Voters in States where everybody assumes politicians are corrupt go on to vote for corrupt politicians
I started campaigning and immediately had people yelling at me. A lot of people like me, though. Odd.
we have a really strong "ballot measure" system for local politics, and very few ballot measure receive party-line votes
I'm going to need to look at this for Maryland. Our local politics are a mess. It's Democrat-held territory with a sense of strong party control, which is why everyone in the world is trying to break the Central Committee this election: the voters want control of their government again. We have an obscenely powerful executive, and need to make the Governor more like the President. We also have a weak legislature and don't do much with ballot initiatives.
Right now, we're going for a Democratic governor to replace Hogan, and a removal of some of our more egregious Democratic legislators like Senator Bobby Zirkin. I sent our largest newspaper an op-ed crushing Zirkin for bullshitting voters, lying to his constituents, and having no clue what he's doing with crime and corrections (besides, he's basically the biggest representative of the bail bond industry). Sheldon Laskin is going to put him in his place in June.
No, I don't form social attachments and have no capacity for emotional intimacy. I also don't have any sort of weird emotional attachment to money--it happens to be necessary to live here (like food and water), and more is useful--which has made me a poor fundraiser.
Or just a search history?
Full of probes at the Internet. I actually considered attending the Heritage Foundation's candidate training, but it looks boring; and when I checked out their page of stuff for it, I found very little in need of heavy analysis. They have economic solutions like "Social Security is destroying our economy with massive deficit!" instead of some kind of bizarro logic that tries to suggest the same thing in a way that would allow me to hunt for, point out, and rebuke the flawed reasoning. How utterly useless.
Oh well. I can still play the privatized unemployment card: we should give employers a discount on unemployment taxes (like, half) for any employees who are part of a union; pay the greater of 4 months or a total of 6 months of any unemployment period; and subsidize any union's unemployment benefit by 1/3 of the government unemployment benefit for up to 6 months of union unemployment. Because union members are more-likely to be re-employed, we should see unemployment periods shortened and unemployment costs drop, along with increased union participation. Less government in people's lives since unemployment is mainly privatized under this scheme.
I thought I heard protest, but it was just Paul Ryan swallowing his tongue.
We really need more heroes in Congress, like Senator Ron Wyden who both voted against FOSTA/SESTA (because it's stupid and makes the problem worse) andlost his shit at Christopher Wray for asking for backdoored encryption. Representatives with the integrity to stand for what's right even if it's a losing battle and politically unfavorable.
I'm hoping to see Rikki Vaughn replace Cardin this term; and I'm going for Elijah's seat, so there's that. We need legislation putting a stop to the overuse of powers in secret against our own citizens.
Executive Order 13526 was an important step for government transparency; and at some point, we have to work toward accepting manageable risk--allowing for that it may be slightly more-difficult to achieve a national security end goal, yet still not likely that an adversary will advance its campaign against the Nation--in order to protect the rights of our people. Yes, restricting what the NSA can pull from Facebook in total darkness and restricting the use of national security gag orders to clear and present dangers might telegraph things a bit and keep some enemies of the state circling at distance instead of sitting around while we purportedly close in on them; that's better than the State becoming the shadowed enemy of the people.
That line of argument actually doesn't hold very well. I could shoot myself in the head whenever I want; why would I, and how would I prove I would?
I've seen people go on and off things like alcohol and marijuana for years, and then get antagonized by the same reasoning when they drink socially or whatnot, as if you're addicted to something if you ever do it at any time in your life. "How would I prove I would?" is an interesting question in that frame.
It's been described to me as that a 250mg dose before bed will make you sleep like nothing else; and it'll work again 20-30 days later. You can do it twice in a row by taking 500mg the second time. People seem to get up to 5g/day to maintain the effects after only a few weeks of usage.
The withdrawal has been invariably described as a terrifying experience of feeling horrible and contemplating suicide.
A few people have been put on baclofen for medical detox. This hasn't happened very often, as you can taper phenibut. If you require medical assistance, you get baclofen, as it doesn't create drug craving or euphoria; Phenibut is considered similar to GHB in its effects.
A lot of stuff out there won't do this. Some of the stuff out there is actually phenomenal and safe. Other stuff out there is ineffective and dangerous.
Officially supporting cognitive enhancement is one of my smaller policy goals.
Right now, "nootropics" businesses slap the name on any unregulated drug they can manage. That includes extremely-addictive b-GABA receptor agonists like Phenibut. Bromantane might be fantastic; it also might increase risk of alzheimers. There's a drug from the 60s that was studied heavily by pharmaceutical researchers and determined to have pretty much no toxicity, no addictive nature, and a significant hypermnesic effect: the drug makes you learn fast as hell, with nearly double recall, by way of being a pretty selective dopamine drug (it cranks up dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex, but not the nucleus accumbens, or some such) and not a norepinephrine drug.
So we see some safe things, some extremely-harmful things, and some useful stuff.
All of this gets pushed on the streets as "this is good for you and will make you smart". That needs to stop. I fully support cognitive enhancement; I want these dangerous drugs off the street, and people to have the choice--real choice, with real controls to protect them, and not manipulative bullshit from unscrupulous profiteers--to pursue cognitive enhancement with reasonable and understood risk. Right now, you're just taking random drugs and hoping it's okay.
It's not that the drug may contain Fentanyl; it's that the drug may be an unregulated opioid (not Fentanyl, but still addictive--and yes, there is one), or something like Valium but ten times as addictive and tachyphylactic (Phenibut works about once a month unless you crank the dose way up; the withdrawal is horrifying). The "nootropic" trade uses strong self-regulation of purity standards as its primary defense against all accusation; the actual risks of the drugs, however, are downplayed.
Also: nootropic has a very specific definition; the industry uses the term "nootropic" to refer to cognitive enhancers which don't fit the definition at all, so much so that cocaine fits the common use of the term.
You can write USB HCI and Client devices on Atmel microcontrollers; whether you can make it function full-speed or completely is a different matter. You may need to do some screwy stuff to get power pins working (e.g. rigging up a digitally-controlled LM with a 3.3V or 12V feed).
You can get enough to say the protocol works (HCI driver). That won't cover the individual quirks of any particular chipset, only the spec itself.
A parallel bus uses a parallel data lane: an 8-pin parallel data lane sends one byte by sending 8 bits all at once, such that the single clock across all buses synchronizes all bits.
A multi-lane serial bus is sending data in packets, such that the data coming down any one lane is self-consistent. For example: bonded ethernet adapters send entire frames down each link, rather than spreading a frame out across multiple links in an alternation of bits.
That means any one lane is sending a complete signal, and any interference causing errors down another lane don't affect the unaffected lane (in parallel buses, an error in one line would affect the entire signal: if you send a packet and one line has noise, you get an erroneous packet--all of the data sent down all lines is erroneous, even though most lines are noise-free).
It really depends. Complex ester bonds are weaker than strong amine bonds; metallic bonds are even better. In general, simple molecules hold up under electrical pressure; complex molecules can break down more-readily. It's an entropy thing: if there's a lower energy state, kicking activation energy into something chaotically will cause it to move toward that lower energy state; and OLED screens aren't factories designed to generate and separate purified compounds, so you'll generally experience a build-up of impurities as large, complex molecules decay.
Polymer OLEDs don't have the lifespan of small molecule OLEDs.
In all honesty, you should see the Nordic Model of Social Democracy. I'm an odd one in the progressive camp: I push back against Bernie's Democratic Socialism.
Then consider: I'm planning to end all homelessness and hunger, provide universal healthcare and vocational education, achieve permanent full employment, and shorten the working hours; and I'm going to do it with half the tax rate of Nordic countries.
Yeah, but then you have to also provide an extra $5/hr of welfare, which has to be produced, which means somebody has to get paid, which means taxes and transfers, and you're back where you started. Welfare keeps an economy stable and maximizes economic wealth (when implemented properly), but it doesn't magic things out of the ether any more than a capacitor is a magical source of electricity from nowhere.
You think $1500 will get you a nice custom tailored suit.
Sure. I've seen the handiwork for an $1,100 suit and it's better than the $800 off-the-rack-and-tailored suit I'm wearing now. I'm not Mubarak.
You realize that government salaries aren't tax free? Politicians are scum, but they know that would be one grift too far.
Take-home is about $127,000. My current take-home is just under 45% of that. My mandatory household expenses (food, mortgage, utilities, etc.) are roughly 33% of my take-home income.
Eliminating my car loan and mortgage takes my mandatory household expenses down to 13% of my current income. With the Congressional salary, I can (barely) run my household with approximately 6% of said income, after resolving current inefficiencies. That would be extremely skimpy and would generally suck, of course.
As I said: I don't need all of this money. I'll have people tending my lawn and stuff pretty much immediately. The people of my neighborhood struggle to survive and are constantly seeking work; you'd be surprised at the stabilization effect even a small household chore has for families in that situation. What point is there in just holding onto it all?
While we're on the topic: why don't we tie the Congressional salary to three times the GNI-per-Capita? In 2016, that would have been $176,000. Strong, stable economies with a well-protected workforce--good social safety nets and a robust consumer class--maximize the economic wealth on a per-capita basis, and this maximization would lead to higher Congressional salaries. One might consider basing Congress's salary on their performance; but what about ensuring Congress's salary is a measurement of their performance?
I had a CRT like that. It worked. It was also fuzzy as hell--they degrade over time. The cheap 32-diagonal HDTV I bought is almost as old, and still quite clear--also, doesn't get fuzzy if line power is unconditioned (which had an impact on an old CRT, hence why I always had TV on UPS).
Slashdot Mirror
The desalinization filter removed them from the news feed.
Have you considered Social Democracy today? It works quite well in many nations.
Voters in States where everybody assumes politicians are corrupt go on to vote for corrupt politicians
I started campaigning and immediately had people yelling at me. A lot of people like me, though. Odd.
we have a really strong "ballot measure" system for local politics, and very few ballot measure receive party-line votes
I'm going to need to look at this for Maryland. Our local politics are a mess. It's Democrat-held territory with a sense of strong party control, which is why everyone in the world is trying to break the Central Committee this election: the voters want control of their government again. We have an obscenely powerful executive, and need to make the Governor more like the President. We also have a weak legislature and don't do much with ballot initiatives.
Right now, we're going for a Democratic governor to replace Hogan, and a removal of some of our more egregious Democratic legislators like Senator Bobby Zirkin. I sent our largest newspaper an op-ed crushing Zirkin for bullshitting voters, lying to his constituents, and having no clue what he's doing with crime and corrections (besides, he's basically the biggest representative of the bail bond industry). Sheldon Laskin is going to put him in his place in June.
You have a family to threaten, right?
No, I don't form social attachments and have no capacity for emotional intimacy. I also don't have any sort of weird emotional attachment to money--it happens to be necessary to live here (like food and water), and more is useful--which has made me a poor fundraiser.
Or just a search history?
Full of probes at the Internet. I actually considered attending the Heritage Foundation's candidate training, but it looks boring; and when I checked out their page of stuff for it, I found very little in need of heavy analysis. They have economic solutions like "Social Security is destroying our economy with massive deficit!" instead of some kind of bizarro logic that tries to suggest the same thing in a way that would allow me to hunt for, point out, and rebuke the flawed reasoning. How utterly useless.
Oh well. I can still play the privatized unemployment card: we should give employers a discount on unemployment taxes (like, half) for any employees who are part of a union; pay the greater of 4 months or a total of 6 months of any unemployment period; and subsidize any union's unemployment benefit by 1/3 of the government unemployment benefit for up to 6 months of union unemployment. Because union members are more-likely to be re-employed, we should see unemployment periods shortened and unemployment costs drop, along with increased union participation. Less government in people's lives since unemployment is mainly privatized under this scheme.
I thought I heard protest, but it was just Paul Ryan swallowing his tongue.
that won't be abused like an underage Congressional intern.
How exactly do you abuse an intern? They're not exactly treated as employees anyone intends to keep to begin with.
Why would they include encryption if they've been ordered to include an encryption back door?
We really need more heroes in Congress, like Senator Ron Wyden who both voted against FOSTA/SESTA (because it's stupid and makes the problem worse) and lost his shit at Christopher Wray for asking for backdoored encryption. Representatives with the integrity to stand for what's right even if it's a losing battle and politically unfavorable.
I'm hoping to see Rikki Vaughn replace Cardin this term; and I'm going for Elijah's seat, so there's that. We need legislation putting a stop to the overuse of powers in secret against our own citizens.
Executive Order 13526 was an important step for government transparency; and at some point, we have to work toward accepting manageable risk--allowing for that it may be slightly more-difficult to achieve a national security end goal, yet still not likely that an adversary will advance its campaign against the Nation--in order to protect the rights of our people. Yes, restricting what the NSA can pull from Facebook in total darkness and restricting the use of national security gag orders to clear and present dangers might telegraph things a bit and keep some enemies of the state circling at distance instead of sitting around while we purportedly close in on them; that's better than the State becoming the shadowed enemy of the people.
That line of argument actually doesn't hold very well. I could shoot myself in the head whenever I want; why would I, and how would I prove I would?
I've seen people go on and off things like alcohol and marijuana for years, and then get antagonized by the same reasoning when they drink socially or whatnot, as if you're addicted to something if you ever do it at any time in your life. "How would I prove I would?" is an interesting question in that frame.
Interesting. I got much different stories when I asked in nootropics forum, seeking a sleep aid.
It's been described to me as that a 250mg dose before bed will make you sleep like nothing else; and it'll work again 20-30 days later. You can do it twice in a row by taking 500mg the second time. People seem to get up to 5g/day to maintain the effects after only a few weeks of usage.
The withdrawal has been invariably described as a terrifying experience of feeling horrible and contemplating suicide.
A few people have been put on baclofen for medical detox. This hasn't happened very often, as you can taper phenibut. If you require medical assistance, you get baclofen, as it doesn't create drug craving or euphoria; Phenibut is considered similar to GHB in its effects.
A lot of stuff out there won't do this. Some of the stuff out there is actually phenomenal and safe. Other stuff out there is ineffective and dangerous.
Officially supporting cognitive enhancement is one of my smaller policy goals.
Right now, "nootropics" businesses slap the name on any unregulated drug they can manage. That includes extremely-addictive b-GABA receptor agonists like Phenibut. Bromantane might be fantastic; it also might increase risk of alzheimers. There's a drug from the 60s that was studied heavily by pharmaceutical researchers and determined to have pretty much no toxicity, no addictive nature, and a significant hypermnesic effect: the drug makes you learn fast as hell, with nearly double recall, by way of being a pretty selective dopamine drug (it cranks up dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex, but not the nucleus accumbens, or some such) and not a norepinephrine drug.
So we see some safe things, some extremely-harmful things, and some useful stuff.
All of this gets pushed on the streets as "this is good for you and will make you smart". That needs to stop. I fully support cognitive enhancement; I want these dangerous drugs off the street, and people to have the choice--real choice, with real controls to protect them, and not manipulative bullshit from unscrupulous profiteers--to pursue cognitive enhancement with reasonable and understood risk. Right now, you're just taking random drugs and hoping it's okay.
It's not that the drug may contain Fentanyl; it's that the drug may be an unregulated opioid (not Fentanyl, but still addictive--and yes, there is one), or something like Valium but ten times as addictive and tachyphylactic (Phenibut works about once a month unless you crank the dose way up; the withdrawal is horrifying). The "nootropic" trade uses strong self-regulation of purity standards as its primary defense against all accusation; the actual risks of the drugs, however, are downplayed.
Also: nootropic has a very specific definition; the industry uses the term "nootropic" to refer to cognitive enhancers which don't fit the definition at all, so much so that cocaine fits the common use of the term.
You can write USB HCI and Client devices on Atmel microcontrollers; whether you can make it function full-speed or completely is a different matter. You may need to do some screwy stuff to get power pins working (e.g. rigging up a digitally-controlled LM with a 3.3V or 12V feed).
You can get enough to say the protocol works (HCI driver). That won't cover the individual quirks of any particular chipset, only the spec itself.
Yes. You'd control it over an RS-232 port or a USB port.
Not really.
A parallel bus uses a parallel data lane: an 8-pin parallel data lane sends one byte by sending 8 bits all at once, such that the single clock across all buses synchronizes all bits.
A multi-lane serial bus is sending data in packets, such that the data coming down any one lane is self-consistent. For example: bonded ethernet adapters send entire frames down each link, rather than spreading a frame out across multiple links in an alternation of bits.
That means any one lane is sending a complete signal, and any interference causing errors down another lane don't affect the unaffected lane (in parallel buses, an error in one line would affect the entire signal: if you send a packet and one line has noise, you get an erroneous packet--all of the data sent down all lines is erroneous, even though most lines are noise-free).
Weird, huh?
You can write one using a $5 Arduino.
It really depends. Complex ester bonds are weaker than strong amine bonds; metallic bonds are even better. In general, simple molecules hold up under electrical pressure; complex molecules can break down more-readily. It's an entropy thing: if there's a lower energy state, kicking activation energy into something chaotically will cause it to move toward that lower energy state; and OLED screens aren't factories designed to generate and separate purified compounds, so you'll generally experience a build-up of impurities as large, complex molecules decay.
Polymer OLEDs don't have the lifespan of small molecule OLEDs.
Interesting.
In all honesty, you should see the Nordic Model of Social Democracy. I'm an odd one in the progressive camp: I push back against Bernie's Democratic Socialism.
Then consider: I'm planning to end all homelessness and hunger, provide universal healthcare and vocational education, achieve permanent full employment, and shorten the working hours; and I'm going to do it with half the tax rate of Nordic countries.
Go big or go home.
An LED-backed LCD will fall under the $600 mark; but OLED is a bigger beast to slay.
Heh. I had bad eyesight and never knew it: my brain was using oversampling to convert the fuzzy circles into letters and words.
Never bothered me; then again, I'm also playing on an i7 4790k with built-in 3D graphics, no external video card.
Yeah, but then you have to also provide an extra $5/hr of welfare, which has to be produced, which means somebody has to get paid, which means taxes and transfers, and you're back where you started. Welfare keeps an economy stable and maximizes economic wealth (when implemented properly), but it doesn't magic things out of the ether any more than a capacitor is a magical source of electricity from nowhere.
You think $1500 will get you a nice custom tailored suit.
Sure. I've seen the handiwork for an $1,100 suit and it's better than the $800 off-the-rack-and-tailored suit I'm wearing now. I'm not Mubarak.
You realize that government salaries aren't tax free? Politicians are scum, but they know that would be one grift too far.
Take-home is about $127,000. My current take-home is just under 45% of that. My mandatory household expenses (food, mortgage, utilities, etc.) are roughly 33% of my take-home income.
Eliminating my car loan and mortgage takes my mandatory household expenses down to 13% of my current income. With the Congressional salary, I can (barely) run my household with approximately 6% of said income, after resolving current inefficiencies. That would be extremely skimpy and would generally suck, of course.
As I said: I don't need all of this money. I'll have people tending my lawn and stuff pretty much immediately. The people of my neighborhood struggle to survive and are constantly seeking work; you'd be surprised at the stabilization effect even a small household chore has for families in that situation. What point is there in just holding onto it all?
While we're on the topic: why don't we tie the Congressional salary to three times the GNI-per-Capita? In 2016, that would have been $176,000. Strong, stable economies with a well-protected workforce--good social safety nets and a robust consumer class--maximize the economic wealth on a per-capita basis, and this maximization would lead to higher Congressional salaries. One might consider basing Congress's salary on their performance; but what about ensuring Congress's salary is a measurement of their performance?
With the new OLED displays with PenTile and even with multi-color pixels, how will you count the resolution?
I had a CRT like that. It worked. It was also fuzzy as hell--they degrade over time. The cheap 32-diagonal HDTV I bought is almost as old, and still quite clear--also, doesn't get fuzzy if line power is unconditioned (which had an impact on an old CRT, hence why I always had TV on UPS).