual (which took some effort to find
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by jfengel 18d ago
It explains why you end up with two parties even if you start with more. The two largest will woo minority parties until they get a majority. And minority party members know they will be marginalized unless they are aligned with the majorit
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by jfengel 18d ago
The smaller parties are all aligned with one of the two major parties. In a lot of ways they act more like caucuses than separate parties. Like Bernie Sanders being "independent". That's overstating it, but it's why the
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by jfengel 18d ago
I think it does largely explain it. Congress can't do even necessary things. On the rare occasions they can, they create an executive branch agency and give it the power to write regulations. They know that Congress is neither qualifie
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by jfengel 19d ago
We have them because the Founders thought it was a good idea. Then they thought it was a good idea to have two houses with different criteria, giving two chances to quash legislation. Plus the veto. Plus the Supreme Court (whose job they le
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by jfengel 19d ago
The "dark ages" were also thousands of years after the Sumerians. Even the Greek Dark Age postdates Sumer by a millennium. So you're not really filling me with confidence about your idea here. Perhaps you can provide some sor
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by jfengel 19d ago
Sure do. It's back up around 80,000. Maybe some of that get-rich-quick money is getting spooked by AI and flowing back into crypto.
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by jfengel 19d ago
I did a bunch of door-knocking, for Obama and Clinton, and it didn't feel like I was doing any good. Everybody had long since made up their minds. It's not like these are hard choices. Either you view the differences as stark and
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by jfengel 19d ago
I think software developers feel that their work is never finished. Nothing is ever fully complete. The software always has bugs and security holes. It is always lacking critical features that you haven't gotten around to yet. I think
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by jfengel 19d ago
What would you say are the most equivalent parallels from history? I don't see this ending well, but I can't think of anything to compare it to. The canonical answer for an anti-scientific society would be the 16th century Catholi
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by jfengel 20d ago
Buried in the article is something much more interesting than the headline: the book author is coming out as atheist. Well, not atheist, but "humanist". There are zero admitted atheists in congress. A bunch are "unaffiliated&
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by jfengel 20d ago
They see their jobs being done rather badly by people and their bosses replacing them with cheaper talent. Not a rhetorical question: is that their actual lived experience, or is it just what they want to see? How often does it occur tha
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by jfengel 20d ago
Well, duh. People have spent decades cementing their opinion about climate change. That's not going to shift just because we broke the record by an eighth of a degree. Maybe if it were 10 degrees, people might start shifting priorities

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