• Ronald Reagan

Oof, man. You alright?

Like, I don’t feel like I was being that condescending. Maybe a bit sarcastic at worst. Feels like you’re projecting some past stuff into this pretty hard.

Genuine beat, you’re worth something man. You have value and people care about you. I hope you’re having a good day.

They did say generally. They also said “no matter how small their business is.”

Okay, so if they employ someone part time to help with the bookkeeping, then I’m supposed to hate them, but not before? Just trying to understand.

So running a craft studio and selling your art direct to people in your area makes you a class traitor now?

Man, I’m having trouble keeping up with who we’re supposed to hate guys.

Is your definition of neoliberal “anyone who doesn’t agree with me on 100% of issues?”

If not, can you give examples of issues that someone could disagree with you on which would not get them branded as a “neoliberal”?

Depends on where you drop the oxytocin, to be fair. Drop it near a playground and you might.

Duolingo has Chess now.

It’s pretty well done. Decently fun.

I read a lot of books. I don’t know that I agree most are well written, lol.

Other people have made solid points, but one thing I think people miss a lot of the time is that “because it’s cool” is a good reason in its own right.

I could argue almost any endeavor that isn’t actively feeding the poor is a waste of resources. Oh, you’re making art? Why aren’t you working in a soup kitchen instead. Oh, you’re building a monument celebrating a civil rights victory? Why not a homeless shelter? Literally any end that isn’t active altruism can be attacked as “why are you wasting time on that.”

But one of the best things about living in organized society is that we can pool our collective resources to do awesome stuff that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. It’s good that there are wonders in the world. I’m glad the pyramids exist. I’m glad the Taj Mahal exists. The Eiffle Tower. The Statue of Liberty. It’s amazing what people can do.

And sure, that money, time, and energy could have gone to helping the poor. And sure, none of those were made in a society without significant social problems.

But we can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. And the fact that the poor exist shouldn’t stop us from doing cool things. Even if they don’t have immediate and apparent “value.” I don’t have an MBA. I’m not looking to maximize shareholder value. And I’m all on board with doing cool stuff, even if it doesn’t have a positive ROI.

Seems like a good way to lose an eye, lol.

Solved or not, computers already smoke even the best chess players in the world. It feels like both of them think people can still compete with computers at chess? What a weird argument.

Ah, fair. I didn’t catch it was median. I just assumed average.

Goes to show I probably shouldn’t comment after midnight, lol.

It does seem like 1 white billionaire living in Massachusetts might account for a good bit of this disparity.

Agreed that we largely probably aren’t going to come to an agreement as we just have fundamentally different opinions on this.

I do think your first point here about this enabling corporate espionage is a bit nonsensical. That’s so far afield as to be borderline unrelated. It’s very “if we let gay people get married what’s next? People marrying horses???” Like, it doesn’t make sense on its face. (And to be clear, so that I’m not misinterpreted again. I’m not saying that gay marriage is bad because then people would marry horses. I am again using this as a parallel example to the point you made, as it makes just as much sense.)

Vis-a-vis birtherism. Do you know how many people I had tell me that, “if Obama was actually a citizen, all he would have to do is share his long form birth certificate. The fact that he won’t do that one tiny simple thing is clear evidence that it doesn’t exist. The fact that you can’t see that is absolutely asinine, and the only reason I think you might deny it is that you are being willfully obtuse and arguing in bad faith.”? It was a lot. I’m from a red area. There are a lot of morons. But you can see how that maybe has some parallels to the people who are saying, “all he has to do to prove he’s not dead is share a photo (oh, wait, he did, it’s probably shopped)… I mean video, yeah, that’s what I said. And the fact that he doesn’t put out a response to every moved goalpost is a clear indication he’s actually a corpse.”

For the last part, I will say, you’re conflating a lot of things here that aren’t the same. It’s a very shallow understanding of how the cyber field works. It’s like saying “Trump gutted the Navy’s budget, and now people wonder why they’re not able to catch any murders in Miami? Come on! Don’t you see how these are related?” Yeah, I mean, they are both related to use of force. They are both kind of water related. But they really don’t have anything to do with one another.

Our country doesn’t have any capability right now to fight online scammers. We have military cyber. We have DoD cyber personnel. But that isn’t their mission set. They aren’t working it. FBI cyber is the closest thing we have to this, and they are woefully unequipped to go after international organized cyber crime. They deal more with online drug and CSAM trafficking. We need to address this issue.

And as I say, recruitment drives to bring in cyber professionals as government employees have failed miserably. The government can’t pay enough, and there’s no real way to fix that.

My cherry pick was federal (non-military) employees. Which he raised by 4.6%, in line with Biden. The first three links you picked were about private sector workers, which as nothing to do with the EO in question. The last is for military personnel, who are handled differently. But the raise for federal employees was a good thing. Just like it was a good thing every time Biden did it. He could have chosen to say eff’em, and not given them their raise, but he didn’t. And that’s a good thing. All the links you posted I fully agree are bad things. But unrelated bad things.

My point (to reiterate for the 50th time) isn’t that he is good or does good things generally. Just that if you kneejerk react with “that’s a bad thing,” even when he’s just doing things that are traditionally viewed as good under better leadership, then you’re just playing team sport politics, not actually paying attention to the reality of what’s going on. And if someone’s not paying attention, it’s hard to take them seriously.

ETA: You also seem reasonable. I think you may be a bit in the tribalism weeds, but I appreciate that you’re willing to engage. As for down votes, I looked back through and I’m pretty even. My worst spread is on the first post at +4/-13, which isn’t too bad. Especially when I’m taking a stance that goes against the group think. I’m not sad about it. I’ve got plenty of net positive comments elsewhere to balance it out, lol.

I mean, I’m happy to take a gentleman’s bet that this will be a net good. I agree it depends on implementation, and we’ll see what that looks like. Honestly, the realist interpretation is that 5yrs from now it’s tied up in the courts and has gone nowhere. That’s really the most likely outcome.

I brought up birtherism as an example of obvious nonsense that Obama handled in the right way by not engaging with. I, in fact, brought it up because it obviously had no truth, and the fact that you could read what I said in any other way speaks to either intentional bad faith or exceptionally poor reading comprehension. My point was that McConnell was following Obama’s lead in not engaging with conspiracy theories, as it only hurts to do so.

You keep not engaging with the example good thing I gave. Again pointing to bad faith engagement with my argument. The example “good thing” is raising the wages of federal employees. That is good. That has been my one example of a good thing. You say experts disagree with me? Find one expert saying that raising the federal pay scale was bad.

I said that the new cyber EO could be good, depending on implementation, but that I’m tentatively hopeful.

And everything in the bottom of your post is about cyber warfare, which is wholly irrelevant to the conversation at hand by any metric. The military should not be going after scammers. The military is not for hunting criminals. The war in Iran has nothing to do with scamming grandmas. These are completely separate parts of the government that have nothing to do with one another. This is an FBI program to hire cyber bounty hunters.

And I’m not saying private industry is inherently better. The government just has trouble hiring technical experts across the board because the governmental pay scale is very rigid. Top cyber experts can easily charge $250k+/yr. What GS level do you offer to make it where you hire competent people? There isn’t one that matches industry. If you are a government employee you are on a G scale (or are an executive level appointee), no exceptions. The government doesn’t have the flexibility to pay experts enough to fill these roles.

Would I welcome a sweeping change that allows the government more flexibility in how much they pay people? Absolutely. But that’s a major overhaul of how federal employment works writ large. The current solution is butts in seats contractors who work for private companies doing the work. That’s happening now. This is just an extension of that.

There’s a difference between being morally against the Nazis and being the kind of person who refuses to drive on the Autobahn because the Nazis built it. You can say the Autobahn is a good road system without endorsing the group that made it or the methods used to do so.

I don’t think they’ve been especially hiding him any more than Obama was hiding his long form birth certificate. He’s been discharged to his home. He’s had multiple communications at this point. But every time he sends a message or uploads a picture, people call it AI or his handlers doing it. There’s no point in engaging with conspiracy theories because every time you jump through a demanded hoop they just demand another one.

I didn’t say Trump increasing the federal salaries made up for anything. And we agree that he’s a disaster. I in no way am saying that the administration is good just because they did one good thing. I’m just also willing to acknowledge the evidence of my eyes. They did a good thing. It in no way diminishes all the evil they’ve done. But if you can’t be honest about when they do a good thing, you’re not engaging with reality.

With regards to the actual bill at hand, I’d like to see the government scale up its in house cyber capabilities as well. That is something they have a poor track record of however.

Congress is broken at this point. You can’t get it to pass a bill that says the sky is blue. That doesn’t excuse all the executive orders, but there’s a reason every president since Obama has leaned so heavily on them. Congress can’t figure out how to pass even the most broad appeal bills anymore. That’s a whole separate problem that needs fixing.

And to be clear, these are not military operations. These are not valid military targets. We don’t mobilize the army to target theives. We don’t send in aircraft carriers in response to fraud. These are criminal investigative proceedings. This is the same as a police department hiring bounty hunters. Maybe a little scummy. Maybe something that I’d in general be against. But in this case, where we have a known criminal element that the police aren’t equipped to deal with it, maybe hiring some bounty hunters is the best solution. It’s certainly better than continuing to do nothing.

You want to read through this thread and see what percentage of people think it’s a joke? https://vger.to/piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2235683/10-more-days-until-mitch-mcconnell-is-allowed-to-die

Some do certainly, but there’s a preponderance of people who are very much convinced we were gonna get an announcement on 8/3 that he was dead or in a coma.

My point with that wasn’t to defend McConnell. It was that people wanted him to be dead/braindead so badly that it made them accept things at face value that were almost certainly not true.

He’s 84. Regardless of any official statement or anything, the wildly most likely thing that happened was that he fell. That’s what 84 year olds do. They fall. That’s what I assumed happened before we had literally any information, and then every single piece of information since then has pointed to that being the most likely explanation. The only evidence for stroke/dead/vegetable has been “because I really want it to be true.”

So you think it was a bad thing when Trump signed an executive order raising the salaries of all the federal government employees by 3.8%?

Look man, maybe you missed the literal hundreds of posts a few weeks ago saying that they’re secretly hiding the fact that he’s dead and that they’re going to announce it at 12:01 on August 3rd. It was “established fact” that the pictures of him were photoshopped, and that his wife was writing all of his messages for him, and that he was either already dead or in a vegetative state. None of that was true.

Should he retire? Obviously. Is he able to do his job right now? Obviously not. Is he gonna return after the summer is over anyway? Probably. He’s been going blank on camera for years now. He’s been unfit for years now.

But that’s not what people were claiming or what I was referring to. People were spreading obvious conspiracy theories that they were “weekend at bernies”-ing him to get past some imagined deadline. If need be, I’ll happily scroll back a few weeks in any politics related community and get you a few hundred people saying exactly that.

I don’t think it’s defending the man to say he’s not dead or a vegetable. He’s an abhorrent human being, but so are a lot of people who aren’t dead or vegetables. And denying reality by saying they are isn’t exactly the flex you seem to think it is.