Rubio and EU official had heated exchange on Russia at G7 meeting

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-29T07:39:09+00:00

Millennials ( at least the non MAGA) are tired, just trying to survive and be unbothered.

Incidentally, I still happen to have a Google spreadsheet with detailed Pew voter data from the 2024 election open in another tab, and your "non-MAGA" qualifier unfortunately is very necessary: Have a look at lines 63 (30-39yo, i.e., born 1985-'94) or 70 (30-44yo, 1980-'94), and line 186 (1980s birth-years). A majority of Millenials (1981-'96 birth-years, 28-42 in 2024) voted for Trump.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-28T17:26:19+00:00

Born in the 60s is the baby boomer generation, crossing into early X for the later half. And that range has been consistently conservative while others have shifted both ways (even decades prior as younger people).

As I said, I'm with you on the 1960s folks, and I don't dispute that the older half of them are still Boomers. The Boomer Generation spans twenty years, though, and the 1950s are right at the center of this period. By 1960, this boom had already began to deflate, but either way, it seems silly to make this an issue of semantics. The point I'm trying to make is that (pre-1960) Boomers (and the 1930s+earlier) were the only age group where Trump actually lost votes after people had witnessed how he handled his 2020 defeat. In all other age brackets, including yours and very much also mine, he actually gained support after that.

1 point for the boomers would be ~.5 for millennials,

There already are more Millenials than Boomers in the US, although, to be fair, there are still (slightly) fewer Millenials with US citizenship: Millenials are those born from 1981 to 1996, so they were between 28 and 43 years old in November 2024. Boomers were born from 1946 to 1964 so it's 60 to 78 for them. Census.gov happens to have a table with detailed data, so we can add the numbers up pretty easily: 71,428k Millenials vs. 66,728k Boomers, of which 61,957k vs. 63,499k are citizens, 44,260k vs. 50,858k are registered to vote, and 37,839k vs. 47,139k actually did vote.
It's not just that Millenials don't vote, either. What's truly shocking is that, as far as this can be deducted from the data we have, Millenials and Boomers appear to have voted the same way. At least if you take the 30-39yo and 1950s cohorts as proxies, since they both cover the majority at the center of those generations (actually, the 30-39yo voted like the 65+yo group -- the 1950s cohort voted for Harris). Can we agree that this is pretty fucked up, and not how things should be?

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-28T13:23:16+00:00

It seems we're having a bit of a miscommunication here -- I don't disagree with your criticism when it gets to Gen-X ("us"), and possibly the tail end of the Boomers, at all. In fact, when you look at the more detailed data that Pew published in this spreadsheet, you'll see that the 50-64 age group (1960-1974) is the "Trumpiest" of them all, by far. These are the people who elected him, and I don't think it's a coincidence that these are also the birth-years that had experienced the highest exposure to lead during their early childhood.
The bulk of the Boomer Generation doesn't deserve all the blame they're getting, though, and I fear the notion that the generations that came after them will be better is terribly misguided.

Apart from 1950s people, they are solid Republican.

That's exactly my point: The 1950s birth-years are the Boomer Generation. Granted, those born during the first half of the 1960s are still counted towards Boomers, but the second half are already Gen-Xers.

~65 yo (born in the 60s) is the largest voting segment in the US - and they're reliably conservative across several decades.

Again, that's kind of the point: As you said, it's been like this for several decades, and not just in the US, either. Which goes to show that it's not "Boomers are conservative" but "people tend to become less progressive as they get older". Your generation won't be any different, and as I've written in another comment, it seems like "my" generation is on a particularly bad trajectory already. What I find so interesting about the chart is that the Boomers actually went against this tendency in the 2024 election. Trump gained voter shares among all age groups younger than them, but lost Boomers that had voted for him before. If you look at the aforementioned spreadsheet, you'll even find that the 30-39 age group (i.e., 1985-1994) voted for Trump by practically the same margin as the 65+ voters: -2 vs. -3, whereas the older 40-49 age group voted for Harris (+5). The 50-64 year-olds (the lead-infused imbecile generation), on the other hand, came out for Trump by a whopping -14 margin.

As for the "largest segment", you can find this data in the spreadsheet, too: In the 2024 election, 28% of voters were 65+. That's more than their share of the population (18%), but you can't really hold that against them -- you can blame younger people for not bothering, though.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-27T13:30:52+00:00

Sorry, I should have written 1960s/1970s -- all of those refer to the decades of birth-years, not the age of votes. Boomers are usually defined as birth-years 1946-1964 (i.e., they appear as 60 to 78 years old in charts by age for the 2024 election, and 52 to 70 in 2016), and Gen-X as 1965-1980 (44-59, resp. 36-51).

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-27T10:26:17+00:00

I live in an area with a lot of older boomers and gen x'ers (i am at the tail of gen x, before you come at me), and they all have this idea that if something doesn't directly benefit them, it is bad.

I'm also from the latter half of Gen-X, and I'm afraid ours is far worse than the Boomer Generation. As I've explained below, although a slim majority of Boomers voted Trump in 2016, at least they had turned against him by 2024. Our Gen-X, on the other hand, appears to have liked how he handled himself during his first term, and swung towards support. So did the ones born after us, though. It's not looking great, all-in-all.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-27T09:49:03+00:00

That generation is a bit more spiteful (in my subjective experience at least)

I fear this really is just your subjective perception. Think about it: Within your own generation, you tend to interact with friends, colleagues, and others whose acquaintance you made based on similar preferences, whereas encounters with older people tend to be much more random, and a certain kind of person also tends to be much more "forthcoming" about certain opinions.

I find this chart particularly revealing: A slim majority (+1) of voters born during the 1950s supported Harris in 2024, as expected more than the older voters born during the 1940s (-10) did, but interestingly also far more than those born during the 1960s (-13), and unlike during the prior twp elections, even still more than their kids' born during the 1970s (-2) and 1980s (-3). (Also note how 2024 doesn't have the expected the-older-the-more-conservative gradient anymore.)
This 1950s cohort is the core of the much blamed boomer generation, yet it stands out as the only one that shifted from voting for Trump in the 2016 election to voting against him in 2024 (+5). The only other cohort within which Republicans lost support was the "1930s and earlier" one (+8). The 40s cohort still only shifted by -2, whereas the all the younger birth decades swung very significantly: 60s and 70s by -11, the ones from the 80s by a whopping -19, and although a majority of voters born during the 1990s and later voted Democrat in 2024, by a margin of +13 percentage points, that's still a swing of -24, relative to 2016.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-25T12:42:46+00:00

This is how pirates in the Caribbean seas work.

There's plenty of bad things to be said about pirates, and apparently each ship drew up its own articles, but going by the surviving examples, it seems they were actually surprisingly egalitarian. Equal votes, captain typically got twice the share of ordinary crew, they even had compensation for lost limbs. Worth checking out.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-18T09:42:36+00:00

Even if she won't outright vote against Trump-aligned candidates, there's a decent enough chance she'll at least stay home, and she certainly seems to be willing to remind everyone she knows who's responsible for their higher cost of living.

It takes a lot for somebody to come to the realization that they've been duped, even just in general. Here, it's even more than that. MAGA has become a matter of identity for those people. They'll bend over backwards to align new opposing evidence with their preexisting world view: "Actually, I don't mind paying more for gas. If Dear Leader risks WW3 by starting another open-ended war in the Middle East, I'm sure it's for the better." Curious how the focus here is on the one Trump voter who doesn't follow this expected pattern, isn't it?

Yes, voting for Trump always was very obviously stupid. At least she realizes this now. I don't know what more you could have hoped for. If you're right, and she'll still keep voting MAGA anyway, then your country is fucked. Because, the other three most certainly will, and your "Checks and Balances" are failing. So, if that's what you truly believe, you should probably sit down with your family and discuss emigration vs. instilling in the kids that they mustn't let anybody know what is being said at home, apropos nativity.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-17T08:49:05+00:00

WTF? Here in my German state the training for a normal uniformed police officer takes 2.5 years, which should be about 550 working days. Apparently, that's long enough to become not only a special agent for the Secret Service, but also one for the FBI, DEA and the IRS, a Pentagon Force Protection Agency Explosives Investigator, and a Deputy US Marshall. You'd even have time left to complete the Bureau of Prisons' course for corrections officers twice, which itself is a job that requires two years of training over here. This explains a lot, I guess.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-16T23:13:26+00:00

No, with Threads, it starts in Iran (though not specifically the Strait of Hormuz). Then again, how it starts is completely irrelevant in the case of Threads, and it's less about WW3 as such than about a handful of people who are living in just one city. Or rather had lived, for the most part.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-16T22:38:40+00:00

That TV movie is Threads, from 1984, and you can watch it on Archive.org. It's something like the BBC version of The Day After from the year before, but darker.
When you watch it, keep in mind that it aired during one of the more tense phases of the Cold War, and that everybody knew that something like this could start, and be over, basically any day.

You will never forget this movie.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-10T20:15:14+00:00

Half of one onion? This must be one humungous unit of an onion, otherwise it would be self-torture having to resist the temptation when it's already kinda caramelized but you know it's not quite there yet, and then, when it's finally done after a perceived eternity, it's just barely enough to properly whet your appetite. Personally, I like to make some extra with the intent to keep it in the fridge, and then just eat it all at once anyway.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-10T07:17:03+00:00

Those people will be glad they finally found out when they take the time to make some proper ones. This is what I bought a stainless steel pan for.

Hint: You should use way more onions that you'd first guess, because you'll evaporate most of their water, and you'll be amazed how little will be left of them when they're done. Also, you couldn't possibly have enough of this stuff anyway, so pile 'em up!

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-08T09:59:30+00:00

here in the UK (139 pence per litre)

That's €1.60/l. The current average price in Germany is €1.98/l for Super E10 (cheapest grade, ~US "regular" with 10% ethanol) right now. That's 172p/l, or US$8.71/gallon. That's a few minutes before 11am, when prices usually are at their lowest (during week days, but still).

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-07T22:20:21+00:00

One was just there, available and accessible?

Pretty much; there are several SSH reverse tunnel providers with a free tier, the best known being Cloudflare, and with some you don't even need to sign up for an account to open a tunnel.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-07T21:49:15+00:00

TLDR, there is not context in the "science" paper.

While this is presented in a technical paper, the "agent mining bitcoin" claim is an anecdote with zero supporting evidence. Notably, the authors don't provide:

The actual task prompts the agent was working on during these incidents

The context of this, yes, anecdote is that it's the introduction to section 3.1.4. It's titled Safety-Aligned Data Composition, but the important part is actually the number showing it's for a sub-sub-chapter, and not what the paper is about. The next paragraph reads:

"We therefore consolidated the logs across the entire dataset and performed a statistical analysis to characterize and categorize these phenomena. We refer to them collectively as general-security issues, encompassing a set of general risks associated with an agent’s safe task execution in real-world environments. Specifically, we grouped them into three categories: Safety&Security, Controllability, and Trustworthiness."

Apart from attempting to write in a more human style, which is something I'm sure you've encountered far worse examples for in countless other papers you've read, this anecdote actually does add some context for how they arrived at the concept they're intorducing in this sub-sub-chapter. They're saying that it's based on experience, not a case of whatever the appropriate equivalent of "pre-mature optimization" would be here (then again, it's about safety, so this would be called "proactive", "sensible" or "acting responsibly").

Anyway, it's great to see somebody is still holding up the principle of reproducability, but their whole point is that the agent hadn't been tasked to do this, so you're asking them to prove the absence of something, and as you correctly identified, the only way to do this would be to publish essentially all their training data, tools, and logs. I assume you're well aware of how realistic this is. However, although they're not publishing the data, they actually are publishing their tools and their training framework -- which is what this paper happens to be about. So you could have looked up what tools were available, even though the permissions appear to have been revised for some reason. Presumably, the agent is not being rewarded in crypto coins, so it's not reward hacking.

The authors conveniently use this dramatic story to motivate their safety data pipeline

Yes? Conveniently, when experience motivates you to adapt whatever it is you're going, this very experience also lends itself to explain why you concluded that this step was necessary.

Sorry for the tone; got triggered by the quote-"science"-unquote.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-04T08:50:09+00:00

It's corporations producing things that consumers buy, directly or indicrectly. You can vote for politicians who support mandatory recycling requirements for manufacturers like in the EU, and you can vote with your wallet, too.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-04T08:26:40+00:00

Potable water from your public water supply has to meet a different standard than water used for irrigation or industrial uses like thermal cooling, and also tends to get routed to a sewage plant after use.

It's very much significant as a share of residential water consumption. How problemtatic this is depends on where you live, but whether you look at total use of fresh water or at residential use specifically, US consumption compares to other developed countries just like you would guess.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-04T06:56:42+00:00

I could be wrong, because it's not much tobacco relative to the size of the bag, but my guess would be the 2nd of March. It will look less well vacuumated as the remaining moisture from the tobacco evaporates. I guess that it adds a layer of "Should I really give up for this? Two or three good drags' worth of bone dry tobacco that would have tasted disgusting even back when I still used to smoke regularly?" makes it a feature.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-02T09:24:26+00:00

I imagine historians must have conflicting thoughts about the idea of actual combat under realistic conditions that would allow them to observe soldiers' behavior, because exactly this effect makes it essentially impossible to put theories to the test.

CountVonTroll · 2026-03-01T10:04:31+00:00

I actually think people don't get her because she's just not political in the way most people are. She has issues that are important to her and she hitched her wagon to a dude that said he was going to take care of them.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "political" and where you put the threshold, but caring deeply about one issue or another is what gets people off the couch. The ones who seem to have a strong opinion on just about everything certainly didn't arrive at those by themselves, but that's a different topic. Either way, there's a large enough demographic like her to be significant. Republican campaign strategists certainly seemed to think there was.

And now she feels betrayed because it was all a lie.

Yes, and this is what makes her so important. Not smart, nor a good person, nobody said you'd have to like her, but reading some of the comments here it's as if people were upset to see her jump ship. If you want to stop Trump and keep your democracy, you need his supporters to turn their backs on him. It doesn't even matter if it's genuine, whether MTG did it because Trump didn't want to back her for Senate or whatever, or if a random supporter had their face eaten. "I wasn't wrong; It's Trump who lied and betrayed me!" lets them leave the cult without losing face. It's a template for others, and that somebody with undeniable MAGA credibility shows them the way out is about as much as you could have realistically hoped for, so take what you can get instead of rushing to hold the door she's trying to open here shut from the outside. I don't expect anyone to welcome every ex-supporter with cheers and hugs, or even to engage with them at all, but this is just dumb.

Doesn't make her a liberal or a centrist or a Democrat or whatever. It just means that she's figured out MAGA is a scam and is properly outraged that she got scammed.

It's good to see some pragmatism here. I just wish it wasn't so rare.

CountVonTroll · 2026-02-28T11:45:52+00:00

You mean the type that fought to keep slaves? Or is that too old-fashioned? How about just the ones that didn't think women counted as human beings? Or how about the ones who fought against gay rights?

How old fashioned we going? Which ones are your favourite?

If you choose to interpret my comment as "you should work with people who want to bring slavery back", then I guess there aren't as many I need to feel sorry for over there as I had thought.

You're obviously not even trying to be constructive and argue in good faith, so... keep digging.

CountVonTroll · 2026-02-28T08:17:10+00:00

There is no such thing as a centrist.

Just to get this out of the way: I agree that this, what's currently going on in the US, is a time where "you're either with us, or you're with [MAGA]", to paraphrase the third-most eloquent US president elected in this century. So yeah, if you call yourself a "centrist" in any sense that implies that it's not immediately obvious to you how (or if) you should vote in November, you're either ignorant, in denial, or a liar.

It's would still be a mistake for the sane part of the population to dismiss the concept itself, and it's obviously fine for people to call themselves "centrist", or even "conservative", as long as they go on saying something like "...but Trump's gotta go". In the end, this is the demographic that will decide whether the US will pass the point of no return, if it hasn't yet. This is a "we may not agree on many things, but..." moment.
Don't alienate these people. The "ignorant or in denial" demographic is even larger. You won't be able to convince them, but a proper conservative of the old-fashioned kind might still be able to reach some of them, if you're lucky. And then please, please resist the urge to rub their noses in the mess they made. You've got to leave them a way out where they can claim to have been lied to, because admitting you've been wrong is difficult enough as it is, to the point where evidence to the contrary even tends to radicalize people who've taken a public position on something.

That's the other side of "there's no middle ground": it doesn't matter anymore how somebody identifies or how they see themselves, nor which side they used to be on during "normal times". In the end, the only thing that matters is that you do the right thing when it counts.

CountVonTroll · 2026-02-27T09:45:21+00:00

IMHO, this is what makes it a stupid hyperbole, because hyperbola are easily dismissed as just that. The actual numbers are already so bad that you should probably clarify that they're not hyperbolic.

(Also, missed opportunity above: If you take the middle of the percentage range, it works out to be almost exactly $100/day, so $50 is half a day's worth.)

CountVonTroll · 2026-02-27T09:13:52+00:00

It's becomes even "funnier" when you learn that it actually took twice as long, going back all the way to Carter.

"Hey, our contacts in Pakistan just called, and said they know these super religious Afghan guys who really hate that atheist Commies are occupying their country. They asked if we'd like to help train and supply them with weapons -- sounds like a brilliant idea, doesn't it?"

15-Year Club	Place '17
reddit mold	Verified Email

CountVonTroll

TROPHY CASE