- > billionaires became as such without utilizing any resources or regulations paid for by the public
Strawman.
No one is claiming "without utilizing".
However, they are part of the public that paid. Moreover, if I let you use my pen to take a note, I'm not entitled to all of the gain that you get from taking said note.
- The National Guard is NOT a state militia. Its funding and equipment come from the Feds, and any state-level authority can be removed at the president's whim.
This was settled when Reagan sent NG units from some states NG members overseas over the objection of said states' governors.
https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1990/rt9...
- My inference was that you were suggesting that the "independent FCC commissioner" was just as subject to control by elected officials as the Secretary of State because both are appointed by elected officials.
That's why I pointed out that the Secretary of State can be fired at whim by an elected official while the "independent FCC commissioner" can't.
I apologize if my inference was incorrect.
- On the off-chance that someone believes that there is border security between US states but that these states are an exception.
The US doesn't have border security between states.
The closest thing to an exception is the "don't bring agricultural products into California" stations. However, there's a bypass lane for folks who stayed within 10 miles of the border, and no one checks whether someone is using that lane inappropriately.
- > This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.
The unshielded Lightning center blade is on a $5 connector. If it breaks, I'm out $5 and it's reasonable to have spares.
The shielded USB-C center blade is part of an expensive device. If it breaks....
- > Would German military spending of 5% GDP have prevented the Crimea annexation?
Probably not Crimea, but you'd think that the annexation would have caused some rethinking of "soft power".
The lack of European defense spending since 95 means that Europe doesn't have much to help Ukraine. (EU countries brag about "100% to Ukraine" but never talk about how little that 100% is.) It also means that Europe doesn't have much in the way of a defense industry. (And then they whine when money gets spent on US weapons.)
Getting serious in 2014 (after Crimea) would have given Europe options.
> EU military spending only really came up under Trump
Trump's comments, the actual words, on EU defense spending were basically the same as Obama and W's.
The difference was in how Europeans, especially the Germans, reacted.
BTW - do Europeans know how "But we have better work/life balance" comes across? The reaction by many Americans is "Why am I paying to defend their work/life balance?"
- > In international law, they were treaties.
Please provide a verifiable reference to the specific international law or laws that says that a US president's signature is sufficient to create a binding treaty.
The US Constitution, specifically Article II, section 2, says "[The president] shall have the power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur". That's pretty clear that the President's signature alone is not enough.
- > The US doesn't really see Russia as an adversary under Trump.
From the fall of the Berlin wall until the Ukraine invasion, the US saw Russia as more of an adversary than Europe saw Russia.
Yes, even after Russia annexed Crimea. In fact, it's only this year that Europe has started to significantly increase defense spending, three years after Russia invaded Ukraine. And, even then the most aggressive increase plans end up short of where spending was during the Cold War.
Every US president after Clinton (and maybe Clinton as well) urged European countries, especially NATO ones, to keep funding defense and they cut instead.
It turns out that the cowboys were right, that there was a bear in the woods, and that "soft power" wasn't power.
- > Since bits aren't addressable, they don't really have an order in memory.
Bits aren't addressable in the dominant ISAs today, but they were addressable by popular ISAs in the past, such as the PDP-10 family.
The PDP-10 is one of the big reasons why network byte order is big-endian.
That said, I forget whether the PDP-10 was big-endian or little-endian wrt bits.
- > many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.
In this case, "many" is at most 2.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators... Thurmond was the only US senator who switched parties in the 60s. Harry Byrd (from Virginia, not Robert from West Virginia) stopped caucusing with Dems in 1970.
No other US senators switched parties until 94.
Before Thurmond, the previous switch was by Morse (Oregon) who went from Republican to Democrat in 53-55.
The same seems to be true of the House of Representatives - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_represen... .
Pretty much every prominent Dem segregationist only left office when he retired.
That's why the "first Republican elected since Reconstruction" events didn't start until the mid 70s and didn't really get going until the mid 80s.
- > They've quite literally taken the stance that someone literally just seeing the existence of a gay couple in a children's picture book is a violation of their freedom.
No.
They've taken the stance that parents get to decide what books their kids see.
Other parents are free to make a different decision.
Do you really think that there's a "right" to force others to read books that you choose?
- You're ignoring differences in the size of the space and the ability of most drivers to back-up vs going-forward into a small space.
>90% of the people who back in take much longer to back-in than they'd take to back-out because it takes them more time to back up with any accuracy.
Head-in to the spot is just as fast as head-out into the lane because most people don't have any trouble going forward.
The result is that back-in is a net time loss.
- A couple of months ago, I saw something about Temu paying the tariffs for all of their shipments to the US in bulk but still shipping them individually.
The basic idea was that they'd figure out the tariff on everything they shipped during a time period as if it was done in one shipment, pay that, and then do individual shipments.
I suspect that something like this will happen.
Of course, there will be auditing to ensure that companies don't pay tariffs on $10M worth of goods when the actual total is $100M, but that's doable.
- California has an EV-specific registration fee. It started at $100/year, is now $200, and will be $274 starting in 2028.
I don't have data on what fraction of CA's gas & related taxes go to actually building and maintaining roads. (CA does divert money from the transportation fund, which is funded by one of the gas taxes, to "not road" transportation and road stuff for "not cars/trucks.")
- > And even if the war ends, Europeans will be ware of sending their money to a country that may use it against them.
I'd bet a significant fraction of my net worth that Europeans will embrace Russian energy after the war.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/24/eu-spends-more...
Most deep learning systems are learned matrices that are multiplied by "problem-instance" data matrices to produce a prediction matrix. The time to do said matrix-multiplication is data-independent (assuming that the time to do multiply-adds is data-independent).
If you multiply both sides by the inverse of the learned matrix, you get an equation where finding the prediction matrix is a solving problem, where the time to solve is data dependent.
Interestingly enough, that time is sort-of proportional to the difficulty of the problem for said data.
Perhaps more interesting is that the inverse matrix seems to have row artifacts that look like things in the training data.
These observations are due to Tsvi Achler.