Viewing profile — jfengel

That 3°C by 2050 figure comes from one particular group of German scientists. It is not the broad consensus, which is that we'll reach 3°C by around 2100. Either scenario is obviou…

Not many. And even fewer would make a different choice, given the opportunity. Change will rely entirely on people who sat out 2024. The question is how much regret they feel. Cyni…

A lot of people cited Gaza as an example of "evil" by the last administration. I can have a small amount of sympathy for that. What was happening there was indeed harrowing. But on…

Do any other countries teach it? I'd be curious to know how such a curriculum works. I have dark suspicions that it would be difficult to implement in the US, because of existing d…

Error bars would be misleading, because this isn't a sampling error. These start with actual counts. The more important errors are systematic: the definitions of terms, the reporti…

Or at least, the tech-bro subset of the general population. It's possible that they're disproportionately vocal on HN, but I think overall it's a reasonably accurate presentation o…

But they didn't drown the government in a bathtub. They cut a bunch of tiny programs that they were ideologically opposed to, at a savings amounting to a rounding error. All of the…

Democracy is only ever choosing between two evils. You will never agree entirely with either candidate. In order to reach a majority, you will have to reach some kind of compromise…

It was a majority of voters. If you include all of the non-voters as tacitly consenting to it, then it's an overwhelming majority. That's not entirely accurate; quite a few non-vot…

No, we're not expecting someone else to stop it. We voted for this. The evil is not imposed on us. It is us. Not everyone, but a majority. The minority is looking for ways to stop …

As Republican commentator Bill Buckley put it, "A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop." The rest of the quote is actually about how it's meant to give …

You can always tell a director who does do their own storyboards. The film is always visually bats**. In a good way. I'm looking at you, Guillermo del Toro.

It's kinda the reverse. The ones with the most motivation to get crypto rolling are the ones seeking to circumvent the law. For most people, even in the best case crypto is breakev…

Depends on what "low mass" means. An earth-mass black hole lasts 10^50 years. A black hole the mass of Mount Everest lasts 10^21 years. Black holes on the order of metric tons woul…

I did at last see a Cybertruck carrying a thing. An easy chair, I think. I had never seen one with its bed cover off before. I wasn't certain that a Cybertruck could actually carry…

No, because "devaluation" means something different. Devaluation is about currency. Inflation is about consumer prices. Devaluation of the currency generally raises customer prices…

Headline buries the real lede. The thesis is that it proves the effectiveness of Modern Monetary Theory. Except that's not really news. We've been deficit-spending for decades, whi…

The Act is consistent with a legislative intent to target drag shows that are obscene for children, not drag shows writ large. True. But since drag shows that are "obscene for chil…

Sorry to hear that. Did you have a better reaction to the protein subunit vaccine (Novavax)?

In a lot of ways, the same happened in the Soviet Union. The poor farmers were never socialists. Socialism was imposed on them by upper-middle-class intellectuals. The poor farmers…

I don't like getting wrapped up in lexicography, but any meaningful definition of socialism has to include government ownership of the means of production. What the super-rich want…

That also includes self-described supporters of socialism, who almost always mean something closer to social democracy. They tend to point to places like Scandinavia, who are absol…

Except of course nobody is ever exonerated by that kind of investigation. If they find nothing of interest, they'll just insist that the incriminating information is elsewhere, and…

They even got the poles. It's pretty impressive that they managed that without anybody catching them at it. And without getting themselves caught on the cameras themselves. That mu…

I kinda barely understand that. I really appreciate you writing it. Thank you.