DomeGuy
@DomeGuy@lemmy.world
- Comment on Do people really think setting up domestic manufacturing in the USA is easy? 2 weeks ago:
Assume that, for the first time in his life, Donald meant what he said. Pretend that he won’t change his mind or panic, and assume that the same GOP which keeps missing Speaker of the House election layups won’t break and let the Democrats take the tariff power away
The midterm congressional elections are always a swing to the other party. The Democrats are more likely to take at least one chamber of Congress than Trump is to say something dumb. But let’s assume that for some reason they only take one, and you get gridlock enough to preserve the tarrifs until the next POTUS takes office in January 2029.
A factory would need to break even by that time to be worth a quick investment. And not just break even, but leave you with more wealth than if you just bought a bunch of crypto and stayed home until this all passes. And if you signed an deal today, your break even points might be as soon as only 45 months away.
You can’t even get a car loan with a team that short.
- Comment on trapped in the middle with u 3 weeks ago:
Exactly.
- Comment on trapped in the middle with u 3 weeks ago:
It says something about modern physics that possibly the two most famous bits of it were named by people trying to call bollocks.
What it says, though, is too many STEM folk skimp on humanities and are just really bad at naming things.
- Comment on What's so important about keeping military operations secret? 4 weeks ago:
D- day is a great example of why opsec matters so much. The Germans knew that the allies were going to invade, and if they had been prepared they very well might have rebuffed the invasion. But the secrecy worked, and operation overlord succeeded instead of being a bloody failure.
If the target of the military raid had known when it was coming, they could have simply relocated anything actually important away from the target zone.
A useful analogy is probably a boxer and a ring: your opponent knows that you’re going to throw a punch, but you really don’t want him to know exactly what punch you’re going to throw when.
- Comment on "There comes a time when we all declare the war is over": Former PlayStation Studios boss Shawn Layden on the future of video game consoles 5 weeks ago:
There is a mythical “Sony fan” customer who pays extra for their video game consoles, and justified that by believing it comes with a right to be special and awesome and play games no one else is allowed to.
It’s a pantomine of a Nintendo fan, who pays for an underpowered console for first-party games that use unique controllers. None of whom would ever complain if their games were sold on PC so long as they could bring the controller over.
AFAIK, the only real people who want exclusives on PlayStation are Sony employees and shareholders.
- Comment on Gen Z is ‘task masking’ in the workplace. How harmful is it? 5 weeks ago:
“task masking” happens for only one reason : managers value appearance over honesty.
Gallant writes code and documentation quickly and efficiently, then pulls out a Gameboy while waiting for new issues to come in = must be a bad worker.
Goofus mutters all day and types furiously, but produces no usable code = obvious the backbone of the team.
- Comment on Can Christians, Muslims or Jews worship or pray to pagan gods? 5 weeks ago:
This really depends on what you mean by “pray.”
Sincerely worship and praise a pagan godhead as if they were responsible for the deeds Scripture attributes to God? No. It’s as bad as lying in court, stealing, or killing someone.
Falsely go through the motions of pagan prayer, such as in a game, as an actor, or under threat of death? Usually. Some are sticklers, but most are OK with leaving cookies for Santa.
Sincerely giving praise or worship to a being other than God, for things asserted as being done in God’s service or things not done by Her? It depends. Some may be hard no, some may be open yes.
There are something like 3 billion nominal followers of the God of Abraham alive today. With such a large population, it’d be hard to find a statement that they all agree on, including “water is wet”.
- Comment on Can Christians, Muslims or Jews worship or pray to pagan gods? 5 weeks ago:
There’s plenty of references in the OT to Jews doing the same thing.
And European Christianity chased out worship of anyone save the God of Abraham rather violently after a generation or two.
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 5 weeks ago:
It sounds like you’re not proposing a technocracy, and are instead proposing a direct democracy with a bureaucratic civil service chosen by popular vote.
Which is a fancy way to have an inefficient and easily gamed democracy. As is done in Iran and Russia.
If “people vote” is a core and meaningful part of any system, that system is democratic. And inefficiencies in democracy are always and only ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.
If you don’t see how avoiding bloodshed for power changing is a fundamental advantage of democracies I think you may want to re-read your histories. The ONLY way power ever changed hands from one group to another prior to the American election of 1796 was through violence or the threat of violence.
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 5 weeks ago:
The American political system occasionally having a terrible choice is one of the tradeoffs for having power be changeable without bloodshed.
Because of lifetime appointments the US legal system is nearly a technocracy as you describe. It arrived at a decision in 1971 that a wide swath of the body politic was so opposed to that they essentially lost all faith the status quo. What followed was a decades long campaign to shift that pseudo-technocracy. Not a bloody insurrection.
You and I may disagree with their position, and we both dislike some of the results of their movement, but the worth of a government form is how well it responds to such discontent.
I don’t think you’ll get any disagreement that the current administration is exposing some flaws in the American political system. But the potential fixes for those flaws are numerous, while a brand new system as you propose would have its own expected and unexpected flaws.
Let’s talk about those goldbugs, since anything else urges trolls to show up. If they’re in power what stops them from declaring that their opponents are “fake” economists? How would we remove them from power?
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 5 weeks ago:
If we’re talking about which forms of government are “better” than others, we need a benchmark of what makes one better or worse. I’m a big fan of the ideal stated in the US declaration of independence: governments exist to preserve the rights of their people, in the broadest possible sense.
A technocracy, where established experts make relevant rules, is probably the worst form of government that’s still trying to be good. For whatever topic you have, the original paradigm becomes fiercely embedded, and because power wants to preserve itself that basic framework would be even worse than what we have now.
Imagine if a group of goldbug economists had been in charge of markets and banks when the great depression hit. Or if ma bell has been in charge of telecommunications when the Internet was invented. Or if the same GM engineers who killed the EV1 and bet on trucks were in charge when electric cars and hybrids started becoming popular.
Technocracies don’t have a way to change perspectives. You get all the bad parts of a bureaucratic democratic Republic, and none of the way to short circuit bloody revolutions that makes democracies the least-bad option. You might as well just go back to monarchies – at least for those, there was a person who could be almost impartial when it comes time to decide if old ways need to change.
- Comment on Hypothetically, if some mysterious force started to jam every radio frequency, how would modern day society adapt to this? 3 months ago:
So, EVERY radio on the planet is suddenly overwhelmed by broad-spectrum jamming from orbital sources? Every cell phone, wifi, broadcast TV, satellite, AM/FM?
A bunch of people die,.due to distracted-driving car accidents with no way to call for help. News and government adapt modestly quickly, since the Internet itself runs mostly on already-shielded wires. There is a run on ethernet cables and phone modems for a bit, though, since not everyone has one. Navigation and timekeeping get harder, since no GPS or radio time sync, but humans adapt to those fairly quickly.
Long-term consequences depend on how long the aliens keep it up. It’s definitely a holy crap there are aliens! moment, though, since a bunch of sudden radio transmitters would be detected in the sky and identified as alien tech way before the toilet paper shortage even starts.
- Comment on Why do people say things like "I didn't do nothing"? 4 months ago:
American English has three languages that we do most of our cultural trade with.
- Commonwealth English
- Mexican Spanish
- Franciscan French
In both of the latter, multiple casual negative modifiers are additive instead of inverting. That is, they have the semantics of “bad” instead of “not.”.
Consider :
“i do not not want a million dollars”
and
“That is a bad, bad cookie.”
- Comment on Crisco in a Terracotta: Decoding the (Mostly) Useless Candle Meme 4 months ago:
I dont think you’ve ever been really cold if you dont recognize the difference in utility between “heat up my whole room a very little amount” and “heat up something i can feel.”
To explain it simply: having heat trapped locally can help get heat into the human, which is far more important than putting heat into the air.
- Comment on Should Democrats also gerrymander blue states to counterbalance any advantage that republicans have due to the gerrymandering in red states? 4 months ago:
Yes, absolutely.
The American left has a terrible habit of playing nice instead of playing fair.
Congressional gerrymandering should be regulated nationwide or not at all. Instead, we’re stuck with this asinine “no gerrymandering except in redcap occupied states” situation.
- Comment on Can someone give me atleast 5 examples of Democrats being against the working class? 5 months ago:
Ignoring Bernie for the moment, “against the working class” is usually a dogwhistle for “poor whites have racial nervousness and i want to exacerbate that for political gain.”. You wont find real examples because, generally, professional democrats arent against anyone. (even nazis, apparently.)
Bernie’s specific crtique was a slightly tone-deaf critique that the dems were largely silent on the economic nervousness of the working class, and instead spend political capital fighting for racial and gender equality. Since the white male working class is not oppressed by race or gender, or in a position to really oppress anyone, they often feel unrepresented.
- Comment on How come Food Network doesn't show the labels of what they are using? Wouldn't be great advertising for corps who would probably pay food network to advertise on show? 5 months ago:
To rephrase this: they take the time to block out labels to ensure there is a reason for the brands to pay.
- Comment on What is Trump going to do to social security since he is now going to be president? Just wondering because my mom gets SS and she does not want me to support here? 5 months ago:
Please understand that “nothing” means the built up surplus runs out and there will be not enough money to pay all benefits.
The smart and easy fix would be to raise the cap on ss taxes while flattening the “you deserve more money because you made more money when you were working” weirdness.
Instead, they’ll likely either do nothing and force the dems to fix it in four years, play with benefits to make the poor suffer, or try and replace it with a phased in 401k style stock market scam.
(that last option, btw, is killing social security.)
- Comment on Explain why the US bail system is not insane 6 months ago:
Bail is not money you get back. It’s money that a bail bondsman doesn’t have to fork over if you dont show.
Either you are so rich that the opportunity cost of tieing up the whole amount is more than the fee (so you just pay the bond fee) or you don’t have enough and need to ask someone to lend it to yoy (that is, you pay the bond.)
New York tried to largely ban cash bail (becaue its essentially just a way to lock up the poor), but because of Republicans and police unions (i repeat myself) who whined about offenses while out on bail, the state poked a bunch of holes in it instead of making pre-trial detention easier.
Cash bail is ALWAYS indefensible. If someone is so dangerous to civic order they need to be detained pre-trial, then no amount of money should get them out of it.
- Comment on Is there a specific example of Target getting a shoplifter convicted for a small individual theft that puts them over the felony limit? 6 months ago:
So, you’re asking if there is a shoplifter whose small-dollar.spree was stopped by target, who was then arrested by the police, who then refused an initial plea offer from the DA, who was then charged by a grand jury, refused a pre-trial plea offer, went to trial, refused the pre-verdict plea offer, and was then found guilty?
Well, what about someone who hit 60k over 120 visits?
- Comment on Is the RNC and DNC monopolies? 6 months ago:
It’s not really “established” becaue there isnt any formal body declaring what names different voting systems have.
Are you unclear about what recognition other demcracies give to parties, how there is no prize for 2nd place in America, or why that lack of such a prize gives rise to a two-party system?
- Comment on Is the RNC and DNC monopolies? 6 months ago:
1: FPTP is a terrible term as its literally not an accurate way to describe a “single-vote plurality wins” systrm like most of the USA has. When you use the phrase to someone who doesn’t already agree that there are better ways its just inaccurate enough to sabatoge any point you might make.
2: the UK and other parliamentary systems have embedded rewards just for being “a party”. There are only two parties in the USA becaue parties on their own have institutional recognition, and in our politocal contests there is no prize for second place.
- Comment on I hope you don't have any plans this evening. 7 months ago:
Does this imply that the rapture won’t happen on any day any man or angel predicted it, and suggest that these crackpots are either delivering a “no rapture today” message from the Lord Almighty or else embarrassing Her into putting it off?
- Comment on i need an rv, and lab equipment, and a helper 7 months ago:
You should check with the laws in your state (or your insurance agency, if you have a low enough deductible.).
Just because the grocery store puts up a sign that they are not responsible for damages doesn’t mean they aren’t. They have a first amendment right to lie, and a game-theory reason to do so.