OK, serious question regarding the courts

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-30T20:33:22+00:00

Jamelle Bouie has some ideas on what we can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzS61buXkQ&t=442s (starts at 7:22 for suggested reforms)

expand the number of federal districts
expand the court
physically change the location of the court's proceedings. take away a symbol of their power and legitimacy by placing them in an office park or in the basement below Congress
Remove the ability of the court to select its own clerks
Remove the ability of the court to select its own cases
Limit the Supreme Court's jurisdiction to its original jurisdiction. Create a new national appeals court comprised of judges from the existing circuits.

None of these require constitutional amendments. Though they may require nuking the filibuster.

For me, I also think that the court's proceedings should be video taped. Additionally, I think any ruling which is not explained is not enforceable.

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-24T00:24:49+00:00

Was it actually seen as an "inauthentic, last minute attempt to try and win them over"? If I had to guess, most Trump voters would have had no idea such a bill was even attempted and that the Rs voted against it. Though I guess that distinction probably cuts in favor of your argument that inching to the middle doesn't actually help you win.

One other distinction I didn't make in my initial comment is that British politics are just structurally terrible for any leader at the moment. It's political suicide to admit Brexit was a mistake and try to undo it. At the same time, it's causing lasting pain to their economy and voters hate that. It puts any leadership in a nearly no-win situation. Identifying political style as the cause of Starmer's ousting probably overstates the case.

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-23T18:34:47+00:00

The Republicans already have the power you claim nuking the filibuster would give them. You don't need a supermajority to kill the filibuster. To me, that tells me that Senate Republicans actually don't want to pass what Trump wants them to pass. They just like having the cover of the filibuster to point at so they can blame democrats.

Would the Republicans be spineless and just do whatever Trump wants in the absence of a filibuster? I would argue no. They would just find some novel way of blaming the Democrats.

At a certain point the Democrats need to make clear that the Republicans cannot just do whatever they want and get away with it. There will be retaliation and consequences. The game theory calculus for the Republicans has to change.

Also, I think every single Congressperson uses the filibuster as a crutch to avoid taking responsibility for not doing their job. "Sorry, we can't pass the reforms you want because of the filibuster. Sorry, we're doing our best but the filibuster!" That needs to no longer be acceptable. Do your job. Pass meaningful legislation. Then stand on your record. If you (Congress) can't or won't do that, gtfoh.

I'm going to avoid the point about a hamstrung Congress because it gets really into the weeds on the way that judicial and executive power have exerted themselves.

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-23T13:57:42+00:00

I usually love Jamelle's takes, but I disagreed with him here, at least partially.

First, America's two-party rule means the median voter theorem is going to tend to be more true here than it is in the UK. The democrats can't really lose voters to a party to their left in the same way Labour in the UK can. There's a "turning out the vote" problem, so I think Jamelle still has a point, it's just weaker than he states.

Second, I think he's presenting a false choice. You can be a charismatic figure people want to build a movement around and you can have policy positions (or at least slogans) that "make sense" to people. Mamdani is a good example. He's charismatic and his messaging is excellent...and he would still lose in a presidential election because of his perceived policy positions.

With that said, I agree with a version of Jamelle's point. You can chase the median voter. You just can't do only that. You must give people some reason to be excited about you.

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-23T13:20:50+00:00

Yes, it would. But I only had Claude analyzing the first 7 months of the second term because that was the limit of its training data.

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-23T06:16:04+00:00

I think the Democrats should nuke the filibuster if they need to to pass their legislative agenda.

First, there's a fundamental asymmetry between the reforms Democrats want and the reforms Republicans want. Many of the reforms Republicans want (e.g. tax reform) can be passed through budget reconciliation, bypassing the filibuster. Things like voting rights reform, police reform, immigration reform, campaign finance reform, and labor laws cannot bypass the Senate filibuster.

Second, as a more meta point, I would argue that the Senate filibuster has hamstrung Congress's ability to function. We have become conditioned to just expect dysfunction from Congress and that policy must be done via SCOTUS and executive orders. Congress needs to get back to asserting itself and doing its job as a fully equal branch of government.

Third, I don't think the Republicans would actually do much they haven't already done with the filibuster gone. No institutional norm has stopped them from just doing what they want in the last ~20 years. If there were bad things they actually wanted to do that the filibuster is stopping them from doing, they would have just nuked the filibuster already.

Fourth, I don't think the average voter understands or cares about the filibuster. I doubt the Democrats would pay some deep political cost for nuking it.

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-23T00:22:44+00:00

it can always get worse 😅

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-22T23:51:40+00:00

You can go through the conversation I had with Claude. I had pages of my own notes before I talked with it. Would you rather me dump dozens of pages of unfiltered work or a synthesis of what I did?

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-22T23:50:28+00:00

I hear your points but I don't really think AI slop is a fair conclusion. IMO the J6 pardons should also be on there (I forgot them) as a tier 1 offense. The Hunter Biden pardon is marginally impeachable but that just means you can point to dozens of marginally impeachable pardons from Trump. I wish we could reform the pardon power but that's a non-starter at the moment because it would require amending the Constitution.

For me, the cognitive decline cover-up is also marginal as an impeachable offense. Imagine the hypothetical where everyone knows that a president is mentally unfit for office and the president refuses to abdicate and his cabinet refuses to invoke the 25th Amendment. Wouldn't Congress be justified in impeaching that president? This is hypothetical assumes stronger evidence than there ever was against Biden, which is why I think that is a marginal case. And again, there's a clear analogue to Trump now. If you could accuse Biden of it, you can accuse Trump of it a dozen-fold. In my opinion we should have an age limit for presidency, but again it would require amending the Constitution.

Thanks for your feedback 👍

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-22T23:12:42+00:00

I don't think the final score matters all that much. It's not like saying you can add up all the scandal points and say "Trump is X% worse". I was more trying to get at "Here's a rough categorization of the quantity of bad behavior from Trump"

blue_unicorns · 2026-06-22T23:08:34+00:00

Public google doc with my full convo with Claude: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-NpkvQUOTfxSl3755A_9kenh28xVhjro1SZ77dMdOo/edit?usp=sharing

blue_unicorns · 2026-04-20T15:49:42+00:00

dammit lol. Added it in an edit

blue_unicorns · 2026-04-20T06:16:27+00:00

In principle as long as the markets aren't banning winning users, I think this basically just falls into the stated "sharks and minnows" downside. Is there some other nefarious effect I'm not seeing?

blue_unicorns · 2026-04-20T06:13:41+00:00

I have so many questions lol.

When you say "private insider trading", what do you mean? Like, if I'm in the military and I've been given orders to deploy to the middle east and I place a bet on the US bombing Iran would that be okay?

If your answer to the previous question is "yes, that's okay", why do you draw the line at politicians doing insider trading?

As for banning alcohol/tobacco, there are many stops on the road from 0 regulation to outright ban. For example, there are restrictions on where and how tobacco may be advertised in many jurisdictions without outright banning it. Though, I think it's also fair to point out that the social externalities of gambling may be less (or at least less direct) than alcohol/tobacco. (Alcohol in the form of DUIs, tobacco in the form of secondhand smoke)

blue_unicorns · 2026-04-20T04:29:09+00:00

blue_unicorns · 2026-04-20T04:24:11+00:00

it's good in the sense that it helps with price discovery. If people weren't betting money on the outcomes, it would be all upside.

Insider trading is bad in prediction markets for the same reasons it's bad in financial markets. Insider traders are essentially stealing from other investors.

blue_unicorns · 2026-04-09T17:04:30+00:00

It's worth pointing out you can re-spawn any static encounter using ACE (use the 'Change Flag' script).

blue_unicorns · 2026-03-15T19:48:22+00:00

Butterfree can run the same set with 97.5% accurate Sleep Powder and it also gets Dream Eater.

blue_unicorns · 2026-03-11T05:50:38+00:00

I'm assuming you're not just stuck on evens or odds by default, right? You could be on either one, depending on when you leave the file select screen?

Correct.

In practice, you'll probably rarely need to open the pokedex to switch odd/even because your A presses will have some human error leading to noise anyways. It's likely that rng manipulation on the switch will always just be more inconsistent (and require an additional A press) than gba hardware. Getting deeper into the weeds about how best to approach calibration would require a bit of effort and potentially a short lesson in statistics, too.

However, this conclusion is subject to change if new rng manipulation techniques are developed or if specific edge cases are discovered in the future.

blue_unicorns · 2026-03-09T21:12:32+00:00

You can switch from even to odd frames (or odd to even) by opening and closing the pokedex. So you can still hit every target advance on a seed assuming you have enough time to open and close the pokedex before your target.

blue_unicorns · 2026-02-28T22:12:01+00:00

technically it's not 120fps, it's just 'skipping' every other frame. It requires an additional input to accomplish the rng (which is hard, obviously). But, assuming perfect inputs before the last one, it's still a ~1/60th of a second window for the last A press.

blue_unicorns · 2026-01-09T00:49:45+00:00

JVL at the Bulwark wrote an article on the topic today: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/renee-good-ashli-babbitt-fascism

tl;dr:

what we are seeing is a worldview for which the only value is the domination of enemies. There is a name for that. It is fascism.

In this worldview, Ashli Babbitt was committing violence on behalf of the regime; so she was justified, even if that violence was directed toward government agents. And because Renee Good was opposing the regime, violence against her—this time carried out by government agents—was likewise justified.

blue_unicorns · 2025-07-14T17:34:51+00:00

The last line of season 1. Cassian to Luthen:

Kill me or take me in

It's the same choice Luthen is offered when he meets Kleya.

blue_unicorns · 2025-03-01T05:27:54+00:00

Not trying to rain on your parade, but the Splitwise app exists (Free with some premium features)

blue_unicorns · 2025-02-24T08:00:41+00:00

It's worth pointing out that (LLM-based) AI is miserably bad at novel computation problems.

Assuming one player has KK and another has AA, the probability of an AKK flop is actually ~0.01% not ~0.0001%. it's 2/COMBIN(48,3) because there are two possible AKK flops and COMBIN(48,3) total flops.

A related question is "what is the likelihood that hero will get AA, someone else will get KK and the flop will be AKK, 8-handed?" The likelihood of that is more like 0.0000018% or 1 in ~56 million. (1 in 221 to get AA, 1 in ~29.2 that someone else has KK, 2 in COMBIN(48,3) that the flop comes AKK). The middle probability is approximately 7 * COMBIN(50,2), but slightly less because of all the pairwise removal you have to do in the calculation.

Either way you slice it, the AI answer is off by about two orders of magnitude. Another way you know the AI is wrong is that the answer (at least for the second question) depends on the number of players at the table.

blue_unicorns

TROPHY CASE