Yup, that would be how I’d play it. But she kinda sucks on policy, so maybe it would hurt instead.

When looking at 2020 candidates, she was literally my least favorite, and Biden wasn’t far behind her.

I just watched this on Audit the Audit, so good on this guy for following up. The video was incredibly obvious that the cop was in the wrong. Basically, the video went like this:

1. Cop pulls Greg over for allegedly giving the middle finger, and the cop terms it a “welfare check” (no other violation); after the stop, Greg allegedly cussed at the trooper as he left (not loud enough to be picked up on body cam)
2. Greg pulls away and it’s obvious from cop dashcam footage that he’s not impeding traffic in any way; cop then pulls Greg over again for impeding traffic
3. Cop orders him out of the car, apparently has called backup, and arrests Greg for obstruction (Greg repeatedly asks what crime he committed, and is not told about impeding traffic)

The first may have been retaliatory (not clear, cop may have been able to defend it as a welfare stop), but the second absolutely was retaliatory and blatantly illegal. I’m surprised the award was only $175k and nothing more happened because it was a clear violation of Greg’s constitutional rights, which have been clearly defined through case law to include criticism of the police.

Screw this cop and the entire department that allows this nonsense. This was also on Christmas, which makes it so much worse…

“I was disrespectful,” Bombard conceded of that cold day in 2018. “I don’t think I should have been arrested for it, though.”

Disrespect is protected speech and has been enshrined in case law, and police are expected (again, in case law) to be held to a higher standard than the average citizen. So middle fingers and profanity are absolutely protected speech, just don’t commit any actual crimes while expressing yourself because the police will look for a way to arrest you if you’re doing that. And there are a lot of technicalities (e.g. when you need to identify yourself, what constitutes a “lawful order,” and what “disturbing the peace” means). So if you’re driving, drive the speed limit, keep your plates updated, etc if you plan to give police the bird.

Yes, both sides suck. One side sucking more than the other doesn’t change that.

Biden is awful on policy, and I dislike much of what he “got done” in his 4-years of office. And I actually voted for him in 2020. I voted for him for three reasons:

1. get out of Afghanistan - both presidents promised that
2. not start new wars - both presidents alluded to that
3. not Trump - I thought it would be funny if Trump lost my very red state (Trump got ~45% here in 2016)

This year, “not Trump” is still true, but that doesn’t change the fact that Biden still sucks on policies I care about. His website just says “defeat Trump.” Here he is on “the issues”:

• “Protecting and strengthening our democracy” - basically “defeat Trump”
• “Growing the middle class” - again, “defeat Trump”
• “Fighting to lower costs for working families” - “unfair junk fees charged by banks, credit card companies, and airlines” - I guess that’s cool? But this isn’t really solving systemic issues, this is just pandering to poor people IMO and I doubt he’ll actually do anything about it
• “Building a fairer tax system that works for the middle class” - cool, the TCJA is sunsetting in 2025, which is why it’s weird he’s proposing a 28% corporate tax rate when it would revert to 35% if he does nothing; “cracking down on wealthy tax cheats” - looks like increased audits are starting this year, we’ll see who they actually target
• “Making health care more accessible and affordable” - “They strengthened the Affordable Care Act” - this only really applies to people who don’t have coverage at work; earlier they said they’d strengthen the middle class, but this sounds like it’s going to increase rates for the middle class to benefit the poor, so I’m getting some mixed-messaging here
• “Fighting to restore reproductive freedom” - “Donald Trump overturned Roe v. Wade” - yeah, that was the Supreme Court, not Trump; “Joe and Kamala are fighting to restore the protections of Roe” - no they’re not; they had 4 years and did exactly nothing about it, aside from some feel-good EOs, I see no reason to expect this to change in the next 4 years

And comparing them on the issues:

• Economy - edge to Biden
  • Bidenomics - lol; at least Biden wants to spend money on stuff, instead of just lowering taxes and running deficits for no reason
  • “Mr Trump has blamed his successor’s big spending for inflation” - nope, that was mostly you, Trump
• Immigration - about the same
  • “Democrat to shift in favour of more restrictive measures” - big nope
  • “Mr Trump rallied his congressional allies to kill that bill, claiming it did not go far enough” - bigger nope
• Abortion - about the same
  • mud-slinging against Trump, but no actual planned action
  • proud of overturning Roe, and prefers states rights vs national ban
• Ukraine aid - eh, Biden is a wet blanket here, but Trump is potentially way worse; edge to Biden I guess?
  • I’m not a fan of Russia, so I’m fine with continuing aid; ideally we’d be pushing for peace talks, it’s gone on way too long
  • Trump - ??
• Israel/Gaza War - both about the same, and I disagree w/ supporting Israel here; slight edge to Trump for finishing it quickly I guess?
• Taxes - edge to Biden because Trump is so bad here; we need to balance the budget, and neither seems to have a plan here
  • Biden could literally do nothing and tax policy would revert midway through his term, yet he proposes a lower corporate tax rate than what would happen if it reverts; so… ??
  • big nope
• Healthcare - both are meh here
  • Biden’s wins are mostly just natural changes to an existing program; I see few actual proposals here
  • ?? He seems scared to cut entitlements, and he has even less of a plan
• Crime - Biden, because doing nothing is better than what Trump is doing
  • “Biden credits investment in public safety for the significant decline in violent crime after major spikes during the first two years of the pandemic.” - no, pandemic lockdowns and whatnot likely caused the spike (people getting less social interaction), so this is just reversion to what would’ve happened w/ no pandemic; he shouldn’t take credit for inaction
  • pointing out anecdotes to stir anger; big nope from me
• Climate - Biden is bad, but Trump is somehow worse…
  • I see Biden’s policies as largely cronyism, but at least he did something
  • more oil? WTF?
• Gun laws - meh, both suck
  • gun safety laws just make things worse for responsible gun owners and don’t actually reduce crime
  • tried to ban bump stocks, but that actually has nothing to do with gun crime whatsoever (how many mass shootings used bump stocks? I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s at or near 0)

So I guess Biden wins a slight edge here by being less terrible than Trump, actually trying something, and not messing things up too bad. But I disagree with pretty much every policy proposal he has.

Here are my priorities:

1. peace in Gaza - don’t send aid to Israel, engage Fatah, and try to bring someone to a table somewhere
2. balance the budget - increase taxes and cut spending; my preference is to make the TCJA tax simplification permanent (nobody wants to mess w/ personal exemptions…), increase the tax brackets back to pre-TCJA levels, remove income cap for SS taxes, and implement a Negative Income Tax bracket to replace the EITC (max age 62), and offer people to opt-out of SS to get access to the NIT instead; spending cuts should primarily target defense (mostly foreign bases) and student loans
3. end federal student loan program - I’m fine with grants, but aid shouldn’t come with strings attached; I believe education is so expensive because schools know the gov’t loans are easy to get, w/o gov’t loans, student loans would be dischargeable in bankruptcy and the problem would likely correct itself (though likely reduce college enrollment)
4. expand legal immigration, and simplify the legal immigration process
5. climate change - I’d like to see a carbon tax, not subsidies (more cronyism) and certainly not more pollution

Neither candidate seems to have a plan for any of that, they are either silent or opposite. So that’s why I consider both to suck, they suck on the issues I care about, and they’re decent on issues I care much less about.

So yes, both sides are pretty much the same to me, and since I live in a very red state, it won’t matter if I vote for the less crappy option. So I’ll be voting third party instead, since I do have options that align with my priorities.

Which is probably for the best because I think they’re both pretty awful on policy.

That’s really sad to say though. I wish people care more about issues and policy, and I wish candidates actually cared about and fulfilled their campaign promises. But that’s apparently not the reality I get to live in…

“I give [Trump] a lot of credit for doing this debate on the terms that were effectively set by Biden,” Ramaswamy said of Trump, noting the debate is “hosted by CNN, in Atlanta, without a live audience.”

Those terms, he said, “would be the equivalent of Joe Biden agreeing to do a Fox News-hosted debate, in Alabama, with 3,000 live audience members.”

Uh, what? How is the lack of a studio audience an advantage for Biden? And how is that similar to a 3000 person audience elsewhere?

Somehow it’s even less than how little I care about what Trump or Biden have to say. I’m just going to watch for the drama, I’ve seen them both in office so I’m not expecting any campaign promises that they’ll actually keep…

That’s fine. If he loses this round, I doubt he’ll run again, and if he does, the RNC is unlikely to support him again. I want him to lose so it’s clear that his ideas are not wanted.

Please no. I want him to lose with a massive gap, like 40% Trump, 50% Biden, 10% RFK/random third parties. I want him disgraced…

This doesn’t bode well for a 2008 part 2… Home owners will be forced to rent, driving prices up even further…

Yup, and Family Feud filming is moving to the White House.

6 head play

I wouldn’t say “infinitely,” Biden is only relevant because Trump is so bad…

You don’t have to convince me that Rust rocks. I just need to convince my team that it’s worth the investment in terms of time to onboard everyone, time to port out application, and risk of introducing bugs.

We have a complex mix of CRUD, math-heavy algorithms, and data transformation logic. Fortunately, each of those are largely broken up into microservices, so they can be replaced as needed. If we decide to port, we can at least do it a little at a time.

The real question is, does the team want to maintain a Python or Rust app, and since almost nobody on the team has professional experience with low-level languages and our load is pretty small (a few thousand users; b2b), Python is preferred.

Yup, I guess not. But if I was on the product team, the customers and director ate the bosses. And on it goes up to the CEO, where the board and shareholders are the boss.

If I can justify the change, we’ll do it. That’s close enough for me. And I did do a POC w/ Rust and could’ve switched one service over, but I campaigned against myself since we got good enough perf w/ Python (numpy + numba) and I was the only one who wanted it. That has changed, so I might try again with another service (prob our gateway, we have 3 and they all kinda suck).

I’ll have to check out Deno again. I remember looking at it (or something like it) a couple years ago when first announced on Reddit.

Well, I’m kind of the boss, but I inherited the Python codebase. The original reasoning was it’s easier to hire/on-board people, which I think is largely true.

If it was up to me, I’d rewrite a bunch of our code to Rust. I use it for personal projects already, so I know the ecosystem. But that’s a tough sale to the product team, so it’s probably not happening anytime soon. I’d also have to retrain everyone, which doesn’t sound fun…

However, any change I make needs to work smoothly for our devs, and we have a few teams across 3 regions. So it needs clear advantages and whatnot to go through the pain of addressing everyone’s concerns.

That’s pretty impressive! We have a bunch of a bunch of compiled stuff (numpy, tensorflow, etc), so I’m guessing we wouldn’t see as dramatic of an improvement.

Then again, <1 min is “good enough” for me, certainly good enough to not warrant a rewrite. But I’ll have to try uv out, maybe we’ll switch to it. We switched from requirements.txt -> pyproject.toml using poetry, so maybe it’s worth trying out the improved pyproject.toml support. Our microservices each take ~30s to install (I think w/o cache?), which isn’t terrible and it’s a relatively insignificant part of our build pipelines, but rebuilding everything from scratch when we upgrade Python is a pain.

Both of those are largely bound by i/o, but with some processing in between, so the best way to speed things up is probably am async i/o loop that feeds a worker pool. In Python, you’d use processes, which can be expensive and a little complicated, but workable.

And as you pointed out, scons and pip exist, and they’re fast enough. I actually use poetry, and it’s completely fine.

You could go all out and build something like cargo, but it’s the architecture decisions that matter most in something i/o bound like that.

Even when qualified immunity is removed, individual cops are indemnified because they are in the act of performing their duties

That’s the definition of qualified immunity. It’s not a law, but an understanding in the courts that cops are special. Ending qualified immunity means passing a law that states cops aren’t special and should be held to the same standards as regular citizens, with grants to do specific things to act in their official capacity (e.g. detain and arrest).

Ending qualified immunity is essential to getting rid of bad cops. And bad cops are who cause issues like George Floyd’s death.

That’s a specific tactic but the broken windows strategy would remain in place.

We should absolutely be fixing broken windows as we come across them.

Just like the civil rights movement didn’t end racism, but instead gave minorities a lot of tools to fix the broken windows they came across, to the point where things are a lot better for POC today than before the CRA.

Ending qualified immunity and legalizing recreational drugs are approachable goals that appeal to a broad audience and will do a lot of good for POC specifically (and everyone generally).

He has no grassroots movent

But he does. He got a lot of people out voting who wouldn’t have otherwise. They didn’t have a clear, actionable goal, but they did have a clear message: “drain the swamp.”

The lack of meaningful change was because Trump (their spokesperson) doesn’t care about change, he just cares about being in the spotlight. We can learn a lot from his messaging and turn that into meaningful change.

Every modern movement learns the lessons of socialist organizing or perishes

That’s just not true. Look at the American Revolution, which was pretty much the exact opposite: classical liberals (individualists) fighting against authoritarianism. That worked because people had a common enemy, so they organized for the purpose of defeating that enemy.

What you need to be successful is an “us vs them” mentality. That can come from a socialist background, but it doesn’t have to.

Yes, and this is triangulation that he later regretted

Yes, but we don’t know if he would’ve been as successful without doing it. Given the political and social climate at the time, I think King made the right call (for the movement, not for his personal convictions).

You cannot build a pro-Palestine movement while vilifying Palestinians

Sure, broadly speaking, but you can kick out specific individuals that will distract from the message. That’s what King did, and I think his movement was successful for it. That’s called compromise, and it works if you’re careful to not compromise on your core message.

Please review his later work when he was murdered.

I’m not talking about his later work, I’m talking about the Civil Rights movement.

You’re thinking of social democracy, not democratic socialism

My apologies, they’re similar terms and I align with neither, so I sometimes confuse them. King appeared to be more of a social democrat than a true socialist, though he did associate with more radical socialists.

BLM was a failure because they have the same false consciousness you are recommending.

No, BLM failed because they didn’t have consistent or lasting messaging. There are multiple ways to get that, and they did none of them. Chants don’t change laws, actual proposed laws do, and protests and whatnot are there to get media attention for those proposed laws.

What’s relevant about it? The only relevancy I can see is an attack on Trump’s character.