Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.

You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn’t ever actually in their field of view.

Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.

This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?

You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.

If Democrats hadn’t made a bunch of unnecessary and unforced errors, then we could blame it on the corpos and the Russians.

No, I’m relying on polls that actually poll people who voted for Biden but stayed home in 2024. Among those 19 million people, who exit polls would not capture, a full third of them cited Gaza as their reason for staying home.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/harris-gaza

And we’re not talking about a silent majority. We are however talking about a crucial slice of the base that Democrats need if they want any hope of winning a national election.

You’re thinking far too short-term in your economic analysis.

Imagine if everyone tomorrow just started pirating the works of the major video game and film studios. Will high quality movies simply stop being made?

Of course not. There are many ways to structure a film industry. Why are films made by big for-profit companies in the first place? Market conditions have simply allowed for that consolidation. But if we change those market conditions through targeted mass piracy, the current major studio model will disappear in favor of other organizational structures.

Why can’t films be made by collaborations of various worker co-ops? You could have an actor’s co-op, a videographers guild, an employee-owned animation studio, etc. And they could all come together to collaborate on projects for a share of the total profits. Or hell, there’s nothing preventing even a major film studio from being entirely employee-owned.

If everyone stopped buying things from the giants, then the film industry wouldn’t disappear; it would adjust. Companies would become smaller as the “evil megacorp” model became unprofitable. And more space would open up for more distributed production models and for employee-owned businesses.

Your vision and imagination are ultimately simply far too limited.

If the movie is good, you should support it by making a donation to the strike fund of the unions that represent the artists that actually create the movies. You can support artists without supporting the amoral companies that produce these works.

I decided on my moral beliefs on piracy back during the days of Kazaa and Limewire. Back then the RIAA was shaking down teenagers, threatening them with statutory liabilities of a quarter million dollars per song, simply because the law allowed it. They would threaten low-income families with lawsuits in the millions and get them to settle for a still-ridiculous settlement of few thousand dollars. Even the settlements were far in excess of the full retail cost of purchasing these songs.

I decided then that if the law allows this kind of thing, then copyright law as it exists now is fundamentally immoral. And immoral laws are not worthy of respect.

I mostly take a pragmatic approach to copyright. Whether I pay for something is a combination of the quality of the work, the reputation of the company selling it, the customer service provided by the legitimate product, the probability of getting caught for violating copyright law, etc. An indie publisher that treats their people well? I’ll buy it. Mass market schlock made by criminally underpaid artists for rent-seeking megacorps? I’ll pirate that all day, every day.

But morality literally plays no part in it. I learned long ago that copyright law exists outside of the realm of morality. The decision to buy or pirate is an entirely practical one; morality simply isn’t a factor.

Meanwhile, your morality is just the bandwagon effect.

And you don’t see the glaring obvious problem with relying on EXIT POLLS, when the primary cause Kamala lost was because a substantial portion of Biden’s voter base simply stayed home?

Politically supporting Palestine is a terrible move for either party outside the Dearborn area in Michigan. There isn’t a relevant mass of people that actually care

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I honestly wonder if at this point, candidates would be better off pursuing progressive legislation by running a Republicans.

Ideological purity doesn’t matter worth a shit to Republicans. See Republican voters loving the ACA while hating Obamacare. The party that is supposedly pro free market now openly endorses tariffs and regulation on business to advance a host of culture war bugbears. Republicans are not libertarians; the base especially isn’t ideologically opposed to government programs.

I could see a progressive running for the Republican nomination, a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt. And since the Republicans have become the party of the working class, while Democrats are the party of lawyers and big business, the attack lines write themselves. “Democrats are in bed with the insurance industry!” “Democrats want to pick your pocket instead of giving you healthcare!” “Democrats can’t pass a health plan without lining the pockets of their donors!”

The Republican party has proven itself to be much more susceptible to disruption from outside charismatic figures. The Republican base has far more control over the Republican party than the Democratic base does of the Democratic party. In 2016, the establishment Republicans tried to shoot Trump down, but their base overpowered them, and Trump took over the party. Bernie tried the same thing in 2016 and 2020, but the DNC was far more powerful and able to resist this outside takeover.

I really think that now may be the time for a return of progressive Republicans in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt. Promise to fix healthcare and break up big businesses left and right. Throw a bone to the right by promising to exclude illegal immigrants from the healthcare law (which they would never be eligible for anyway.) Hell, you could even write it so it didn’t exclude coverage for abortion and trans healthcare. If someone points that out, just lie and say that your plan does include these exclusions. It’s not like the truth on such things matters anymore. Sell it in simple terms the common man can understand.

I really do wonder if at this point, progressive candidates might gain more traction by running as Republicans. The Republican party is not ideologically libertarian, and it has proven far more receptive to outsiders and new ideas than the Democratic party.

That’s why you only cap rents on buildings that have existed for some time.

Businesses do not plan for 30 years or more in the future. If landlords can’t make an acceptable rate of return within 30 years, they’re not going to build a new house or apartment building.

So you can attach rent control provisions to buildings that are over a few decades old, and it will have zero impact on the financing and construction of new housing. It will only affect buildings after they’ve long since been built and paid for.

You do have to worry about rent controls discouraging landlords from keeping buildings maintained. But that’s why good rent control doesn’t cap rent, but simply limit the rate of increase. If a landlord can afford to keep a building maintained today, they will be able to keep it maintained in the future, even if rent increases are capped to the rate of inflation.

If anything, smart rent controls like this actually encourage the construction of new housing. By limiting rent increases on old buildings, you encourage landlords to knock them down and replace them with bigger and newer buildings that can be rented at any rate. In unregulated markets, landlords can increase profits by colluding to suppress the construction of new housing stock. Why invest the money in new buildings if you can just increase the rents on existing buildings by conspiring to prevent new buildings from being built? Smart rent controls mean that if landlords want to see their profits increase at any rate higher than inflation, then they will need to actually build new housing units.

A few conservative pundits attacked it from the “undeserving” angle. The actual base didn’t give a damn. The actual base thought it was a useless and tone-deaf figleaf of a policy. It was a wonkish policy only a milquetoast centrist could love - a market subsidy that had a long litany of provisos and qualifications. And one that economists stated would just serve to bid house prices up even higher.

The voters didn’t reject progressive wealth redistribution. They rejected half-baked meaningless gestures.

He lost in 2020 because of a coordinated campaign to get all the centrist candidates except Joe Biden to drop out, while Warren stayed in as a progressive candidate against Bernie.

They did this precisely because he was on track to win the popular vote among the Democratic base. No candidate was set to win a majority of the popular vote, but Bernie was looking at a clear plurality.

Bernie WAS winning the popular vote until the DNC deliberately prevented him from doing so.

When I die, I want to be turned into a drone.

It’s a travesty that his inauguration will coincide with MLK Day.

Many will say that World War Three cannot happen, that nuclear weapons will prevent it. However, this assumes that World War Three has to be global thermonuclear war, rather than some repeat of the previous world wars.

Cities don’t have to be leveled for nations to fight a world war. The US fought two world wars, and we never had our cities and infrastructure decimated. What I can imagine is a future world war where all the major players fight the war in the same way the US fought the two previous wars. Both sides contribute massive resources, adopt wartime economies, throw their whole populations behind the effort etc, but at no point do the various combatants directly attack the main territory and population centers of the other side. You could have a conflict where both sides lost millions of troops fighting it out in some third party territory, but the nukes never fly as all sides realize that invading the home territory of the others is suicide.

It’s actually an open legal question. Actual legal scholars have argued both ways on it. Yes, there is was a deadline in the act Congress passed to send the amendment out for ratification. But the key is that they didn’t include that deadline language in the text of the amendment itself. Some other amendments have language in the text of the amendment that places a deadline on ratification. That is the crucial difference here.

A good argument can be made that Congress can only propose an amendment or not. They can’t attach a bunch of extra provisos to the amendment process. Congress can’t confirm a justice to the court and apply a bunch of conditions to that confirmation. If they want to have a time limit on the ratification of the amendment, the time limit should be in the actual text of the amendment itself.

Potash for quota I need. But no potash have I. However, tungsten I have. Is anyone I can I trade tungsten for potash?

Read a damn stats book. Jesus Wept! This could literally be a question on a sophomore-level undergrad stats class, and you would fail that question.

Do you even know how to do an ANOVA?