bubbatheclown

That "demilitarization of Hamas" is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting. They're extremists willing to die as martyrs for their cause. Why would they agree to that?

And even if Hamas did, why wouldn't another group take their place?

Gazans identify as Palestinians; accordingly, they'll treat Israeli settlements in the West Bank as an ongoing attack on their own people. I don't believe there's such thing as a party or coalition in the Israeli government with the necessary political capital to evict 700,000+ settlers from their homes and force them to restart their lives completely from scratch inside Israel proper (good luck selling your property to Israeli buyers in a place where Jews aren't allowed to live, and Palestinians are too poor to pay anything close to the full value, assuming the PA didn't just confiscate the house), but if the settlements continue to exist, then the provocation will continuously serve to radicalize Gazans. That'll still be true 20, 30, 40, or 50 years from now.

Not sure how this could happen.

There's five and a half million Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and that number will probably double in a couple of decades. Those people aren't going anywhere. If Israel waited a hundred years it'd find that all those people were still there. Repeatedly dropping bombs on them won't make them go away. They'll still be there in the aftermath of whatever Israel does. You can't convince millions of people who've been taught from childhood that Israel/Palestine is their ancestral homeland and that they're just one successful intifada away from taking it back to move abroad, and even if you could the other Arab countries won't take them because they'll cause problems in those countries (see Black September, 1970).

If Israel tries to rule them as colonial subjects, they will forever resist. There is no amount of time large enough to convince a whole population to accept eternal disenfranchisement and second class citizen status. Every generation will renew the rebellion conceivably to the end of time.

You don't pay off people not to steal. To paraphrase an old quote, "Billions for defense but not a single penny for tribute."

I mean, sure, that's basically what I said, though I'm not sure why you'd prefer to read that summary over reading the OP. It wasn't even that long.

One thing that concerns me is that the number of articles I cited a couple hours ago hasn't budged since, and apparently that's also where it stood like 2 days ago. My guess is that Grokipedia generates the articles but these have to be manually approved before going public? And in large batches as opposed to being published sequentially.

One criticism that immediately comes to mind is that the articles are rather barebones. Articles aren't embedded with hyperlinks to other articles, there's no pictures, etc. Note that this is still a beta version of Grokipedia and that it could stand to improve over coming days, weeks, or months.

Occasionally over the years I've propounded on a concept which I call "hub value".

It's the reason why a state like Kansas can lower corporate taxes to the floor (I remember there was a governor named Sam Brownback who tried this) but not be able to entice businesses to migrate there from California: all your business partners are already in California. All the talent has already migrated to California since that's where the jobs are. If they all simultaneously migrated then the cost would be mitigated but the first to move will suffer a loss. And so, nobody moves. The passive influence that comes from already being big is what I call hub value.

Hub value isn't all-powerful. Texas is gradually gaining on San Francisco or Los Angeles even in the tech sector. For example, laxer zoning laws make it easier to build AI data centers in the state than in California. But basically no matter what California does it'll continue to be a big player for years, and probably decades, thanks to its massive pool of hub value.

This applies to the internet too. "Alt-tech" competitors to, say, YouTube or Wikipedia (e.g. Odysee and Conservapedia) will always struggle to take off because YouTube and Wikipedia are where things are already at. Granted, the cost is less than the California-Kansas example because you can visit multiple sites, but when what you find is a ghost town will minimal content then you'll be tempted to spend more time where a lot of content already exists and less time where that's not the case. The people uploading content to competitors sites, in turn, will be discouraged by this fact and upload to YouTube or Wikipedia instead.

But we may be entering an age where internet hub value is breaking down, and the first experiment is Grokipedia.

Grokipedia, an AI-generated alternative to Wikipedia, launched on October 27. At the time of writing (three days in) it has 885,279 articles available; in comparison, English-language Wikipedia has 7,082,943 articles after 24 years.

To put it another way, if Grokipedia can sustain its current rate of growth then it will have as many articles as Wikipedia in under a month.

Browsing Grokipedia it seems to work. I've put in such random search results like:

-Sword Art Online

-A Confederacy of Dunces

-Beverly Cleary

-Ampersand

-List of Presidents of Namibia (this one only gave me President of Namibia, which included a list of officeholders lower down in the article)

-Beer Pong

-Trapdoor Spider

-Romulus Augustulus

This is absolutely unprecedented by the way. Something like Conservapedia, which specializes in covering political topics and little else, could never dream of having such a massive scope of content. It even seems to hold up well compared to Wikipedia itself, its article on RFK Jr. including biographical details missing from the latter (e.g. a successful 1997 lawsuit against a polluting company called Consolidated Edison).

For 20 years Wikipedia has stood as the online gatekeeper of "facts". An either glowing or excoriating article about a political candidate can decide (and probably has decided some) elections. And of course, the nature of said articles invariably depend on the political lean of said candidates. But now a more politically neutral alternative might pop up out of nowhere thanks to the AI revolution. And if Grokipedia itself proves dissatisfactory to some then who's to say Grokipedia won't prove but the first in a long line of overnight Wikipedia copycats?

Anyway, you can check out Grokipedia for yourself here:

https://grokipedia.com/

If George Washington didn't think himself good enough for a third term then Trump sure as heck isn't either. 'Nuff said.

Drinking and smoking should be at least 20. On top of the usual reasons about an 18 or 19 year old's brain still being undeveloped, an 18 year old will likely still be in high school (re: surrounded by people even younger than his/her self). The same plausibly might be true of a 19 year old who was held back a year.

Antisocial behavior should be thought of as a contagion; if the people with high perceived status are openly flouting the rules, or otherwise doing something you yourself are not allowed to do, this will inspire imitators. Likewise there's the issue of said high school senior being legally able to buy tobacco/booze and then distributing it to his underaged peers. If nothing else it would viewed as a means to make a quick buck.

As for raising it past 21, nah. These kinds of things shape societal expectations about who is still a "kid", and that number shouldn't keep being pushed up and up and up. If you've graduated college then you are a young adult, not a kid.

Is...that really something the elderly do in your country? Serious question.

To protect domestic workers while remaining humane, we should set the **minimum wage at $12.50 per hour**—historically close to the average after inflation.

Illegal immigrants already work under the table. What would such a rule do besides increase demand for migrants willing to work for less than that?

Visitor workers would **receive room, board, and basic medical provisions** from their employers, creating a structured and humane employment environment.

Not sure what this would do besides incentivize their employers to fire them and close shop, since they're generally unskilled workers whose productive value isn't worth that plus $12.50 an hour.

Granted, perhaps that actually is your goal here, but then what reason would illegal immigrants have to register if they couldn't find work following the rules?

Illegal immigrants would be offered a two year window to gain **legal visitor worker status**.

If this had a time limit, like another Reagan-style amnesty bill, then it would do as much to solve the long-term issue as the Reagan amnesty bill did back in the '80s, which is to say, it wouldn't solve the issue.

And if it was a permanent deal for any new arrivals, then new arrivals would permanently keep coming. They'd have every fathomable reason to do so. They'd be immediately and profoundly rewarded for doing so. And tens of millions of American voters who didn't give their consent to this now-legally codified in stone arrangement would be collectively disenfranchised on an issue that matters a whole lot to them. No compromise of any real substance (re: that they get much if anything out of), just "suck it up and accept that your vote means nothing at all in America".

Businesses must use **E-Verify** to confirm worker eligibility.

You can already do this without throwing in the above. But it also hinges on the assumption that said businesses which are hiring illegal immigrants (you know, illegally) will comply with this law.

While a wall or fence could help reduce illegal entry or drug trafficking, it is **not immediately necessary**. Long-term enforcement and verification measures are more cost-effective and flexible. Illegal Immigration after all doesnt go endlessly up, it just fluctuates, after all, and with everify and deportation crack downs, itd likely go downward

All the fences in the world mean nothing when the laws are (mis)interpreted so that all you have to do is step foot on US soil and it requires a drawn-out legal battle spanning years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to deport you, and when you're out on bail (if that) and can just skip town when your lawyers advise you that you're probably about to lose. Heck, even if you were deported, what would stop you from just coming back? I mean, they'd have to do another trial all over again just to re-deport you. Why would they bother?

ICE showing up and arresting people even 10 feet past the wall is practically useless at that point - it's just security theater, a meaningless charade to give the illusion of doing something when in fact nothing is being done.

Jonathan Rinderknecht, age 29, has been arrested for deliberately starting the Pacific Palisades fire, which burned through vast swaths of urban/suburban California at the beginning of this year and caused 12 deaths.

Discuss.

Feminists have been split into two camps on this issue from the start. One says it's objectifying women to view porn, the other says it's empowering for women to throw off old-fashioned norms of modesty and choose to star in porn. I would be interested in seeing how these two positions map onto the "TERF" debate.

My refutation is that's like saying in the US, where no state has a significant military budget on it's own, then we would all be at the mercy of the Oklahoma Overlords. Why would Namibia want to conquer the world? It's like Oklahoma trying to conquer the entire US.

Because there's a Federal military to stop Oklahoma from trying this. So would the UN have an army? How is that preferable to the current situation?

My life is the same as it was before the election. But I'll go through these one by one:

-ICE raids on illegal immigrants

-There are no serious threats to the trans community. The cultural zeitgeist has moved firmly against the policies of even 20 years ago. If their movement is experiencing any pushback at present, it's because they overplayed their hand to a virulently off-putting extent and revealed themselves to be hardly less authoritarian in character than their old-timey Moral Majority opponents. When their movement collectively reverses course, their reputation will improve again.

-I don't like what I see in terms of the Trump Administration's free speech record, but let's not forget that the Biden Administration was actively pressuring social media giants to censor speech the president didn't like.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-some-covid-19-content-during-the-pandemic

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerberg-joe-rogan-biden-officials-scream-curse-facebook-rcna187199

-By far the most dramatic increase in the Consumer Price Index (a broad measure of inflation) of probably the whole 21st century to date took place under the Biden Administration, with a comparably far more modest increase ever since Trump took office a second time.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm

-Health insurance prices have been steadily rising over time, and were projected by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) in December 2024 to increase further in 2025 due to structural factors independent of Trump.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/health-insurance-costs-are-increasing-markets-become-more-concentrated-fewer-insurance-companies-interactive-map

Nobody, because we'd all be living under the global hegemony of the first country to violate this agreement. All hail our benevolent Namibian overlords!

There should be no sex discrimination in the military. Women and men should be equally subject to the draft. Both should pass the same minimum standards for a given age, with the option of being held back in basic training until they eventually do. If, say, a candidate (male or female) enlists with the Marine Corps and is simply unable to pass the physical standards of that branch but could pass the standards of, say, the Army, then they should be reassigned to the Army and cycled back through an expedited round of Army basic training.

No sex discrimination in who gets assigned the dangerous jobs. The stresses and rigors of army life naturally reduce female fertility, but nonetheless both the man and woman involved should be held equally liable in the event of an unauthorized pregnancy in a wartime theater, with both being sent off to the brig for the full duration. The punishment shall be shared by both, and to the extent that pleading the belly is in fact a privilege to get out of a dangerous situation, that privilege shall also be shared by the father. After this period both shall be either sent back to the wartime theater or dishonorably discharged, depending on the needs of the Pentagon.

One thing I'd add to this is that there's a standard leftist pathology which idolizes youth and being "bright".

There's a lot of pretty well known stereotypes about the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, but if in hindsight we have the collective self-awareness to articulate a stereotype about the last 25 years, it's that internet influencers of the time period all tried for the same basic persona. It's a way of acting I have seen countless times from countless different faces, best embodied in the "Vlog Brothers" (don't know if they still call themselves that lol).

If I were to try to describe it in one sentence, it's a sort of superficial witticism and book-smartness which to the left signals that this person isn't an old, close-minded (re: conservative) square. This is something that's taken to be the exclusive domain of the young because the young are the perennial friends and vanguard of the revolution, because their generation is uniquely bright enough to recognize capitalism = bad, billionaires = greedy, and dekulakization = good.

Whoops, I've gone off on a tangent. Anyway, these are the cultural values engrained in leftists from youth. Instead of asking "How do I make good money" or "What contributions of material value can I make to the world through my labor", they ask "I'm smart, so what smart person career do I belong in?". As a result, leftists go disproportionately for careers in academia, since it's the archetypal smart person job. When the institutions become left-dominated this fact reinforces itself, yes, but I think even if you solved the problem in the short term it'd just happen again later because the left will always be the camp sending its people to colonize this sphere of authority.

A reminder that Comey was indicted by 14 out of 23 members of the grand jury on two counts. On that note they rejected a third count, suggesting this wasn't a blind politically motivated decision.

Also, a reminder that Virginia is a blue state which hasn't voted Republican since 2004.

I'm confused. You proferred a sensationalist clickbait-y YouTube video as evidence, even though literate nuns who wrote surviving literature (e.g. Hildegard of Bingen) mention nothing about having supposedly experienced this?

If you're going to murder someone, you'll use the best tool available. Guns are the best tool for this job, so they're most commonly used. But if you don't have a gun, then you'll use the second best tool available. The underlying desire to commit murder is the same, and will be acted upon regardless.

Rather than comparing the US to other countries (which I'm sure always conveniently leave out Switzerland), a better comparison would be crime/murder rates in a given country in the years shortly before vs shortly after a gun ban took effect. Were rates of gun violence climbing/remaining at a steady high right before, only to sharply fall afterwards? And if so, was said fall permanent?

This is the kind of evidence you want to produce in order to convince me. Not that gun rights don't exist, because they do and are inalienable for law-abiding citizens regardless of the actions of a minority or of some utilitarian calculation. But at least of the underlying point of this thread, which is that gun widespread ownership increases overall rates of violence over the long term compared to no widespread gun ownership. You could convince me of that with indisputable evidence.

Did you send me the same message twice?

of similar countries as the USA

There are no similar countries to the USA. Everywhere else is either like Europe/Japan (to whom we are simultaneously worse off than by many metrics and richer than for the most part) or like the Third World. The unique mix of conditions which exists in this country is without either historical or modern parallel.

The points about domestic violence are also missing the point. Men involved in domestic violence are more likely to be steeped in machismo culture, and men steeped in machismo culture are more likely to own guns. Take away the guns and these would still be men steeped in machismo culture with the physical capacity to kill their wives/girlfriends. If such a man wanted to kill his wife/girlfriend but didn't have a gun, he could grab a blunt object and bludgeon her to death, or grab a knife and stab her. At present they generally don't because that more convenient option is available, but take away that option and they'd go for the next "best" thing.

Would the survival rate in these attacks be higher without guns? Sure. But guns also give wives/girlfriends the option of plausibly defending themselves against a much stronger attacker. It's difficult if not impossible to quantify how often this happens; a woman who points a gun at her partner for a couple of seconds to escape a bad situation leaves behind no visible crime scene. Women in these situations often don't report the incident to the police, perhaps to avoid provoking their abusers or out of fear that they themselves would be charged for threatening him, and the abuser certainly won't if the full story would land him in jail for battery.

International comparisons are unhelpful because there's too many near-impossible-to-quantify factors that come into play, like loss of social cohesion, a "culture of violence", etc., as well as more readily understood ones like racial composition (the United States has a browner population than most Western countries), rates of single parentage (also higher in the US than in any other Western country), etc.

But here's what we can quantify: guns are used some 500,000 - 3 million times a year in self-defense, compared to around 300,000 violent crimes facilitated using a firearm.

https://www.heritage.org/gun-rights/commentary/12-defensive-gun-uses-show-armed-citizens-make-communities-safer

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18319/chapter/3#15

A comprehensive 2021 study by the CDC arrived at a figure of 1.6 million defensive gun uses.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4109494

So let's break this down.

In 2023, about 18,000 homicides involved a firearm. While I am admittedly conflating statistics compiled from different years (Google refuses to answer the simplest frigging question), let's suppose for the sake of argument that that 300,000 figure is still largely accurate. This would mean 6%, or about 1/16th or 1/17th, of all violent crimes involving a firearm turn into a murder. We can take this to more broadly mean that 6% of all criminals who have the clear and relatively unchallenged option of killing their victims elect to do so.

We don't know what percentage of those 1.6 million attempted crimes involved the criminal being in a position to kill their victim. A lot of it could be, say, a carjacking while they thought the owner was away. But if we assume that "just" 1 out of 4 cases met this description, this would suggest that guns saved 6,000 more lives than they took (not counting suicides or accidents) in 2023.

Yes, excluding suicides and accidents. I am perfectly comfortable excluding suicides since that is a personal choice freely made. Likewise, there were around 500 accidental gun deaths in 2023, which means you can knock this figure down to 5,500 but is still a net surplus for the fact of gun ownership.

A couple of years ago it was far, far more common on the left than on the right. It wasn't even close. But the right has definitely started to appropriate the idea with the whole Charlie Kirk business and whatnot, like it appropriated being a hippie or an anti-vaxxer.

While to a certain degree canceling someone has the same pro-democracy logic of a lynch mob which outnumbers its lonely victim, a lot of it is institutional.

In general, the right hasn't cared as much about activism or making their voices heard; you only really know which political camp is more popular the day after an election. But if you were a big company trying to score brownie points with the most people while offending the least people, on any random day of the year, how could you tell? Well, obviously, you'd take the opinions you can hear the largest number of people spouting and assume that's what the majority thinks. And so, cancel culture favors whoever can scream the loudest - which is to say, whichever side can motivate the most people to get out and make noise. Until recently, that was the left. Combine this right-wing apathy with an understandable fear that screaming in the wrong direction might render yours the next head on the chopping block, and you get a self-reinforcing phenomenon.

But I suspect Trump winning last year fundamentally changed the game. The right is more comfortable thinking they have the power to cancel people, and companies are more likely to take right-wing cancel mobs seriously, perhaps due to Trump's willingness to weaponize the presidency against whoever pisses him/his voter base off.

Personally I think this sucks no matter who is doing it. You should be allowed to say what you want on your private time without fearing that a target will be placed on your back for exercising this basic right.

The abortion connection you cite is also rather nonsensical. Whether or not unborn humans are US citizens is irrelevant; pro-lifers aren't arguing for the right of fetuses to vote, drink, drive, marry, file lawsuits, etc. The right of human beings to not be murdered by other humans, and of humans below the age of majority to not be lethally neglected/abandoned by their caregiver, is universally accepted in every jurisdiction, regardless of citizenship. Indeed, the concept fundamentally predates modern notions of citizenship.

If you went and killed one of the several million people worldwide who are legally stateless, "he was stateless" wouldn't exactly be an airtight defense in court lol

It's funny you should mention that, because I literally just typed in "does the 14th amendment due process clause apply to non-citizens" and the Google AI answered yes. AI gives notoriously unreliable answers that often read as brain farts - indeed, it doesn't have a brain at all and is incapable of thought, so the idea that it has a "position" on any one issue is silly.

But anyway, does due process exist? Yes, absolutely. However, it doesn't mean "the government can't do anything at all without winning a lawsuit first".

Punishing someone for a crime is one of those things, sure. Removing someone from land they're trespassing on is not. I think you would agree with me that if I waltzed into your back yard, set up a tent, and announced I was going to live there from now on, the cops could remove me without having to fight and win a 3-year court case first. To give me, say, 2 years in jail for trespassing is something a court would have to decide first, but just the removal of my dumbass from your back yard would be straightforward.

It goes without saying that illegal immigrants are trespassing in the United States. Birthright citizenship is a separate issue (though "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" creates some wiggle room), but also clearly non-applicable to people who were born in a foreign country to non-US citizen parents.

I found myself this evening, for the umpteenth time, completely boned on account of my work computer disconnecting itself from the internet and refusing to recognize any networks, all for no discernable reason. It is an HP laptop, the third HP I've owned to meet the general description of being garbage.

For my other job, I have been mailed computers to use from home for work purposes. Due to systematic failure to perform various updates mandated by the office, I've kept having to send these back, and the office would mail me a new computer. I'm currently on what is at least the third computer they've sent me. These, too, are all HPs. Or to put it another way, at least five out of six HPs in my possession over the years have been garbage. The sixth is also janky and chances are good I'll have to mail it back at some point too.

In contrast, I've had the same ASUS Chromebook since 2018-2019. While the outer frame is now in the very early stages of starting to come apart, it is still more reliable today than any HP I have ever handled.

What is the takeaway? HP is a borderline fraudulent company which sells laptops at standard laptop prices but with a tiny fraction of standard reliability.

Now, this is partly a rant thread but not entirely. The extremely unequal qualities between different laptop brands have led me to consider a possible solution:

Statutory minimum warranties on all new laptop purchases of, say, three years. Companies that sold less reliable laptops (re: those more likely to need repairs before the end of three years) would eat the costs of this in the form of repairs, instead of said costs being passed onto consumers. And if they tried to re-pass these costs onto consumers in the form of higher upfront laptop retail prices, then at least this would have the side effect of making the true price of laptops (retail + long-term repair) more transparent, and we know that markets work better with more transparent pricing. Indeed, the absence thereof is an often-touted factor in healthcare's ballooning prices.

To enforce this, there ought to be established Federal warranty commissioners, analogous to state insurance commissioners, each overseeing a district and who would have the power to impose fines and other penalties when a laptop manufacturer is caught refusing to perform mandated repairs.

Now, I say laptop because HP desperately needs this kind of oversight, but there are other markets which routinely deal with warranties. Cars, refrigerators, window glass, etc. The same regulatory scheme could apply to all of these.

Thoughts?

I think Biden has a lot of issues as a man and as POTUS but one thing he did that I really respected is that when Trump was shot he immediately and unequivocally condemned it and spoke with him in a way that I think was sincere. Despite his personal hatred of the man. Because despite his many flaws (in my opinion at least) he was wise enough to understand the absolute and utter horror that such a thing could’ve, and still could, unleash.

Biden's policies may have been milquetoast leftist president slop, but he was a president of the old type that was ubiquitous just 8 and a half years ago but now probably won't ever exist again: the kind who could at least pretend to be a decent human being and a unifying leader figure for 5 minutes straight. I think he'll be remembered more for that than for anything he actually did, in a vaguely Jimmy Carter-esque sort of way.

Pandora's box has been opened and there's probably no going back to the good old days now. Everything going forward will be populist demagoguery from the highest office in the nation.

At this point, it’s just because Politics has become a sport, and to a lot of people, we just scored a touchdown or something.

That's crazy, because I see it as the opposite. Whichever side the killer belonged to just took a massive L. Combined with Iryna Zarutska (the Ukrainian immigrant woman who got stabbed) and that recent school shooting, this couldn't have come at a worse time for the party trying to convince 2026 voters that there is no legitimate crime problem Trump's national guard stuff is a response to.

The same went for Charlottesville or Dylann Roof on the right. The optics of violence rarely favor the side whose people are doing it; some people seem to have mistaken Luigi Mangione for the rule and not the exception. I doubt Charlie Kirk is even a fraction as hated as that CEO was.