Would be nice if we had blue state agencies and universities willing to step up and absorb some of the shock by hiring these professionals and issuing grants to continue their projects. Instead, we’ve got institutions wasting time and resources on elaborate surveillance programs aimed at Palestine protesters

…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand

Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century

Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away

More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”

I am a professional encoder and I always put all my codes in a single big file marked EXE for faster execution.

its gross how people were convinced millions of immigrants were here causing issues but as soon as a few thousand are exported everything is a-ok.

Media cycles have flipped from “MIGRANT CARAVAN! KUNG-FLU! TOOKER JERBS!” to “Those ICE agents are being a bit too rough, COVID is solved/not-real, AI will replace you anyway so migrants aren’t really an issue.”

oh yeah, and now we get spend hundreds of billions of dollars now not feeding people but ‘watching’…

Now that we have the eugenics focused government that the media industry lobbied for, we can pivot towards the liberal technocracy that makes the brutality cheaper and more efficient. Amazon / Facebook / Palantir will join forces to deliver a new era of Smart, AI-powered Population Management that can deliver the same gestapo-like tactics for a fraction of the price.

Just like with Clinton after Reagan/Bush and Obama after Junior and Biden after Trump, we’re going to get a new Tough On Border Crime democrat at the top of the ticket (maybe even Harris again, she was great at telling Guatemalans fleeing a civil war to go home) who will campaign on Trump’s ICE doing a bad job according to the deportation counting spreadsheets.

And we’ll get an earful about spending, too, of course. Never a bad time to take another big chunk out of the Entitlements in order to balance your books for National Security.

chinese companies are notorious for stealing IP

American companies sell the ip to China in exchange for access to capital and labor, then claim they’ve been robbed when the Chinese firms innovate and expand on the patents they’ve acquired.

The end result is a car company that produces better vehicles than anything an American or Japanese or German company can manage.

Curiously, these superior vehicles are “stolen” while the Teslas keep exploding under home grown technology.

Holy shit, are we still on Grey’s Anatomy?

Mamdani’s Jihadist plan to open municipally run grocery stores will destroy NYC with Shari Onions.

NASDAQ is up 6.8% ytd and 12.7% yoy. This “drop” didn’t even bring it below the 5D low.

Very possible some HFT was in the know and did a bunch of day-trader shenanigans in the ten minutes before the announcement. Possible this was just speculation on the eve of the announcement because “Trump opens his mouth” is typically bad for the markets for a day or two. But this is a 0.59% drop that you’ve got zoomed in. It’s nothing, in the context of the 3 year Bull Run that’s doubled the NASDAQ’s valuation since the '22 low.

I mean, unironically, this is what polygraphs exist to accomplish. They aren’t reliable instruments and a lot of the “results” boil down to a technician trying to figure out if your heart rate increase or sweaty palms are a result of you lying or the AC in the room not running properly.

By the time someone’s decided to strap you into a ploygraph machine, you’re already “guilty” in their eyes. They’re just looking for an excuse to slam the book on you.

A lot of these subsidies (both in the US and China) are implicit. Chinese state rail networks operate at cost, allowing cheap transportation of materials and labor. American borrowing is heavily subsidized through the Fed Credit Window, which keeps rates in the low single digits while corporate bonds and consumer loans can be 2x-30x as high. Both countries cut corners on environmental enforcement and subsidize waste management. Both countries subsidize education and incentive R&D through their university systems.

The real benefit BYD enjoys - even above its Chinese peers - is vertical integration. They own everything from mining interests to technology patents to dealerships. This is a deliberate consequence of Chinese trade policy, which requires foreign investors to partner with Chinese nationals in order to own and operate capital. Consequently, Berkshire Hathaway - a large early investor in BYD - cannot dictate Chinese vehicle manufacturing policy from a private office in Omaha. Chinese locals benefit from the innovation, the domestic capital, the experienced labor force (which can migrate to local competitors), and the increased economic activity it produces.

China is insourcing it’s wealth aggregation, which has a cyclical compound benefit over time.

If they play a system, they probably like that system

I don’t think you’ve ever actually gamed before.

Don’t forget the Lt governor has more power than the governor

That stopped being true decades ago, when Perry was granted a bunch of appointment power under the Republican legislature.

The Lt. Gov set the agenda in the State Senate, which made the position a bottleneck in the legislative process. But Senate Republicans are in total lockstep. The real legislative power rested with the House calendars committee for a few sessions, as the legislature was only in session for a few months every few years and the House could kill a bill by timing it out.

But of late, Abbott has excercised his ability to call “emergency” sessions liberally. And since he can get the agenda in these sessions, he can bully the House Reps into compliance by dragging them back over and over again until they concede.

you just really want me to be racist

I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.

It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.

The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.

Cool, I never made that claim.

How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?

They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it

Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.

single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games

True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.

Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.

Fortnite

Call of duty

World of Warcraft

Apex legends

Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.

You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.

For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.

I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.

Games as a service don’t need to be a scam.

But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.

Scams all the way down.

there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s)

Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won’t just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you’d have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.

They might have invented interesting musical genres, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles 1950s-1960s era black music.

Maybe they’d have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they’d have made something better. It’s very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.

If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.

Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.

Texas won’t need to go blue for this to backfire

The GOP has a lot of techniques to drive down voter participation and soften up democratic opposition. Rewriting the districts just lets them define the terms of engagement.

This is as close as I get to optimism about state politics though.

Until we get a Wisconsin-style full-state flip and some replacements at the state level, or a Federal DOJ willing to drop the hammer on all the little parasites skittering around the state, there’s very little the state-level Dem Party can do to resist this kind of malfeasance.

Abbott’s been consolidating more and more power in Austin as the various municipal and county level seats have flipped to Democrat. With Trump at his back, the state is increasingly feeling like a single-party dictatorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_Texas#History

Rigging the districts is a long-standing Texas tradition, running straight back to the state’s founding. Under the current map, the State Senate is so meticulously drawn that Texas would need a 60/40 Dem voting majority to have a prayer of flipping it.

Abbott is trying to squeeze yet another ounce of tomato juice from a crushed can.