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But when you try to imagine how it could be split up there are all kinds of problems. e.g., obviously CA + NY makes sense plus some large cities(e.g., Chicago). It all seems untenable w/o excessive relocation a la Stalin.

Truly splitting up the USA would require a war and that's more trouble than its worth in most peoples' opinions: I've kinda grown fond of letting my neighbor's kid cut the lawn for $25, even though he is a Democrat.

Now, OTOH, spinning off a state or two is within reach: e.g., giving CA and NY their independence would be fine with me. But then that's just me!8-))


The loss of jobs and transfer of production abroad was driven by the widespread introduction of MBA degrees and consequent recognition of how offshoring could increase profits plus simple capitalistic greed. All politically implemented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the greediest and most powerful of the capitalistic organizations in the USA.

Now, with Dems in control, USCoC is back in the driver's seat:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/4/chamber-comm...

Move the boot factory to China and profit!


If you had written your entire comment without the "No" at the beginning I would be nodding my head in agreement with you. Instead I'll ask: do you think the "MBAs" operated/operate in a vacuum devoid of government oversight/regulation or do you think they were/are aided and abetted by said overseers/regulators?

Maybe they were storming the capitol because they thought the ghost of Jack Welch was in there.


The government should have investigated it. The media have poor access to voting procedures and ballots and are unable to properly investigate. They can only question.

The Stalin misquote is difficult to deny: "It doesn't matter how people vote as long as [those in power] count the votes."

Also few, if any, election results were truly audited.

There was undeniably fraud. E.g., in Pennsylvania mail-in ballots had mismatched signatures, ballots were accepted beyond the law's limiting dates, ballots with no date were accepted, etc.The fraud was committed by Democratic-party supporting voters, judges and local voting officials.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/12/07/mark-l...

Mail-in ballots are an invitation to fraud and now that the Democrats got away with it bigtime in 2020 the floodgates will open in 2022 and 2024 producing a flood of fraudulent mail-in votes in other states where Dems will do their best to pass and modify (by legislative fiat or court order) similar mail-in voting laws.

The sitting president simply told it like it was.


> The government should have investigated it.

Governments did investigate it. That's what an election audit is.

The presidential election in Georgia is a good example of this. Georgia's election result from November was counted three times over. Georgia is confident the result is correct.

Nevertheless, Trump attempted to get the government of Georgia to commit election fraud for him. He wanted them to "find" an extra 11,780 votes for him.

Listen to the full one hour of Trump's phone call on the 2nd of January to Georgia's secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for yourself:

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/04/politics/donald-trump-geo...

Luckily for America, the government of Georgia stood up to Trump's attempt at election fraud and did not go along with it.

> The sitting president simply told it like it was

No. He has done nothing but lie to you.


> Georgia's election result from November was counted three times over. Georgia is confident the result is correct.

> Nevertheless, Trump attempted to get the government of Georgia to commit election fraud for him. He wanted them to "find" an extra 11,780 votes for him.

Not quite true - that's the misleading summary people have been spreading, started by an out-of-context clip of the conversation. He wasn't trying to find extra votes, he was trying to find and validate votes which he believed could add up to 11,780 disqualified. Just re-counting the votes does not do this, those ballots would simply have been counted each time.

Two of the relevant quotes from the transcript:

> You had out-of-state voters. They voted in Georgia but they were from out of state, of 4,925. You had absentee ballots sent to vacant, they were absentee ballots sent to vacant addresses. They had nothing on them about addresses, that's 2,326.

> The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.


> Not quite true - that's the misleading summary people have been spreading, started by an out-of-context clip of the conversation.

It's not out of context. Listen to the full hour of the phone call. Trump is told repeatedly his claims are false.


Whether or not he was told his claims are false, I quoted some of the missing context in my comment above. That context is why the shorter clip and summary of the conversation was misleading and wrong.


It's not misleading and it's not wrong. He made his goal clear. Listen to the full one hour of the phone call.


Please read my comments, I read the transcript. There's a link to it from your link. Unless you're saying CNN is outright making stuff up?


The article includes the phone call. Listen to the full one hour. You're making excuses for him that he doesn't deserve.


He won’t listen to this, he’ll make up some excuses of it being out of context.


To those who downvoted, was I wrong? He straight up ignored it.


If only Trump had you as a lawyer, your airtight evidence could’ve been brought to court.


Did my comment break some guideline? If you find it problematic, please reply and explain to me what’s wrong instead of downvoting. I would greatly appreciate it, thank you.


Did my comment break some guideline?

"If only Trump had you as a lawyer" crosses both the personal attack and snark lines, especially with your other comment guiding interpretation.

I'm just a bystander who likes to hang out here, but FWIW here are the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I see. I guess I should have just stated that no actual evidence has stood up in the court of law by Trump’s legal team that has the most incentive to show such damning evidence. What’s crazy to me is that this community is more welcoming to wild conspiracy and misinformation stated politely than a less than kind refutation.


I think it would be nice to have a consolidated resource to link when someone raises a specific allegation of fraud, that contains a list of the arguments, court cases, and counterarguments. I chose to go on a partial media blackout in 2020 so the only things I've seen about the issue are some mathematical rebuttals on YouTube, whatever I see here on HN, and whatever I hear from my conservative friends.

It's likely some people are acting in bad faith, but many more just haven't seen convincing enough counterevidence to counteract what they've heard from "the other side". If we flag their posts so it's not even visible to most users and impossible to reply to, then it's impossible to have that conversation and we are just proving their claims of censorship and a lack of evidence.

I think it would help to have a summary essay, not attached to any news outlet, that simply listed the publicized claims of fraud (like this claim that mail-in voting is fraudulent), who benefits and loses (democrats are more likely to mail in ballots especially in 2020, so discrediting mail-in voting favors republicans), what evidence exists, what counterarguments invalidate the allegations, and whether the alleged fraud was sizable enough to sway the election. Boring and emotionless, like a spreadsheet.


These people don’t listen to facts. They argue that the election results should be in favor of trump and that it was stolen and fraudulent. At the same time they insist that all of the Republican wins are perfectly valid. There’s no logic or evidence behind their beliefs that is grounded in reality. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. Especially not with something as emotionally lifeless as a spreadsheet. That won’t change anyone’s mind who has been primed by their conspiracy bubbles and outrage machines


The world isn't made up of "these people" or "those people", it's made up of varied individuals -- friends, families, and neighbors. When one is using "those" kinds of phrases, it's pretty clear that one is thinking of stereotypes, and not individuals. One would be rightly excoriated for saying "these people" to refer to a race or an orientation, and the same should be true for a culture or a party.


So I can’t say “these people” when referring to the ones who stormed the capitol or support that treasonous act because they wrongly believe the election was stolen? Is that really just as bad as referring to black people as “these people?”

Either way that’s besides the point, I wish I had your optimism but I doubt you’ll convince anyone who is dug in and truly believes trump won this election. If you do please let me know and I’ll apologize fervently to your friends and neighbors.


As soon as the media got away from reporting "Who, What, When, Where, Why and How" the whole system fell apart.

Today every newscaster wants to project his personality onto the news and the results are deadly. We need an AI that strips news down to the 5W's+H and makes it available.


"We need an AI" is the worst possible suggestion, considering it's social media revenue maximization algorithms that got us to this stage.


Recommendation algorithms are completely unrelated to summarization algorithms.


> Recommendation algorithms are completely unrelated to summarization algorithms.

They can however be as dangerous, for example:

> Recommendation algorithms are summarization algorithms


Its bad reasoning to shoot the messenger even when its a bot!


I have never heard of any true historical proof of the existence of Jesus whatsoever. No eyewitness accounts, no Roman accounts, no Jewish accounts, etc.

And to top it off, his story ends with him rising from the dead!8-))


It’s hard to be sure of anything that happened so long ago, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence, and scholars almost universally agree that there was at least a person by that name doing things in the area at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of... are two good places to start.


Anecdotal evidence? Two thousand years later? "Consider the source!"


The evidence which I described as ‘anecdotal’ starts a mere twenty or thirty years after Jesus’s death, and comes from sources who didn’t have any particular interest in promoting the Christian agenda. It seems that I may be unlikely to convince you, but if you’ve already got a strong opinion on this it might help to come at it from the other direction and start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory#No_independ... first.

Personally, I don’t really think it matters much either way (the events of a few decades being much less influential than the following two millennia of activities by people who did believe he existed), so I default to taking the word of people who’ve actually studied the matter in depth; but as he was one of several Roman-era Messiah claimants wandering around (we know of at least two others, and there were probably more whose names never made it into the histories we have) it seems reasonable that the group which happened to catch on would have also originally coalesced around an actual person.


You can be easily disabused of this ignorant view by reading the wikipedia page for the historicity of jesus. Jesus mysticism is a fringe, crackpot view in historical scholarship. People adopt it because it suits their priors not because it has the weight of literally any scholarship or investigation behind it. It is , simply put, a ridiculous proposal in the light of what is known about the NT.


My understanding (from reading a book called "who wrote the Bible") is scholars generally agree Jesus existed, but out of the 5 main objective criteria for "did a character exist", he only satisfies 3 of the 5. IIRC, the fact that he plays so prominently in modern life acts as an effect size: in the 3 categories he can be confirmed, he is off the charts.

So it is generally accepted he existed, even if the criteria used to judge other historical characters is loosened for JC.

Edit - but please try to not say things like "ignorant" or "disabused" unless you meant to attack OP. Those are pretty loaded words for a collegial discussion.


Even bart erhman has published in his hostoricity


Existence of historical Jesus has been well established. First century Jewish historian Josephus and Roman historian Tacitus wrote about him... For eyewitness, you can find first person account in the New Testaments.


> First century Jewish historian Josephus

Two mentions. One is almost certainly fabricated, or at least heavily rewritten by later Christians.

> For eyewitness, you can find first person account in the New Testaments.

The Gospels aren't first person accounts. The closest you get to first person accounts of Jesus in the NT are brief mentions of Paul's conversion experiences in his epistles. The Gospels probably draw on first person accounts to some extent, but they themselves aren't first person accounts.

There's a very strong case to be made for the historicity of Jesus, but you make a misleading one by leaving out some very important context regarding Josephus and mischaracterizing the accounts of Jesus in the NT.


> No eyewitness accounts, no Roman accounts, no Jewish accounts, etc.

debate the authenticity all you want, but what exactly do you think the new testament is?


The criteria with which you dismiss the historical Jesus is also applicable to any other historical figure of antiquity. By your measure, no one without a photograph, video, or audio recording can be counted as anything other than a myth. The historical Jesus is very real (as is His Divinity, but that is beyond the scope of this response).


Jesus is ahistorical - no documents, no records. Everything about him written long after he died.

In contrast Pontius Pilate is historical - there are extant documents with his name and title.

Simply b/c Pontius Pilate was real doesn't mean Jesus Christ was real. And it certainly doesn't mean he rose from the dead!


themodelplumber says> "And this guy was a _master_ at a certain language starting with the letter P...

Prolog?

What a shame he couldn't use his best language! It has such nice web frameworks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages#...


I imagine you're joking? More likely Perl, it was a big web language back in the day. Smaller chance that it was Pascal.


Actually php is more likely than either of those.


"ELM" = "Extreme Learning Machine" is apparently heavily based upon previous work, if not outright plagiarism. The Wikipedia article on ELM discusses this only briefly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_learning_machine#Contr...

Yann LeCun' opinion on ELM: 'What's so great about "Extreme Learning Machines"?':

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/34u0go/yan...

A sort-of "How-to plagiarize successfully" guide including "Easy but Proven 5 Steps to Academic Fame" with Huang's work as a gleaming example:

https://elmorigin.wixsite.com/originofelm

Two very detailed plagiarism analyses of two of Huang's papers. They are quite sarcastic, funny and enlightening:

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/5256f1_ac3a0f6b08524a3ca6101d...

And finally, as one poster says, the provenance of "Deep Learning" itself has some controversy:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_Extreme_Learning_machi...

"But, just recently I also found that there is also a problem with the inventorship of Deep Learning. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.htm... For this, I post a question for discussing these issues. https://www.researchgate.net/post/Any_enlightment_on_the_ori... https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/5256f1_556b42c00d0d4d5bb199fb...


As much as people dislike Schumidhuber for being bit of a curmudgeon, his contributions have been undermined in the Deep Learning community at large. He did not deserve to be shafted for the Turing award.

His contributions were as impressive as the other 3, and a lot of it was done in isolation away from the support of the NA AI/ML community.


"Smart guns" in the form of the Magna-Trigger Conversion have been available for decades:

http://gunssavelives.net/gear/smart-guns-have-been-available...

From the article:

"Magna-Trigger conversion is a custom process in which a magnetic piece is placed in the gun, preventing it from firing unless the user is also wearing a magnetic ring. Despite the simplicity in this system, it never really caught on for one simple reason. Generally people want their defensive firearms to be as simple as possible. Simple, well machined firearms make for reliable firearms."

BTW what responsible manufacturer would sell a gun that might not shoot when you need it to? That's a lawsuit-in-waiting for manufacturers. Depending on the local political beliefs, a gun that _would_ shoot under the circumstances is _also_ a lawsuit_in_waiting! So "smart guns" are a lose-lose situation for gun manufacturers.

And when a "smart gun" mechanism fails (say, due to low battery) should it allow _anyone_ to shoot it)? That's what I would want but I think others would want a gun to be disarmed under such circumstances.

Imagine being raped/robbed/killed b/c your gun has a low battery! [the Magna-Trigger system requires no batteries]


The tricky part is getting someone to store their gun with less care than they store their ring.

Rings are also not unique to each gun.

If any of these technologies worked reliably, law enforcement would be all over it, because (1) perps couldn't take officers' guns and use them and (2) the politicians who make the purchase authorizations would love to claim credit.


Learn Prolog - everything else is an extension.

"One [language] to rule them all."


The great thing about Prolog is that it's so radically different, without being intentionally difficult or obscure.

There's not that much value in learning yet another imperative object oriented language. If you want to put the field of programming into perspective, Prolog is even more alien than Haskell.


O'Rourke has a broken mind that money cannot fix:

"Buff My Balls": Beto O'Rourke Wrote Creepy Poems; Joined Old School "Slaughterhouse" Hacker Group

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-15/buff-my-balls-beto...


Thanks for giving me more reasons to vote for him, I find creative writing to be an interesting form of art.


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