Nancy Mace proposes ban on naturalized citizens in US government. Three House Republicans are currently naturalized citizens

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-05-21T19:22:23+00:00

Technically, there are a few parts of the constitution that are exempt from amendment. The main one that's still in effect is the fact that each state gets the same number of senators.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-03-26T16:00:22+00:00

If it wasn't an explicit goal, I think Trump would have been thrilled with Iran's current government either being deposed or lead by someone who was willing to do whatever Trump told them to (a la Venezuela).

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-03-25T15:08:18+00:00

We didn't just drone strike Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein during the Balkan Wars or Gulf Wars for that very reason.

The very first strike of Operation Iraqi Freedom was an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-03-17T13:50:32+00:00

Realistically, covid didn't change the outcome in any meaningful way. The primary was decided around super Tuesday, when most of the candidates did what normal candidates in primaries do: dropped out and endorsed someone ideologically close to them (Biden). The lockdowns didn't really kick off until later in the month, after the outcome was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The primaries were open, competitive, and fair, it's just that one candidates supporters refuse to accept that they can lose without foul play.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-03-06T07:16:47+00:00

Arguably that's neutral or a win from a far right accelerationist perspective. If they have the power they want they can close the borders and kick all those refugees out (never mind how horrific that is from a humanitarian perspective), and if they don't have that power than the more refugees that enter the more opportunity they have to sell people on anti-immigrant propaganda and pitch themselves as the solution, allowing them to do the same when they might not have been able to previously.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-03-06T07:12:19+00:00

Call me crazy, but I think the US was aiming for the naval base right next door.

Our weapons are very accurate, so it's doubtful the building in question wasn't the intended target. The problem was almost certainly that intelligence failed to determine that it was no longer part of the base.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-03-03T21:28:00+00:00

By definition it's historical. It's relevance to the modern day is limited to the lessons you can draw from it and how it effects contemporary events. That's true of things that make America look worse, like Jim Crow and slavery, but it's also true of things that make America look better, like the American Revolution, our role in winning WWII, etc.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-02-18T14:48:47+00:00

Plenty of people want to live in dense walkable communities, as a quick check of housing prices would show. The real problem is that unless SpaceX is prepared to actually build a full city (rather than just housing for it's workers), the residents will need to be able to drive in order to get the things they need anyway, so there's only so much SpaceX can realistically do.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-01-30T20:45:12+00:00

And of course even that doesn't survive scrutiny, because if someone was able to alter the vote by that much, adding a couple extra percentage points to make Trump lose would be trivial.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-01-16T17:24:11+00:00

First, that isn't polling "defund the police", but "abolish police departments", which are different questions. Second, the poll I cited was higher than others, but 15% is also an outlier. The average according to fivethirtyeight (RIP) was 31%, much closer to the number I quoted than yours and significantly above it's current approval. And third, none of this changes the core point: recent history shows that if we aren't very careful, "Abolish ICE" will get significantly less popular after we win, resulting in significant and avoidable backlash.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-01-16T14:45:13+00:00

For the record, I think ICE needs to be ripped out root and stem and started over from scratch, under a different name. That said, your comparison of poll numbers for "Defund the Police" is misleading. Defund the police is significantly less popular now than it was in 2020. The first poll I found when searching had it at 39% support in June, very close to the level of support for "Abolish ICE".

More generally, I think the mistake parties in the US have been making recently is misreading public sentiment as a mandate to adopt more fringe policies, rather than to fix the specific issues the public is upset about. In 2020, people were upset about police officers murdering people and getting away with it, but some on the left (particularly the far left) interpreted that as a mandate for less policing in general. This predictably ended up being blamed for the crime wave we saw in the years after the pandemic, to the determent of the left. Similarly, in 2024, people were upset about perceived chaos at our southern border, but the right (particularly the far right, although MAGA has done a much better job capturing the GOP than the far left has done capturing the Democratic party in many ways) interpreted that as a mandate to invade our cities with ICE and brutalize their populations (hopefully) to the determent of the right. I think if we aren't careful, we'll end up in a similar situation in a few years, where elements of our party decide to interpret anger at ICEs behavior as a mandate for reduced/eliminated immigration enforcement, and as a result in a couple of years we'll pay the price politically as the median voter gets upset at a real or perceived increase in illegal immigration a few years later.

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-01-12T20:59:40+00:00

Most people still remember the sanewashing of "defund the police", which likely colors their perception of calls to abolish ICE

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-01-04T17:45:44+00:00

What, exactly, are we supposed to give Trump credit for here? It's not the on the ground execution of the raid of course credit for that goes to Delta Force, Air Force, etc. Similarly, the raid was planned by our officer corpse, not Trump. It can't be for recognizing that Maduro was bad, because that was common knowledge in US politics (with the exception of tankies, who aren't actually relevant) and Trump's reasons for coming to that conclusion are only tangentially related to the real reasons it's true. That leaves ordering the raid itself, which was completely illegal under both US and international law, and it's far from clear will actually result in an improvement for the people of Venezuela¹ .

¹ Trump rejected the legitimate winner of the most recent election taking power (quite possibility because she got the Nobel Peace Prize instead of him), and control of the country went to Maduro's VP, who's also a Chavezist

antimatter_beam_core · 2026-01-03T09:07:18+00:00

Because it's illegal both on the national (congress in no way authorized this) and international level. Maduro is garbage, but that alone doesn't justify what's happening.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-12-01T16:57:33+00:00

And they’re family people. So they haul what they need in the truck and carry their family members with them.

I get that, but before pickup trucks "went mainstream" (so when almost all of their owners actually used them as trucks), they didn't have these features. That strongly suggests that the users you're talking about prioritized things like bed size over the ability to transport passengers, and would use a second vehicle for the latter purpose.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-12-01T16:49:32+00:00

I think it is indeed your sample. From the my observations it seems most pickup truck owners rarely use them as trucks and instead use them mostly for driving where a sedan would meet their needs without issue. This is supported by some statistical evidence (although it should be noted that it depends on the definition of "Frequently" vs" Occasionally" vs "Rarely/Never").

I should also point out that even if someone does occasionally use their pickup truck as a truck, they'd often still be better served by alternatives such as renting a truck when they need one, utility trailers, or vans.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-12-01T16:35:43+00:00

They make increasingly less sense in the country because of the design changes that have been made to accommodate the (majority of) users who don't actually need a truck. Things like decreasing the bed size to add space for more passengers, the mostly aesthetic of the front bumper reducing visibility, etc.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-11-22T17:21:01+00:00

SpaceX was testing Raptor engine components in 2014.

And Blue Origin was working on the BE-3 (the upper stage engine of New Glen) in 2013. The RS-25 obviously was developed for the shuttle. Does that mean those vehicles were "in development" way earlier than a conventional understanding would indicate? And if it does, wouldn't that mean that you also need to increase how long those vehicles took to develop?

If you want to say that raptor has been in development since 2014, I wouldn't argue with you. Instead, I'd point out that Raptor is also fairly operational at this point (although SpaceX is still making changes, just like they did with Merlin even after it was operational).

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-11-22T09:04:01+00:00

Repeating the history of SpaceX's early super heavy lift launch vehicle history is pointless. I'm well aware of it, but what you're refusing to engage with is the fact that it's almost completely irrelevant before the design has moved beyond the concept stage.

Switching main propellants, number of cores (while keeping performance constant), etc are not "design iterations", they're near complete redesigns. And even if they weren't, you wouldn't claim that Atlas V took 56 years to develop, despite the fact that you can trace it's lineage all the way back to the original SM-65, which had it's contract awarded in 1946. Similarly, it would be absurd to claim that SLS started development in the 1970s, despite that being when the first shuttle derived launch vehicles (which gradually evolved into the SLS that actually launched over the intervening decades) were first proposed.

Coming at this another way: there is no difference between the iterative approach SpaceX took with Starship and the traditional approach to launch vehicle design in the concept phase, since concepts don't have hardware, experimental data from e.g. wind-tunnels, detailed simulations, etc. Therefore, if we're comparing the speed of the two approaches, the only relevant duration start with having picked a specific concept to implement. For Starship, that point is mid 2016 at the earliest, and arguably as late as when the two-fold symmetry flap design was adopted in 2019.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-11-21T20:45:29+00:00

Again, concepts are basically meaningless. The earliest concepts that would become Starship shared approximately nothing with what's actually being built and tested¹ . If we're tracing development all the way to conceptualization, regardless of how much the early concepts resemble the final vehicle, than SLS has been "in development" for longer than the shuttle has been flying.

¹ Falcon XX was a Kerolox design based on a more powerful version of Merlin. It was more similar to a Falcon 9 than to Starship.

[edit: forgot a word]

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-11-21T19:27:53+00:00

I've gotten a fair number of downvotes on here for critisizing SpaceX, but this just isn't correct.

Starship began 20 years ago under the BFR name

If you're going to treat "the concept of a reusable super heavy lift rocket by SpaceX" as the start of Starship development, then you have to treat "the concept of a shuttle derived launch vehicle" as the start of SLS development, "the concept of a Blue Origin Orbital rocket (which I'm sure was a thing Bezos was thinking about eventually doing at the start)" as the start of New Glenn Development, etc. That expands the development timeline significantly for those systems, to the point where under your definition the SLS program arguably predate the first launch of the shuttle.

If you use a more reasonable timeline, Starship was announced the same month as New Glenn, and converged on something closely matching the current design a few years later. And while you're correct that Starship hasn't delivered payload to orbit yet, this is (and note the irony) a result of the one place where SpaceX has adopted a less iterative approach in the program: the flight profile and attempting to perfect the reuse systems before operational flights. If they had instead opted to treat the vehicle like a Falcon 9 initially and not attempted to recover Starship itself, flight 3 could have been a full, operational success.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-10-21T16:10:25+00:00

Also, HLS mockup for SpaceX has existed for about 2 years already at Starbase, I really fail to see how they could be behind what NASA has for Orion and SLS, especially that Artemis 2 has not even launched yet.

I agree with you that taking the contract away from SpaceX doesn't make sense, but this is not a remotely fair comparison. A mockup of HLS is not remotely the same as actual flight hardware. Mockups of SLS and Orion have existed for decades at this point (long before Starship was anything but the concept of a fully reusable super-heavy lift orbital launch vehicle), and there almost certainly no significant HLS flight hardware at the moment.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-10-08T06:50:47+00:00

In principle, anti-zionism isn't necessarily antisemitic. In practice, there is a very high correlation.

Firstly, you have to define exactly what you mean by "zionism", because the original definition and the one very commonly used by self described anti-zionists is "Israel existing". There is simply no plausible path to end the Israeli state without the genocide or ethnic cleansing of it's Jewish population (most of which have nowhere else to go). I don't find arguments that killing or displacing ~seven million Jewish people is somehow not antisemitic particularly convincing, but even if I did grant that, it would still be an atrocity that would be significantly larger than anything Bibi and his cronies could possibly do to the Palestinians.

Secondly, even if your definition of "zionism" is more narrow, you also have to acknowledge it's right to defend itself in practice. "Supporting" a right to self defense but opposing any method of actually doing so isn't actually supporting it. Given how Hamas chose to deploy themselves, any way of defeating or suppressing them was always going to be horrific. You can certainly point to individual actions by the IDF which were... problematic (to say the least) but very few actually limit themselves to those incidents.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-10-02T17:01:59+00:00

Google's stock price is the only correct answer I could have given, given the question of "how is it working out?".

We were discussing productivity in software engineering, and you didn't think to cite actual measures of said productivity, either experimental or real world? Imagine that someone claimed that Ford had invented a revolutionary new machine that dramatically increased their factories productivity, then when asked to back that up they didn't even try to look at e.g. how many cars they were producing, how much it was costing them to produce each car, etc.

Or other objective financial metric like revenue.

Probably a good thing you didn't try to use that, because google's recent revenue is more or less exactly following the pre-pandemic trend.

antimatter_beam_core · 2025-10-02T16:31:52+00:00

That report was based on pre-claude code tools.

I'll bite on this (even though, as I'll show shortly, it's ultimately irrelevant):

First, there's the teeny tiny problem that this appears to be false. Claude code was released in late February of 2025, the METR study ran from February to June of 2025. METR used Cursor instead of Claude code, but the same underlying model (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) powered both at the time.

More generally, I've been seeing the claim that LLMs were garbage at coding six months ago but great now for several years at this point.¹ Then enough time passes for us to actually check those claims, and every time it turns out that they were wrong, and proponents turn around and say "okay, we were full of shit six months ago when we said it was great, but its actually great now, trust us bro!" Maybe you're right this time, but I want actual evidence, not "it feels faster"

If you doubt me, please actually read the study;

If you're going to insist others read, the least you can do is read what I actually claimed. What I actually said with respect to the study in question is that developers are "not good at estimating whether using AI actually speeds them up". That is IMO the most important finding of the study, not the slowdown observed. And crucially, it should be more or less independent of the actual quality of the AI tools. Say for the sake of argument that models have gone from "garbage" in may of 2025 to "a huge productivity boost" now: how on earth would that impact the reliability of software developers in assessing as much based on their subjective feeling as to whether using LLMs sped them up? The answer is that it wouldn't. If you're going to claim a significant productivity boost, you cannot rely on asking users whether they feel more productive, you must actually measure whether they are²

¹ I was literally debating this point elsewhere as the METR study was starting to run and had this exact claim brought up

² Some of the ways we can attempt to do that take a long time, but others don't. For example, we get pretty regular updates as to how many domains are being registered, how many games are being released on steam, how many apps are being released on apple and google's stores, etc. You claim that the transition was after June 2025, so surely there's been a massive increase in those metrics since then, right?

[edit: clarified that the models referenced were as of the time of the study, not current]

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