It’s worth noting that it’s common for it to take years or decades for victims to speak out against an abuser. Especially when the victims are children. Especially when the abuser is a prominent figure, like the literal King of Pop.

I’m not going to try and convince you that these allegations are credible (though I believe they are), I just want you to think about how a child victim might behave in that situation. There’s almost never any objective evidence or 3rd party witnesses of abuse. It’s almost always the word of one person against another. And it may be years before a child victim even fully understands what was happening, and years beyond that to come to terms with it.

Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.

Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.

Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.

I doubt Hegseth even knows what it means to give quarter, probably just said it because he thought it sounded tough

The only thing voter ID prevents is voter impersonation. It prevents you from finding someone else's name and polling place, going there, pretending to be that person, and submitting a vote on their behalf. But that threat doesn't really scale. Even if you assume no one at the polling places notice you coming to vote over and over under different names, a single person could probably only do this a few dozen times on election day. To scale that you would need more people; and every person you add to the scheme increases the odds of someone slipping up or getting caught. But the real issue is if any of the people you are impersonating try to vote! While election officials don't record what people voted for, they do record who voted, and the ballot counting process will automatically note that people voted multiple times. So you would have to figure out some way to gather a database of a large number of people you know aren't going to vote, and get a bunch of people to turn up at a bunch of polling places under those names. It's just not practical to do, when elections are decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes.

> how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections)

The devil is in the details. I don't trust that the groups drafting Voter ID legislation are doing so in good faith. For example, North Dakota passed a voter ID law years ago. It stated that you needed a valid state-issued ID that included a street address. Sounds fine, right? The problem is that most homes on Native American reservations don't actually have street addresses. Tribal members use P.O. boxes for mail, and that P.O. box is on their driver's licenses. This was brought up when the law was proposed, but it passed anyway. The Spirit Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Sioux tribes had to sue in federal court. They were eventually successful, but it took years, and in the meantime the 2018 midterms were held with many Native Americans literally unable to vote.

See https://www.npr.org/2020/02/14/806083852/north-dakota-and-na...

I'm not saying AI causes cancer, but this rush to sell something in the medical space before proper testing and evaluation really feels similar. And the common refrain I hear is "this so much cheaper than going to a doctor, this will help give access to medicine to those who cannot afford it." Which actually makes it more concerning in my mind. At this point AI is a multi-trillion dollar industry. For-profit companies providing unregulated, under-studied services, targetting people who might not be able to afford standard medical care, doesn't come off as altruistic; it comes off as predatory.

So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?

What do you think is the moral thing to do here?

By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?

> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID

That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.

I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.

Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.

> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.

Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.

> Another problem is the US is broke.

USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.

Everyone knows why he bought the Washington Post: it was for clout and prestige. Just like how the titans of industry built opera houses and libraries in centuries past. You aren't buying it to make a profit. You take care of something valued by society, and you win some respect from society. Conversely, if you burn that thing to the ground, society will hate you.

So why is the profitability of the Washington Post such a concern all of a sudden? Sure, they lost $100M in 2024, but Bezos didn't buy the Post to make money! And it's not like money is tight. Bezos is worth over $250B; in the last few days alone the jump in AMZN stock increased his net worth by over $5B. If he were to hand that $5B over to the Washington Post, they could keep on losing money at that rate for another half of a century! The article makes this exact point in the last few paragraphs.

If Bezos was genuinely concerned about alienating Trump or whatever, why not just sell the Post? Why try to undermine it like this? You are pissing off the people who like the Post, and I don't think the people who hate the Post are really going to care.

Yeah that’s what I think we need to enforce. To answer your question, it was not tagged as AI generated. Frankly, I think we should ban AI-generated code outright, though labeling it as such would be a good compromise.

That’s not exactly true. If a process is running in a container, and someone is running bash outside of that container, reading that processes environment variables is as simple as “cat /proc//environ”. If you meant that someone in one container cannot inspect the environment variables of a process running in a different container, that’s more true. That said, containers should not be considered a security boundary in the same way a hypervisor is.

And some of those representations actually do reveal some patterns. For example, an odd prime (so any prime other than 2) p can be written as the sum of two squares p = x^2 + y^2 if and only if p = 1 (mod 4). So those primes that end in 1 in the base 4 representation can be written as the sum of two squares, but the ones that end in 3 cannot. This is called Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_theorem_on_sums_of_... .

My guess is that there's a number of different theorems about prime numbers that are phrased in terms of modulo arithmetic or whatever that can be converted into statements about the base representations of primes.

If I had to guess, though, I would guess there isn't a base where the pattern suddenly looks regular. That's very much a guess, but I have a couple data points to support that. The first is Dirichlet's prime number theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirichlet%27s_theorem_on_arith... . For any coprime integers a and b, the sequence a, a + b, a + 2b, a + 3b, ... contains infinite primes. This seems to imply that primes are, in some sense, evenly distributed across the different possible last "digits" of any base-b representation. There's also the Green-Tao theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%E2%80%93Tao_theorem ) which says that there exist arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. So for any integer k, there exists some a and b such that a, a + b, a + 2b, ... a + (k-1)b, and a + k*b are all prime! I don't have a good formal argument, but that seems like it would introduce arbitrary "noise" into any proposed pattern of "digits".

Finally, there's the Riemann Hypothesis. This is both my strongest data point and also my weakest data point. There's a deep relationship between the number of primes less than a given number and the zeroes of the Riemann Zeta function. Any pattern on the base-n representation of primes would imply some pattern on the number of primes less than a given number, which would in turn imply some pattern on the zeroes of the Riemann zeta functions. But the Riemann Hypothesis remains unsolved after over 150 years, despite being one of the most-studied problems in number theory. It seems like any pattern in the base-n representation would have meant some pattern in the zeroes of the zeta function, which means we would have made some progress on the Riemann Hypothesis after all this time. I consider this argument both very convincing and not convincing at all, because on one hand I'm relying on the lack of progress of so many people on this problem, which seems convincing, but also maybe it's basically just a logical fallacy, like an appeal to authority.