How do you figure? If they’re in power and let the government, they get blamed for it. Call the bluff. Let the government fail. If it’s in a position where one political entity gets to hold it hostage in perpetuity, it’s functionally unsalvageable and broken by design.

I’m gonna go ahead and ask the obvious question: if it’s so effective when the Republicans do it, then…you can fill in the rest.

Third Way was originally a think tank architected by Wall Street for the sole purpose of committing ideological false flag operations and grossly misrepresenting academic findings for the benefit of their corporate overlords. They once released a study under a headline that basically stated that because of Democrat economic policies, the gender wage was falling. And they were technically right. It was falling. It was falling because men were getting paid less and women were making the same amount.

Now, remember kids: if an unpopular Democratic presidential candidate doesn’t win an election, who do we blame? That’s right: literally everyone to the left of us. That’s how you make progress in a country, after all: Demonizing the left in the same way conservatives do. And why do we do that? That’s right, it’s because we’re secretly conservative, too. We just tolerate gay people more, but don’t want actual social or economic progress. Repeat after me: “unfavorable political outcomes are everyone else’s fault but mine!”

Well, I guess that’s why I said “in this day and age” and not “always.”

Luckily, in this day and age, clean water is both cheap and plentiful. Unless you’re in one of the places where it isn’t. But in that case I doubt you have access to room temperature beer, either.

To some extent, the Democrats are playing chicken with Trump’s eventual re-election. They don’t want to actually “seize” power in the same way that Republicans do. They want the pendulum to swing back and forth so they can keep getting re-elected and keep playing that old game of kickball with Republicans. Dems win some. Republicans win some. Everybody gets to complain about the opposition and do nothing. That Republicans seem to be updating their modus operandi from playing kickball to playing what seems to be “king of the hill, but with knives” has not quite dawned on the Democratic party collectively yet.

Not the best, but better than nothing.

We have very different opinions about the fundamental nature of “old, room temperature, completely flat” beer, if nothing else.

This is a textbook strawman argument. The foundational premise of this argument is that the only reason someone could have for opposing a tool like this is because of a desire to exclude others from accessing specific works that they believe hold a specific degree of cultural capital, and, as such, anyone who makes an argument against this technology must, therefore, automatically hold this position.

Which is not the case. One argument against this technology is that it at best mangles and at worst destroys the underlying meaning and significance of a work of literature. Your argument seems to consider the form of language of a work of literature as window dressing to it - something with far less meaning or significance than its summarizable content. But for many works of literature, it’s not. Some things are written to be difficult. Some things are written to be accessible purely to adults with a complex grasp of the language. Some thing are meant to challenge a reader. That’s why every year in school you’re assigned slightly harder books - because learning is a process of continually being challenged. And this is a tool that actively seeks to negate that. If you’re learning English and you want to read a famously difficult English novel, why reduce its complexity to the point where you’re not even reading the actual novel instead of just reading a version translated into your native language? Or get two copies, one in English and one in your native language, side by side and compare the language in each? A good translation by a skilled translator can preserve most, if not all, of the artistic value of the original, as opposed to this, where a huge chunk of the underlying artistic value of the work itself has been drained from it like blood from a slaughtered animal.

As such, the issue is not “wanting to keep the work out of the hands of ESL learners or children.” It’s about not wanting the underlying work diminished.

I would also argue that this is a tool ripe for exploitation in the worst ways possible, as “simplification” is a stone’s throw from censorship. Some group doesn’t like the inclusion of LGBT characters in a famous book? Use this AI tool to programmatically erase any mention of them. Some group doesn’t like that a book is critical of capitalism? Suddenly, large parts read like a parable straight from the mouth of Supply-Side Jesus. I know, let’s cut out all mention of race in Huckleberry Finn. Now it’s just a fun story about a kid and his…“friend”…traveling down the Mississippi! And if you were reading a novel in this way for the first time, you probably wouldn’t have any idea that this wasn’t what the author themselves had written and that you were reading a warped, ideologically twisted homunculus of the original.

“The highs were high and the lows were low. Specifically for the two cities and the people in them that this novel is about.”

This is the thing. People like to blame Berniebros and whatnot for Clinton’s loss in '16, but the reality is that the centrist Democrats that vote for the party’s corporate-backed candidate wouldn’t vote for a progressive one, so even if Bernie had won the nomination, he probably still would have lost because he would have lost the support of these DNC hardliners. I heard people literally say in '16 that if Bernie had somehow won the nomination over Hillary that they would have just stayed home. It’s wild to think how ideologically balkanized the Democratic party is, with so many people fervently belonging to the leftist minority that holds their nose every election to vote for another mediocre person whose best attributes are being “not an outright fascist” versus the people who will never vote for a truly left wing candidate because they’re fiscally conservative but socially liberal and just allergic to compromising in the same way that they’ve forced the leftists in their party to do since forever.

What are they, 1-2% of the potential Dem voter base?

Add a .000 in front of those numbers and you might be right. If those numbers were accurate you would expect somewhere between, what…1 and 2 million tankies in the US alone?

You have to understand that the average American functions off of lizard brain impulses. It would be probably go like this:

Acknowledging age concerns of the electorate = show of weakness.

Running someone fresh that appeals to this American Idol-esque popularity contest = show of weakness.

Running someone Republicans don’t have their talking-points fleshed out on = show of weakness.

America operates on principles of running someone strong who says they will always be strong and that if they ever become weak while in office and they acknowledge this to be replaced, the entire party goes with them like a tug boat latched to a sinking oil tanker. Trump didn’t win because he’s smart or a decent human being. He won because he exudes baseless confidence like a broken nuclear reactor exudes gamma radiation.

Warren is a woman and economically progressive and America hates people who are either of those things, let alone both.

It’s like RBG all over again, if these people could just get it through there heads to quit while there ahead they could preserve a decent legacy, instead of tarnishing it by leading the way to a regressive order that overturns everything they’ve done.

This is one of the core problems of the Democrats: hubris. When Obama had a majority in the House and Senate, he could have easily pushed through a Supreme Court appointee to replace RBG. But she wouldn’t go. Because in her mind, there was no one qualified to fill her shoes. She was convinced that she was the GOAT and that to voluntarily step down when it was safe to do so would be an insult. This is coupled with the fact that Democrats were absolutely, completely certain that they would win every election for the presidency after Obama without trying and that the “coalition of the ascendant” would easily put Hillary into the White House, and then she could be the first female president in US history and have an easy PR win by replacing an aging female supreme court justice.

I’m willing to bet we have the the same problem here, but in one person: Biden probably thinks the Democrats could never field anyone for president better than him and that his victory is a lock without any real effort to campaign for it again.

Fun fact: the last time anything like this happened it was with Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was the 22nd president of the United States who lost his re-election bid the first time around, and then got re-elected to be the 24th president of the United States. We are officially in the second Gilded Age.

People seem to think I’m advocating voting for Trump. I’m not. You have to vote for Biden, because the alternative is unconscionable. But people shouldn’t pretend the Democrats are a party of political accomplishment. You’re not voting for the positive changes the party can do. You’re voting for the promise that they won’t go out of their way to make things worse. That’s it.

They’ve done plenty with it.

You’re right, Biden signed an executive order making it illegal for a railway union to actually go on strike. And he kept a bunch of Trump appointees in positions where they can do the most damage. Like that dipshit who runs the postal service now.

They’ve had 4 years already and done nothing with it. I don’t know what you think another 4 will accomplish.

It’s good for python stuff, specifically, potentially because python as a language is the closest we have to a natural, descriptive programming language, and as an LLM that might make connections between functional behavior and language easier. That said, it sometimes tells you to do things that won’t work because the libraries you’re using have some specific incompatibility issues between them and the only way you can find out is via github issue discussions.

Those of us who noticed when HailCorporate first got shadowbanned could see that particular train a coming. Reddit was always going to strangle its own content to death in order to make it more advertiser friendly. I’m honestly surprised it took as long as it did.