aberrate_junior_beatnik (he/him)

  • 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Krasnov

    Wat?

    Wanting someone with disastrous mental health issues to not be capable of launching a nuclear strike isn’t ableism.

    Would you loan a gun to a friend who’s been really depressed lately? According to you, you should.

    Oh, I forgot that Truman, the only person in history to actually use nuclear weapons, famously only did so because he had depression. Or he was a perfectly mentally well person who was also a racist to the extent that he didn’t care about the lives of Japanese children. One of those. I always get it confused.

    Anyway, the answer to who I would loan a gun to and who should be capable of launching a nuclear strike is the same: no one. But I would trust your averaged depressed person with the nuclear codes more than I would Trump. To be clear: if Trump has a mental illness, that is not the thing that is wrong with him. What’s wrong with him is that he’s a fascist.




  • Follow the guidelines as mentioned in freedesktop

    Which guidelines are you talking about? Searching for “proxy” and “environment variables” didn’t pull up anything I saw that would be relevant in this case. I’ve been using linux for a couple of decades now and I’m not sure what rule is being broken here.

    It sounds like you didn’t have a proxy set in your environment variables, but you did have one set through another means. It’s somewhat standard practice to have fall-through settings, where if settings aren’t set in one place, a program looks in another place, then maybe another, etc. Now admittedly it would be nice to have a way to disable functionality entirely, but usually that kind of thing happens with command line flags.

    I get that it’s frustrating to deal with a problem like this, but ultimately your environment was misconfigured, and that’s going to break some software.



  • This is a very econ 101 take. A similar argument is that if you increase the minimum wage, people will per se lose their jobs because of supply and demand curves. But the empirical evidence doesn’t support that. I don’t think we know for sure why, but increasing the minimum wage has second order effects that seem to counteract this. Similarly, it’s true that if you print money, you increase the supply of money which according to supply and demand means the money will be worth less. Now I don’t think we have as clear empirical evidence that shows this isn’t true, but we do print money all the time. I mean, that’s how government works; congress passes a bill, and the federal reserve supplies (“prints”) the money to fund it. There’s not some bank account somewhere that has to have the money and if it doesn’t we have an overdraft situation. But, if the bill is printing money to support farmers and provides an increase in the food supply, the cost of food relative to the dollar could go down. Now maybe the cost of other things goes up, but the point is that it’s much more complex than “government print money, inflation go up.”

    The argument I’m making here is based on Modern Monetary Theory (maybe I’m doing a bad job of representing it or understanding it), which you should definitely check out if you haven’t.


  • Before the cuts, the IRS generated $0. After the cuts, the IRS will generate $0. Getting rid of the IRS can’t cost the US government any amount of US dollars because the US government has infinite US dollars.

    To be clear, I think it’s a bad idea to cut the IRS. We should be beefing it up and tasking it with going after the rich, because taking money away from rich people is a good thing. But buying into the framing that the US needs to take money from people because it can then spend that money on something else is a mistake, and not just because it’s false. It’s bad politics. Conservatives don’t actually give a shit about government efficiency or fiscal responsibility, they just hate taxes. If it makes the deficit 10x worse they still want to cut taxes however they can. But they are happy to weaponize concern trolling about the debt and deficit to cut government programs that benefit the poor (or prevent such from coming into existence), and liberals are very susceptible to these arguments.