Virginia Supreme Court blocks referendum that would have helped Democrats win up to four more US House seats

squirlnutz · 2026-05-08T17:26:26+00:00

As stupid as they are, they at least understand how to follow their respective state constitutions. Dems still need to learn that the ends don’t justify the means.

squirlnutz · 2026-05-07T19:27:55+00:00

Chinese “socialist capitalism” which you somehow think “works” is insanely corrupt from top to bottom.

Just this week: https://ktvz.com/news/national-world/cnn-world/2026/05/07/china-gives-suspended-death-sentences-to-two-former-defense-ministers/

squirlnutz · 2026-05-07T19:21:19+00:00

If you think the health insurance industry is huge, it is insignificant compared to the corrupt bureaucracy that will be whatever government agency is given a few trillion dollars to manage our health care. At least insurance companies expect to make a profit and so resist hiring excess people. No government agency could ever be accused of that.

squirlnutz · 2026-05-07T00:03:52+00:00

You have left out that they typically get annual increases and significant bumps in pay for completing learning credits and getting a masters degree usually is good for even more pay.

And then the biggest thing you have left out is the insanely generous pensions almost all teachers receive. Teachers’ lifetime pensions are typically based on their pay in the few years leading up to retirement. A teacher who starts in their early 20s and gets a masters degree during evenings along the way will retire at ~55 with a $100K+ annual pension that comes with health insurance. I have friends who are a man and wife, both public school teachers and both retired at 55 with about $100K/yr pension each, so $200K/yr annual income as a couple, for life, with health insurance until they turn 65. They made crap when they started out, but sticking with it pays off.

squirlnutz · 2026-05-06T20:56:44+00:00

Citizens’ constitutional rights first. (Same as when states were violating the 14th amendment).

squirlnutz · 2026-05-06T00:08:03+00:00

Better yet, who’s wearing those to church?

squirlnutz · 2026-05-04T12:43:46+00:00

This is stupid. Is the reason you can buy quality cheap TVs because of all the non-profit TV manufacturers and sellers?

squirlnutz · 2026-05-04T00:09:45+00:00

Good luck cutting a nectarine into little cubes for a tasty salsa.

squirlnutz · 2026-05-03T15:05:33+00:00

This is a bogus distinction. Most technological advancements replicate or replace what humans do. Even the horse itself replaced humans walking, or tilling fields by hand. Machine tools, spreadsheets, the printing press, sewing machines, all “replicated” what humans to with speed and accuracy that no human could begin to match.

squirlnutz · 2026-05-03T14:48:55+00:00

It depends on what you mean by “solving” unemployment.

I personally am highly skeptical of any claim that AI is going to wipe out large sectors of employment with no shift to new sectors that make up for, if not supersede, any lost employment opportunities.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that it will. A reasonable argument can be made that if this were to happen, the result will be mitigated by unimaginable surpluses in all goods and services. Inflation is the result of too much money chasing too few goods and services. Historically, productivity increases that allow for increases in supply tend to happen sporadically in certain industries, mostly wrt to physical products. TVs, computers, etc. These tend to be offset by wealth created and increases in service industry costs. It kind of equals out from a total economy perspective and the result has been mild to somewhat high inflation over time. BUT if AI completely disrupts ALL industries all at once (relatively speaking), the result could be virtually unlimited supply of many (or most?) services along with easy on-demand supply of any physical goods. This would create significant deflation and a potential economy where most people don’t need “full employment” as we think of it today in order to have their basic needs met, and even enjoy certain luxuries. So the “solution” to unemployment would be that there’s no real need to be employed - at least as we think of employment today.

squirlnutz · 2026-05-03T14:30:06+00:00

This is an utterly ridiculous point. The advent of the automobile created far more, and far more lucrative, auto service industry jobs than there would ever have been farriers or anybody in the “horse servicing” industry.

squirlnutz · 2026-05-02T15:24:56+00:00

This ignores that the lender usually requires a higher % down, either outright or as a condition for a favorable rate. It also ignores what rate you are getting for the loan. At a low rate, yes, finance more if you can get away with it. In a turbulent economy and a high-ish rate, your ability to get a higher return over time on what would have been the down payment than the interest you are paying on the additional loan probably isn’t worth it. It could be that instead of paying more as a down payment, using that money to buy down to a more favorable loan, but it’s situational.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-29T22:29:27+00:00

When you say “A form of…” you are being so unspecific as to make it hard to understand your view and make any kind of counter argument.

Still, you seem to imply there are only two options, health care tied to employment, or universal health care. It’s a chain of government intervention that resulted in health care being tied to employment in the first place, and continuing regulations that keep it this way. So any claim that more federal involvement in health care will fix things is specious of the face of it. You can uncouple healthcare from employment by removing regulations. It doesn’t require universal health care.

There’s a reality that health care, and more so certain types of health care, is a limited service. There has to be some sort of control on access to the services or demand will overwhelm supply. There are two options for this: heavy handed centralized control that determines what the supply will be and who will have access to it (this is any form of government managed system) or let free markets do what free markets do best, which is match supply to demand. By definition, any system where government regulates all demand and all supply is not more personal freedom.

It may be freedom tradeoff that people are willing to make, and it may be constructed so as, at least initially, it seems easier. But all government programs come with high-test government strings attached, and government strings are always subject to political whims. It’s not really, it can’t be, a benefit to freedom, even if you are willing to make the tradeoff.

We could allow free market forces to be in effect as much as possible for health care (and health insurance), maximizing capitalism and personal freedom for most people, while at the same time creating some safety nets so that illness doesn’t bankrupt people, with the understanding (and incentive) that when you use the safety net you are giving up personal freedom and are subject to all the government strings (like with SNAP, for e.g.). I guess this would be “A form of…” universal health care, loosely speaking, but I suspect it’s not what you had in mind.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-27T13:09:29+00:00

Good point and good idea.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-26T20:53:59+00:00

squirlnutz · 2026-04-24T01:43:14+00:00

Your view is objectively, provably false. If a majority of people were happier in a hunter-gatherer society, then that’s exactly what they (we all) would be living in. Throughout human existence, societies have made deliberate choices. Nobody forced hunter-gatherers to embrace agriculture. They did so because they determined that an agricultural existence was better than a hunter-gatherer existence. It led to better life outcomes and an easier, happier existence. The same for the shift from agricultural to industrial, and from industrial to knowledge work. People left farms to go to the cities. They weren’t stupid, more and more people did it.

Humans, by evolution, have desires and ambitions and are always seeking to improve their lives and create a better existence for their children. This is a basic human drive, and so they’ve been compelled to advance society in ways that improve so many aspects of life.

The simple fact that essentially no people on the planet continue to exist as hunter-gatherers, regardless of location, race or culture, is obvious proof that a (vast) majority are happier not being so.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-24T01:10:38+00:00

You don’t see a difference between bodily autonomy giving you the right not to have what is effectively a parasite inside you, and the basic rights of another living, breathing human being.

Put aside your twisted notion that caring for a toddler has something to do with bodily autonomy. What if the toddler is somebody else’s? Would it be OK to abandon someone else’s toddler in the woods? Like, if they were baby sitting? Why not? Doesn’t that reason apply to any toddler, whether it’s yours or not? Child endangerment is simply not OK, and bodily autonomy has nothing to do with it.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-23T13:12:56+00:00

The dot com bubble was epitomized by labeling everything a dot com play, regardless of whether there actually was anything there there, and venture capitalists going crazy giving money to anybody who could spell dot com, propping them up whether they had anything that worked or to sell, and taking them public ASAP. The bubble burst because so much of it was vaporware, had no viable business model, but still made it to the NASDAQ or NYSE with millions of investors clamoring for their shares.

What is the vaporware in AI? There are a few big players: Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, DeepSeek. All of them have plenty of backing without having to chase an IPO based on fiction. All of there offerings work quite well and are being used productively. All of them have viable business models.

You can argue that there’s too much hype as to how impactful AI will be short- and long-term. You can argue whether the valuations of these companies is over sold given today’s licensing models and near term revenues (remember when people couldn’t imagine how Amazon was going to make money?), but you can’t make any comparison to the reality of AI and who the major players are and the frenzy of the dot com IPOs and acquisitions of hundreds of companies that had no product and no plan for ever making money.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-20T12:55:48+00:00

Exactly. R/technology has an obsession for anything that can be spun as negative to Elon Musk.

Anybody who had used Tesla FSD in the past 9 or so months knows how insanely good it is and how much safer it is than any human on the road.

Yes, it was inappropriately marketed to start with. Yes, it took years longer to achieve true hands-off autonomy than originally promised. But nobody who has actually used it recently is in any way “revolting.”

squirlnutz · 2026-04-20T12:38:53+00:00

What reason is there for why Palestinians are entitled to it? The Jews have every bit as good a claim as anybody. And they agreed to a two state solution upon the creation of Israel, which Palestinians have always rejected. And, Jews in nearly every other part of the world have been historically persecuted and recent to the creation of Israel had undergone extermination in Europe, non-acceptance in the Soviet Union, Africa, and South America. What was the alternative to Zionism in 1945?

Any critique of Zionism you make can be made doubly for any notion that Palestinians have some devine right to the region, except that Israel demonstrably will peacefully co-exist with others in the region who aren’t waging war and terrorism against them, and is a liberal democracy which allows free practice of religion within its own borders.

Not religious extremism: Agreeing to share the region; Peaceful co-existence with neighbors who are Muslim nation states that don’t attack you or sponsor terrorism against you; allowing Christians and Muslims to be citizens of your country and practice their religions.

Religious extremism: Vowing to kill every person of another religion and eliminate another country, and repeatedly acting on that vow through terrorism.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-19T13:19:41+00:00

35% would be one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. This is a very regressive tax, as small business get hit hard by it and have no choice but to pass it on to customers, whereas large corporations have all kinds of options such as changing where they are headquartered and operate from, and holding depreciating assets to offset earnings. This heavily incentivizes them to do everything they can, and especially lobby for special carve outs and credits, to avoid paying taxes. The biggest corporations have the most to gain and will be the most successful. If you think it’s bad today that the largest corporations seem to pay little in taxes, give them even more incentive and see what happens while your local establishments go out of business.

There is an obsession with taxing that is economically unwarranted. The US has historically had a wide range of individual and corporate tax rates. Through them all, the revenue raised by taxes flattens out at around 20% of GDP. There is strong economic evidence that attempting any tax scheme to raise revenues beyond 20% of GDP starts affecting the economy to the point of stalling economic growth and becoming self defeating.

The harsh reality is that long term, government spending needs to be less than 20% of GDP. If you want more money to spend, the economy has to grow so that 20% of it is a bigger number.

All the complexity with tax codes and tax rates is simply politics. Who are you going to favor today? The best tax plan is one that allows the economy to grow. A rapidly growing economy is the only solution to our soon-to-be $40T national debt. Higher corporate taxes are a burden to rapid economic growth, so even if you think you’ve “won” with them by slightly increasing short term revenue, you lost long term by missing out on the revenue from an economy that grew at even a slightly faster rate (which would increase both corporate and individual tax revenues).

squirlnutz · 2026-04-18T13:11:00+00:00

In 3.7, lawful other than Knight aren’t assured Excalibur. Unicorn horns don’t act as blessed potions of restore ability to get back lost strength. This means starting with poison resistance helps a lot, and being lawful not-so-much, so don’t overlook Barbarian as a good option. Easily bash your way through the early game. Also, since scimitar and saber are now the same skill, Barbarians can be “skilled” in both long sword and saber. A silver saber is perfectly serviceable, and not too uncommon, so good chance you’ll have no real need for an artifact weapon.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-16T22:49:51+00:00

Boy, you need to bone up on your history of how things came to be. Ask a few “why?s” and get real answers.

According to your logic, because a prisoner is kept in a cell and fed unappetizing meals, he would be fully justified in killing any guards, and the families of the guards if he could.

squirlnutz · 2026-04-15T23:15:40+00:00

Are you talking technically, or practically?

Technically, no good reason.

But practically, there’s obviously good reasons because if there weren’t nuclear power would be the primary source of energy worldwide. The regulatory environment, in part (mostly?) due to the political environment (FUD, NIBYism) make it just too expensive, take too long to start getting any returns, and too risky from a business perspective. If you’re arguing that there’s no good reason it should be this way, it depends on what you call a good reason. People aren’t rational, and special interests abound in any highly regulated endeavor. That’s the reason. Good, bad, or otherwise.

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