You can go to a big box home center and rent a battery powered angle grinder. You can then go back to that same store in the middle of the night, use said angle grinder to cut your way in through an emergency exit, and pilfer thousands of dollars worth of cash and merchandise. They’ll literally lend you the tools to rob them!

Do you care to actually contribute something, or just engage in bullying?

Eh. Really, if you do something this big, your chances of not getting caught are virtually zero. Might as well spread your message yourself so the media can’t later twist it and say you were just mad at your boss or something.

The ISS is primarily designed to research the effects of microgravity and other space environment issues. Hard to study zero g manufacturing when your station has artificial gravity.

Diesel still catches fire. It’s not as bad as gasoline, but it’s still flammable.

We’re not really prepared for the democratization of knowledge, or at least applications of knowledge, that LLMs might enable. Imagine a powerful jailbroken LLM. You ask it how to make an effective remotely operated bomb. You then direct it to not only prepare instructions, but create an augmented reality overview that you can view through a pair of smart glasses. It projects images onto your environment and literally guides your hands through the process of making a powerful bomb. No thought required; just move your hands along with the projection. There’s a reason we have mass shooters but not many mass bombings. It’s not as easy as one might think, and it carries a high risk of the would-be bomber exploding themselves instead. But this? It eliminates all the guesswork, all you have to do is align your hands with what the goggles tell you.

On the less evil side, imagine doing the same thing for medical care. Imagine you could put on a pair of AR goggles and be guided through the process of performing a surgery. Imagine a world where even though it’s illegal, untrained people in increasing numbers are performing major surgeries on each other. An extreme response to the cost of medical care.

Sure, LLMs are deeply flawed on many axis. But they do get it right often enough to matter. Even if the bomber’s LLM manages to result in a dud, or a bomb going off while building it, one times in twenty, that would still dramatically increase the accessibility of home-built explosive devices. And that could be the case across many disciplines and applications.

I remember reading this when it came out. It’s truly a gem. My favorite is probably the studio apartment with a pool in it.

Maybe not in domestic policy, but we could absolutely be at war with Iran right now. At the start of the war, it was reported that the US went in primarily because Israel was going to do so, and that would result in the US getting dragged in anyway. The only way to prevent the Iran war was to have a president actually willing to stand up to Israel, and Kamala fully supports Israel.

Also, I agree with your sentence that harm minimization is a valid way of voting. What I absolutely resent is the haughty assumption people make that this is the ONLY valid way of voting.

Why are act utilitarians so insufferably smug?

Some voters vote for the future. Some for accountability for past actions. You don’t get to tell people the right way to vote.

In many ways, you’re advocating an inferior strategy. Politicians lie all the time, and their campaign promises are mostly wishful thinking. But holding a party accountable for their past actions actually has real data to go off of.

You’re just stirring the pot. Why do you want Trump to win?

Well, you just going to sit there complaining? Or are we going to do something? Grab a shovel and a plasma cutter, we have buildings to move!

Why do you need a separate registration step to do any of that? You already know how many eligible voters live in each precinct. Voter registration made sense before state-issued photo ids were a thing. But they’re now just a tool of voter suppression.

What can you do with voter registration rolls that you can’t do with a database of names, addresses, and citizenship status?

Voter registration is still complety pointless. Why do you even need to register to vote? Sure, it’s location-based, but you should just be able to show up to the polls with your drivers license which lists your address.

Why does it need to be a completely separate thing? This is just a method to suppress the vote.

Oh go masturbate with your hammer and sickle.

That depends if they’re the “let’s keep our own names, fuck the patriarchy” type of lesbian, or the “let’s bond in a quirky way by both changing our last name to a hyphenated or portmanteau’d form of our names” type of lesbian. The former would be unaffected by the proposed voting restrictions, while the latter could both have a great deal of trouble voting. It’s the changing of the last name that’s the problem.

Why do you assume these all need to be new careers? Why do you assume that we can’t expand existing careers? It’s happened in the past, it can happen again. Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.

There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford. Really any industry that involves a lot of human labor. People want more education than they can afford. People want more healthcare than they can afford. People want more childcare, private tutoring, home cleaning, personal trainers, life coaches, financial advisors, and on and on. Think of the retinue of assistants and employees the wealthy employ. Now imagine the number of people who can afford those services drastically expanding. We don’t even need to necessarily invent new careers. There’s plenty of latent demand already. Those masses of displaced agricultural workers? Most of them found jobs in fields that already existed.

Over the last 70 years (in the USA for ex) unemployment has been trending up.

This is false. I’ll ignore the employment rate and focus on labor force participation rate, as unemployment doesn’t count people who are long-term unemployed and have given up working. Labor force participation is a better metric here.

Labor force participation has gone up and down, corresponding with changes in demographics. Despite generations of technological change and automation, we’ve always found ways to employ the excess labor. Human labor is always the ultimate bottleneck. There’s probably enough latent demand for human labor to employ many multiples of our current population.

It made sense precisely because she wasn’t ever going to win a primary on her own. Biden acted like Trump here. Trump surrounds himself with people who have zero future without him. His cabinet is filled with profoundly unqualified people whose only real qualification is unwavering loyalty to Trump. This is a classic move of authoritarian leaders, as their advisors then become completely dependent on them. Once Trump is out of office, Hegseth is never going to have a role in government again. (Unless some other authoritarian president is seeking a loyal lackey.)

Biden did a less extreme version of this with Kamala. Kamala certainly wasn’t objectively unqualified for her job like Hegseth is, but she also could never had obtained a leadership position in the White House via her own merits.

You can still buy those expensive appliances. The brands exist. Just be prepared to pay the prices your grandparents paid.