Things to investigate, what am I missing?:

1. His brother’s admission that they fraudulently used their student visas to start businesses, and if he didn’t admit it on his naturalization application, then that’s grounds for denaturalization.
2. Election fraud related to his promises to pay for votes, and other suspicious statements.
3. Countless privacy, data security and other laws violated at DOGE.
4. His associations with Jeffrey Epstein.
5. Use of his controlling power at his companies to benefit himself and defraud investors.
6. Lies to the NHTSA and consumers about the capabilities and safety claims about Tesla cars.
7. Illicit preferences and treatment for his companies as corrupt payment for funding the GOP electoral machine.

That’s in 4 minutes off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s more. Hakeem Jeffries, you can have that list for free to start with - or, hey, better yet, let’s get someone else who actually will take some action to lead the House.

Yeah, that would be something.

I think the forecasts are useful thought experiments, but it seems if you dig deep enough in the methodologies, eventually you always get to a priori premises and assumptions that can’t be supported except by intuition. It would be helpful for there to be a graphic map of those methodologies with “here be dragons” to denote when we’ve stopped using data. In any case, I’m holding onto some hope for this election despite those forecasts, but guarding it like a caveman would a fire.

Well, the Supreme Court said money is speech, so I guess they think so.

Sorry, I keep forgetting - the right process is, imagine the worst possible pay package that Musk could realistically get, and then add a zero.

Yup, because they’re still losing hundreds of dollars for every dollar spent. Their economics still rely on a delusion that the hardware outlay is a fixed cost that can be recovered after model training by selling cheaper compute. Instead, models continue to be released not only to match competition, but because models still do not do a fraction of what they are promised and being sold to do. So capital costs are not fixed.

So AI hyperscalers have a lose/lose/lose/lose choice of either growing at a rate that requires unsustainable subsidies, stopping growth and admitting models can’t do what they and a thousand other startups have been selling them for, charging actual costs, or any combination of the three.

If people were charged anything near the actual costs, much less with a profit margin, demand would implode fast enough to create a sonic boom.

Let me guess, a merger helps Musk hit profitability targets that adds another few hundred billion to his total compensation, while increasing his control?

Very interesting, thanks. Boy, the difference between their polling and forecast is pretty stark. They are giving huge incumbency advantages to existing GOP senate seats, for example. Polling is D53-R47, and forecast is D48-R52, a 5-seat chamber control swing.

I don’t know if that makes them more or less credible. GOP has outperformed in the past, and I’m very wary of vibes-based expectations, but Maine for example has Collins winning despite (1) their own average polling showing Jackson up by 2.7%, and three of four recent polls by 4%; (2) the last Senate seat going democratic; (3) the last presidential election going democratic; (4) the last governorship going democratic.

Makes it it feel like their forecasting formula is putting a pretty big thumb on the scale, but then again, every time I’ve allowed myself optimism in the last 10 years of elections, I’ve been disappointed.

I’ve started using FiftyPlusOne for polling aggregation. It’s a spiritual successor to 538, but if anyone has a better option, glad to be informed:

https://fiftyplusone.news/

Honestly surprising. I guess David Ellison figured Trump doesn’t watch cable anyway since he never seems to meltdown at Stewart’s shows, and with polls like they are, maybe he’s keeping his “just kidding left, I was on your side all along” options open in case the GOP won’t actually be able to fulfill their promise of a permanent corrupt oligarchy that the Ellisons have been betting on till now.

Got it.

Well, just trying to get the benefit of your experience, so let me ask a different way: my impression is that Taki Udon overpromised, teasing the SSO as an OoB console-like experience, but - while that isn’t ready yet - right now for the money it seems like a good and cheap MISTer with some future potential. Would you disagree with that assessment?

Have you used it since they released the new UI layer? Is MISTer any easier to set up?

I bought the SSO and haven’t opened it yet, waiting for the software to not be a full-time project, so I’m not asking snidely. I just thought it was essentially a full-fledged MISTer for a cheap price and as a bonus has a few bells & whistles and a nice hardware shell, and also that MISTer is at least as unfriendly to set up. So I’m confused.

In the end I agree, it can’t be enforced, but if it helps:

Trademark protects source indicators, for specific goods and services, so a phrase isn’t simply trademarkable or not on its own, it depends on what it is relating to.

There’s different levels of protectibility as well - but “generic” is a higher bar. If something is just “descriptive” then it’s really just describing the goods or services. Those can’t be trademarked unless there is “secondary meaning” which is established consumer association with using that phrase for a good or service. There’s also “suggestive” marks, which are less direct than descriptive, “arbitrary” marks which are words applied to unlike goods and services, and “fanciful” (edit: correction) marks which are totally made up words. All that goes in order of protectibility.

Basically, Crowder shouldn’t (IMHO) have gotten this mark for debate products/services, because it’s descriptive to what debate is. Somehow he did without the USPTO fighting back. Maybe USPTO was overworked and it slipped by.

Ultimately, though, an infringement would only succeed if another party used it in a way that caused confusion over the source/endorsement. Crowder would have to show people saw them say “change my mind” on CNN and thought Crowder was involved. If it was in the title of the show, a huge slim maybe. But in the full show, in a debate, with someone saying “change my mind,” it’s absurd to think Crowder has a case.

I looked it up as well, already has a Section 8 and 15 declaration and no clear limitation based on the prosecution history. Which is kind of crazy since “change my mind” in a debate context and using trademark terminology is at least suggestive, but much more rightly descriptive (which should not be registrable without pre-establishing secondary meaning).

Even if he has a registration, using it within the debate itself and if the debate was not called “Change My Mind” means there’s no real chance of Crowder winning. He’s just doing #rightwingthings, using lawfare to try to hurt opponents when they can’t win with arguments and moral high ground.

I’m glad the article mentions Tony Schwartz. The exhaustive 2016 New Yorker article had plenty of details from the Art of the Deal (ghost)writer, and explained how that book created the myth of Donald Trump’s business competence. It also appeared more than early enough for anyone literate to know he was a conman before he was first elected.

But more than that, it made clear that Trump had nothing at all to do with writing the book.

It took Schwartz a little more than a year to write “The Art of the Deal.” In the spring of 1987, he sent the manuscript to Trump, who returned it to him shortly afterward. There were a few red marks made with a fat-tipped Magic Marker, most of which deleted criticisms that Trump had made of powerful individuals he no longer wanted to offend, such as Lee Iacocca. Otherwise, Schwartz says, Trump changed almost nothing. […] Howard Kaminsky, the former Random House head, laughed and said, “Trump didn’t write a postcard for us!”

Yes, in the future being created for us, 95% of jobs will be janitors mopping up AI slop.

Frankly, I think we all have a bad manager inside of us, and the problem is that being put in a manager position exposes you to humanity-draining incentives that feed the bad manager parts of you, until it defines you. Higher compensation and promotions for focusing on costs and not quality, and short-term gains rather than long-term stability.

If you’re unusually self-aware and smart, and put effort into grounding yourself, you may counteract it, but most people probably just float through life and let those incentives define them and their choices.

Trump has been openly laughed at to his face by rooms full of world leaders at multiple UN speeches, so we’re on our way. But I’m all for more.

They have reasonably positive policy, they just are as usual terrible at explaining activity.

The Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act had quite a bit of green incentives for regular people, and it created widespread solar and non-fossil-fuel home improvements that did (in my area at least) translate to a lot of green tech being installed, not just on-paper policy.

The GOP and Trump especially are irrationally hostile to green tech, and there are plenty of examples why they’re materially worse - paying again just to cancel an already-paid-for wind farm project for example.

So this isn’t really a “both sides suck” problem. One side has a slightly positive policy that could be a lot better. One side is in a psychotic delusional fugue and actively trying to destroy the planet.

Measuring voters’ expectations (versus their intentions) of control of the House and Senate. I’m sure this would have value in a larger study of propaganda effects, but am I missing some value directly relative to the election? Maybe as part of a study to see if expectations correlated to turnout?

Zuckerberg is the AI paperclip hypothetical, but for consuming private information.