[-] frezik 1 points 10 minutes ago

I said a month ago that last minute endorsements don't count, and the window closes in mid-October. I see no reason to change this. Jefferies can get bent.

https://lemmy.world/post/36326117/19557020

[-] frezik 4 points 40 minutes ago

This works until private equity comes by and makes their trailer home just as expensive as any other home. Yes, this is a thing that is happening in the remaining trailer parks, because of course it is.

Capitalism is the best system.

[-] frezik 1 points 2 hours ago

How often did Republicans get a trifecta in the same time period? How does their policy agenda successes compare?

[-] frezik 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

What do you call a "victory" that took a lot of political capital and then accomplished basically nothing?

What did the straw ban do? It's certainly not reducing waste on its own in any significant way; if every single plastic straw was banned worldwide, its impact would still be tiny in comparison to the overall problem. There was a argument that it would get people to start thinking about how much waste is in their lives. That was six or seven years ago. None of that has come to pass, and I'd argue that it was obviously speculative even before anything took effect.

You can't change anything that matters with this nickel and dime policy shit. It is not even worth the effort to push it.

[-] frezik 2 points 3 hours ago

This is a good example of 1) it's easy to fool yourself with statistics, and 2) the solution is more mathematical nuance, not less.

[-] frezik 1 points 3 hours ago

Right, so you also don't know how peaceful protest works as a strategy.

[-] frezik 1 points 4 hours ago

You could have posted this exact message to other replies in this thread, but you choose this one. That's rather telling.

[-] frezik 3 points 6 hours ago

Sure it does. If government can focus on more than one thing, but there are limited success stories, what does that tell us?

[-] frezik 13 points 6 hours ago

Nah, he's just an idiot.

Strong, across the board tariffs are something that only Trump wanted. There were two dueling arguments in Project 2025 on this. One wanted the right-libertarian solution of no tariffs at all. The other wanted some tariffs raised on specific things. Neither wanted high tariffs on every country for everything.

It is a solution Trump has personally proposed for a long time, He thinks of himself as a unique economic genius; the only one who sees how tariffs could work. He doesn't consider at all that tariffs used to be a common solution and were abandoned as an economic tool by everyone for a reason. It can be a tool for international politics, but not economics.

[-] frezik 9 points 6 hours ago

The world security environment is deteriorating.

In part thanks to the Heritage Foundation.

Just, why? Why? We already have more nukes than anyone except Russia, and even that is just a number at this point. There is no deterrence gain for adding more. None. Even accepting deterrence arguments as valid, we already have far in excess of what's needed. At most, we need to swap some old cores.

This has been studied by several military experts over the years:

What was the "right" number? Given the subjective nature of the process, there can be no single figure. However, over the years, a number of knowledgeable individuals have tried to quantify a minimum nuclear requirement and it is worth considering the results of some of their efforts.

In 1957, Admiral Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations, estimated that 720 warheads aboard 45 Polaris submarines were sufficient to achieve deterrence. This figure took into account the fact that some weapons would not work and that some would be destroyed in a Soviet attack (Burke believed that just 232 warheads were required to destroy the Soviet Union). At the time Burke made this estimate, the U.S. arsenal already held six times as many warheads.

Several years later, in 1960, General Maxwell Taylor, former Army chief of staff and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that "a few hundred reliable and accurate missiles" (armed with a few hundred warheads) and supplemented by a small number of bombers was adequate to deter the Soviet Union. Yet by this time the United States had some 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads.

In 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" calculated that 400 "equivalent megatons" (megatons weighted to take into account the varying blast effects from warheads of different yields) would be enough to achieve Mutual Assured Destruction and destroy the Soviet Union as a functioning society. At that time, the U.S. arsenal contained 17,000 equivalent megatons, or 17 billion tons of TNT equivalent.

Even if we accept that we have to have these infernal things, we're at least an order of magnitude beyond what we actually need.

This is pure giveaway to nuclear military contractors.

[-] frezik 21 points 7 hours ago

I remember when disability rights groups pointed out that these laws were placing extra burden on disabled people that weren't being put on everyone else.

These laws accomplish nothing except make liberals feel good that they actually passed some kind of environmental rules. Meanwhile, conservatives are making sure they can legally torture gay kids, let billionaires get away with pedophilia, and burn lots and lots of coal. But we passed straw bans in a couple of cities. Yay us.

[-] frezik 7 points 7 hours ago

I don't think their buffalo sauce is better than any other generic buffalo sauce. Frank's is my go-to standard. You can get a bottle of Frank's anywhere for like three bucks. If you're not doing better than Frank's, what are you even doing?

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submitted 1 month ago by frezik to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Ada stretches her thumbs out (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 month ago by frezik to c/aww@lemmy.world
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submitted 3 months ago by frezik to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world

I think Super Mario Bros might have been the first. Might depend on what counts as a "platformer" or a "water level".

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frezik

joined 4 months ago