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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 5th, 2023

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  • I wish I remembered where I read it so I could attribute it, but I saw someone describe Trump not as a liar but as a bullshitter. It’s not that he lies. It’s that he has no regard, one way or another, for whether what he is saying is a lie or not. He simply has a thought and recites it. It’s so effortless for him to lie because, from his perspective, it’s the same as telling the truth. If this is true, the pattern you’ve identified could be merely chance based on the probability that any random thought a person has is more likely to be wrong than right when they are incapable of learning new information.

    I didn’t feel like I was doing it justice, so I found the sauce…from fucking 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar






  • Absolutely. I’ve gotten myself spun up about determinism before and eventually decided that I’m going to believe in free will for the time being. Much like theism is for many, the idea of free will is kinda comforting for me and it helps me cope with reality to feel like I (and everyone else) has agency. Plus, if I’m wrong it doesn’t really matter and I never could have been right at this point in my life anyway.




  • Started on Friday… still coming in waves. I had a breakdown a few weeks ago… just pushed myself too hard for too long…it was probably building up for at least a year. Went to the VA (veterans affairs, for those not in the US, the VA is the sole source of health care for many veterans in the US), and they started making adjustments to my anxiety and depression medications which eventually precipitated into a ER visit. A few days later, they got me hooked up with the mental health clinic where I talked to a provider about going on short-term disability while we’re messing with my medication doses until I feel normal again. He says something along the lines “sounds like a good plan, sned me the paperwork.”

    Queue up to Friday, I get a call from the insurance company saying they got the paperwork from the provider, and it recommends I go back to work. Now I’m out of PTO, disability is denied, and I’m trying to decide whether I lose my job or go back to work on while tettering between “extreme anxiety” and “drug-induced haze” from all the new prescriptions.


  • I’m not smart enough regarding macroeconomics to know the right answer, but I feel like there has to be a solution that makes home ownership affordable for new entrants into the market without causing the value of existing homes to tank so hard and fast that we end up with a 2008-style crash again. I’m pretty confident that getting large-scale corporate investment out of the picture is part of the solution, and I don’t care if the method involved there hurts the corpos pretty bad. Maybe an oppressive rent-control scheme that makes keeping the properties untenable for corporate owners, forcing them to want to sell as fast (and therefore as cheaply) as they can. I don’t know what zoning laws are like in Canada (compared to here in the US), but I think merging zoning for low- and mid-density residential such that suburban NIMBYs can’t block multi-family units from being build is another necessary step. As far as everyday folks who bought into the housing system, I’d like to see them as protected from the fallout as possible, especially since (at least the US) government has been all-too-happy to let home ownership replace pensions as the primary way people are “supposed” to retire.




  • Nothing. It’s a pretty fantasy. Best I think we can hope for is a few monopolies busted up so some little guys can break into the market. That’ll buy us about 20 years until those little guys have become the new Googles and Microsofts and Apples, and then we start over. We need to entirely rewrite how we do antitrust assessments to account for both vertical and horizontal monopolistic behaviors (a vertical monopoly is a company that controls the entire supply chain where a horizontal one controls the market and customer base. Historically, the US has been more concerned with horizontal monopolies.) It’d be great if we could come up with a better measure of consumer choice that we currently use. If you have the choice between 2 ISPs but they both charge the same amount for the same service, you don’t really have a choice there…at least not a meaningful one.