- The risky thing about creating this tool is that someone will inevitably use it against the creator, the employees, and the investors.
- I’m trying to build 1 decent iOS mobile app per month.
Most recently released one was My Vocab Quest[1], a vocab mastery app with lots of word packs. It uses some gamification mechanics to make sure the user puts in the reps.
Current apps in the hopper are centered around:
(1) Recovery from cosmetic surgery. There are several balls to juggle for days, weeks, and months after a surgery. The app helps the user follow surgeon instructions, promoting physical and mental recovery, as well as medical and dietary changes. Makes use of phone features including contacts, calendar events, notifications. I’m learning to build an App Clip for it and hope to partner with some surgeons to get it promoted in their offices.
(2) Assisting older Americans to be more independent for a little longer (a parent of mine has early stage dementia). Helping the user maintain a regular schedule, take their medications on time.
(3) A dating ideas / meal ideas and agreement app. It helps increase creativity for date ideas, learns from how predictable you are, and facilitates agreement between the users.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-vocab-quest/id6748546703
- What does “home ownership” mean in a country where there is no private property?
- The only reason capitalism works is because it turns everything into a struggle for existence, which is the best motivator. Every company is forced to compete (assuming there is no moat created by politics eg. Intellectual Property or contract law) or the company will go under.
But it also means that the people who can’t compete in this type of Darwinism only survive because of the empathy of others who do (whether that be family/friends, politics, or charities).
I’m worried about the breadth of industries that PE has infected in the US.
- When a landlord “Skimps” systematically on their obligations as a landlord, we call it a slumlord.
- Dollar Tree and Dollar General are sometimes located in the poor part of a city, but most of their locations are in areas which are too poor to sustain good margin businesses. Rural towns with a single road and only 1-2 gas stations, etc. their core business is to offer smaller and smaller portions to maintain profits while rival stores go under. They are so prolific, they can get giant companies (think drinks, household items, and pharma) to create smaller and smaller portioned SKUs over time.
The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.
- > Nobody's human rights are being actively violated because they're not allow to immigrate here.
US law enshrined both refugees and asylum seekers as separate categories of immigration specifically to deal with human rights issues observed in the 20th century. While that doesn’t mean any person anywhere has a right to be a citizen in the US, it is closer to true than your statement suggests.
“Sanctuary policies” are about enforcing the 10th Amendment. The Federal government alone is responsible for immigration policy. The states should not have to participate, and sanctuary policies are a public declaration that they won’t (usually because local law enforcement knows that it makes their primary job of enforcing the criminal code harder if residents won’t testify).
The reason we haven’t reformed US immigration laws is that everyone agrees it is broken, but nowhere close to a supermajority agree on _how_ it is broken or the steps needed to fix it. See “gang of 8” negotiations circa 2013. This is the inevitable outcome of the founders making Congress slow/stagnant by default. Also damn near half of the voters being propagandized with immigration ragebait for decades.
When my family came over to what is now the USA, immigration was as simple as paying for your own boat trip and passing a health inspection. It was hundreds of years of very “open borders” before Congress decided to go hyper racist and xenophobic in the 1870s.
It’s worth poiting out that Republicans have long insisted that “we can’t reform immigration laws without _first_ kicking out all illegal immigrants. It’s neither a reasonable expectation that we can do that, nor is it a reasonable precondition for reform negotiations. It’s also hilariously false that all recent immigrants vote for Democrats — that demographic is FAR more likely to be Evangelical Christian or Roman Catholic Christian, which heavily vote towards Republicans (not to mention all of the Socialism/Communism haters from Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela who think Democrats are somehow equivalent to “far left”).
Nullification doesn’t harm US law. It is the escape valve people in the US use judiciously when US law becomes unruly and malicious.
- I argue that politicians are absolutely rational. I frequently argue that even the dictator of N Korea acts rationally, only by very different rules than we are used to thinking about. Generally I reserve “irrational” to people who are functionally/mentally disabled, severely traumatized, or acting under the influence of mind altering substances (eg. RFK’s drugs history + trauma of 2 men in his life being assassinated during his formative years).
They are acting according to the expected responses to the stimuli they create. The problem is that the culture, society, previous legislation/jurisprudence, and the parliamentary rules they voted in all make the calculus of predicting what is rational for them uncertain.
- In the movie The Imitation Game, the Alan Turing character recognizes that acting 100% of the time gives away to the opposition that you identified them and sets off the next iteration of “cat and mouse”. He comes up with a specific percentage of the time that the Allies should sit on the intelligence and not warn their own people.
If, instead, you only act on a percentage of requests, you can add noise in an insidious way without signaling that you caught them. It will make their job troubleshooting and crafting the next iteration much harder. Also, making the response less predictable is a good idea - throw different HTTP error codes, respond with somewhat inaccurate content, etc
- China is the world’s most populous country with an autonomous governing body that doesn’t always respond to the voice of the people. And their leadership knows that multiple previous Chinese governments were toppled after the people were famished.
- Maybe.
But having 10%+ of all Americans panicking after missing a few meals is also enough to topple a country. There’s not a whole lot that can unify the different political factions of the US, but going hungry gets people focused on necessity and to deprioritize the shallow / vapid aspects of politics.
Arguably it’s China’s governing body’s biggest single fear.
I currently think this government shutdown is unlikely to do that to the US because politicians have had lots of practice making each shutdown less impactful for most Americans, but the longer we go, the more likely we are to find some high value thing the US government does that Americans don’t want to live without.
- This comment makes you look willfully ignorant of the statements and actions of Republicans in power.
Start with DOGE and Russel Vought’s actions. Then look at Congressional Republican’s recision bill, their lack of Article 1 oversight of what Trump’s Executive is doing, their consistent support of the Executive against any attempt by the Judicial to enforce the law.
- You keep saying filibuster, but it is the “vote for cloture” (similar to a quiet filibuster) which is the thing that has blocked most legislation.
I am curious why Republicans have not changed the parliamentary rules for cloture. The party seems to be pushing states to gerrymander to benefit their Congressional power as early as the next Congressional election. My best guess at the moment is there are a few Republican members who fear what the party leadership does with no opposition party constraints.
- I don’t buy that reasoning. They clearly don’t care about their blame claims matching reality, so they will continue to lie about causes. The same with norms — they don’t stop breaking the norms of the US government and politics during Trump’s terms.
That said, there does seem to be something which has thus far kept them from changing the cloture/filibuster rules to pass bills with a simple majority. I’m curious if the “Freedom Caucus” is fearful of Republican leadership so they are still holding the Sword of Damocles over the role of the Speaker of the House.
- In practice, most people in the US use credit (which means spending can go unpaid for about 25 days without any costs incurred) and most people bank with a national bank (so they are screwed if all federal employees stop paying back loans at the same time).
That said, food banks are gonna see lots more foot traffic and federal employees might start looking for other work.
- It looks like they are already talking about it again in the news.
- I suspect this shutdown will last a while, but I don’t think Republicans will have enough votes to open anything without Democrat buy-in. R needs 20% of the Ds to vote for R bills to get anything budget-changing passed (except the 1 Reconciliation per year that only requires a simple majority). Short of Dems feeling some insane pressure (eg. Military threats or somehow defunding of core government tasks like police, education, medical, Social Security), I don’t see that happening right now.
- What have Republicans offered in negotiations to help unblock the logjam?
Republicans have 50% of votes in both the House and Senate, but they can’t convince even 20% of the most moderate Democrats in red states (to get the last 10% needed to pass a budget bill). Why is that?
- What was the date that you imagine that Democrats all gathered together and voted for a budget under Trump?
They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media:
Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls),
Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out),
Jordan B Peterson (charlatan who dresses up banal self-help advice with pseudo-intellectual jargon to seem profound, drug addict who is still taking very big risks with his health, frequently argues strawmans by misrepresenting postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, etc).
Our heuristics of who we should look up to are skewed because too many young people revere wrath and fame over ethics, morals, and values which may hold us back from success.