301–310 of 400 posts
Why are all the articles about Beto about how cool and antiestablishment he is? Just absolutely nothing about what he really intends to do, how he intends to do it, and most importantly, how do we reconcile his conservative voting record with this contrary image he presents?
I don’t believe this. The GOP is desperate to discredit him because he puts Texas into play a couple years early. This smells like a weak hit job. I’m not sold as Beto as the candidate but this is a weak meme. 2/10 be best.
If Beto had an R after his name instead of a D, you’d hear he was boarding-school-attending judge’s son who dodged serious charges for the DUI & burglary, used eminent domain to gentrify poor Latino neighborhoods & married into a billionaire’s family. https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/brace-yourse...
He's nice and all, but can we go back to electing Presidents who have had lots of executive and political experience ?
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You should; lack of moderate voices in primaries only helps fringe candidates.
Exactly; this is why we frequently get such lousy candidates winning in the primaries, who then go to the general election for everyone to vote on.
Since when hacker news promotes political threads?
He named his BBS "TacoLand". He should definitely play up this angle...maybe campaign on a taco cart on every corner. I know people who will vote for him for that alone. This piece is a disaster. It's an excerpt from a soon to be released book, it's light on facts about O'Rourke and is at least equally about Cult of the Dead Cow, it's trying to make things sound more nefarious than they were, and it's playing the gui…
>it's trying to make things sound more nefarious than they were, and it's playing the guilt by association card Are we reading the same article? If anything this article seems like a submarine PR puff piece to me, made to increase the image of Beto by making him seem "cool" and "hip" by associating him with the typically-seen-as-sexy "hacker" scene. This article is very similar to the pro-Beto stuff that was all over…
Isn't this the guy who wants to dissolve the border between Texas and Mexico? Jesus. Here's the difference borders make: check out Nogales Mexico vs. Nogales Arizona - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/travel/nogales-arizona-me... It's not race or genetics or even culture. It's the institutions separated by country borders that let almost otherwise identical cities have radically different outcomes.
Hey, I may have missed something -- do you have a cite for the claim that he wants to dissolve the border?
google it, there's a video.
So what? If anything all this does is show that being an old school hacker doesn't prevent you from becoming an ineffectual small-r-republican with a donkey pin https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/21/18150359/...
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"Imminent lawless action" is the current constitutional standard.
That seems to be about incitement, do that apply to technical documentation? As described above, instructions to build a nuclear bomb, to take an extreme example, are restricted, but surely not on that basis.
Here's some instructions to build a nuclear bomb, right off the top of my head:
1. Take a mass of U-235 about half the critical mass of U-235 and shape it into a rod.
2. Take another equal mass of U-235 and form it into a hollow cylinder, into which the rod will fit. DO NOT PUT THE MASSES OF URANIUM TOGETHER!
3. Put some kind of inert material between the two masses of uranium to keep them separated, and also to keep the rod lined up with the center of the cylinder. Place the separated uranium in a tight cylinder with room left on top of the rod.
4. Put a charge on top of the cylinder, behind the rod. Connect the fuse for this charge to whatever detonation mechanism you like--igniting this charge will also ignite the bomb.
You might say, "hey, that's cheating! Where do you get all that U-235 in the first place?". You're right, that is a hard problem. The entire US managed to scrape together enough U-235 for one of these bombs and just dropped it on Hiroshima completely untested because getting U-235 is a pain in the ass.
Instead, you'll want to have concentric shells of plutonium that implode together into a critical mass with the use of shape charges. Plutonium isn't even a naturally occurring element, but it's still easier to get than U-235. The shape charges are a little harder to figure out (this is one of many things John von Neumann is known for) but enough of it has been documented that it can't be that hard to work out. This is the design of the bombs tested at Trinity and later dropped on Nagasaki.
So, yeah. Some details of specific, advanced nuclear bomb designs are restricted, but largely because the information is currently classified and virtually everybody with that information works in a government position where the laws surrounding classified information and the non-proliferation treaty are binding to them personally. Also, actually putting the information into practice requires lots and lots of hard, large-scale work to get enough fissile material in the first place. I'm pretty sure the physics and engineering faculty of the average American university could build working nuclear bombs if they had unlimited budgets and resources, it's just that once you start trying to refine weapons-grade plutonium, it's kind of obvious and then someone from the Department of Energy shows up and confiscates all your plutonium and you probably end up on some sort of watchlist somewhere.
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>> what he really intends to do Doesn't matter to his voting base. See e.g. Obama. Obama did very little of what he promised in the first term, got re-elected anyway (heck, even I voted for the guy). But unlike Obama, Beto is not going to be the president, not after losing the race to one of the least likeable candidates in his own state, and not with a DWI on his criminal record.
Cruz is only unlikable in the liberal bubble, most Texans approve of him and he still only won by < 3 in a state Trump won by 9 and Romney won by 15.
> he still only won by won by 9 and Romney won by 15