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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023


  • No, of course not. If Harris loses, there is a basically 0% chance of anyone other than Trump winning. But that doesn’t matter, because this stupid waste of a paywall didn’t even address the actual numbers, just some poll that doesn’t say anything about actual voter habits.

    What this stupidly worded title seems to imply is the spoiler effect, where a third party candidate may receive enough votes to change the winner of the election. To be clear, this is only possible because Trump is the main threat to Harris: if she were already ahead by 100 electoral votes, the spoiler effect would be impossible. But as it stands today, the odds of a third party candidate actually affecting this election are less than 1%, so no, Jill Stein and Bear Head Kennedy are not going to have any measurable effect on the election results.




  • Gattaca was taking a lot of license for the sake of the movie. A lot of diseases are multifactorial and while genes might play a role, they’re not the only factor and often not even the main factor. The movie ignored things like epigenetics, early life exposures, lifestyle, age, sex, and just plain variance that are all factors that can play into chronic diseases.

    That being said, allowing parents to make decisions based on genetic testing isn’t itself eugenics. Eugenics is a top-level idea revolving around the idea of improving the quality of human genetics as a whole. And that requires an institutional judgement of what are good quality genes and bad quality genes, which necessitates us saying some people are better quality than others and opens up the door to racism/homophobia/transphobia/ableism/etc. Eugenics is always bad, while personal medical decisions based on genetics can be reasonable.




  • It’s because modern conservatives are less concerned about facts.

    Republicans claim climate change is a hoax; the reality is that climate change is already causing measurable damage around the planet.

    Republicans claim Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats; the reality is they aren’t.

    Republicans claim Democrats want to abort newborn infants. The reality is this is illegal everywhere.

    Republicans claim illegal immigration and crime area crisis. Reality is the numbers are actually trending down.

    Republicans claim supply side economics worse. Reality is that supply side economics does not work and Democratic presidents perform better on every economic measure.

    Republicans have recently claimed that schools are doing trans surgeries on kids without their parents’ permission and immigrants have a direct phone line to Kamala Harris in exchange for illegal votes. Reality is that those are too stupid to garner a serious response.

    So yeah, reality happens to have a liberal bias when conservatives are trying to out-stupid each other.



  • Yeah, in 2016 and 2020 polls underestimated Trump voters. Pollsters know he has voters who aren’t reflected in polls, and they’re consciously trying to account for it.

    But I’m hopeful that this year it’s the opposite, that polls are underestimating Harris support. Young voters, or even women in conservative families who say they’re voting for Trump, but deep down want Harris to win.








  • Dpkg is the low level tool for Debian packages.

    Apt-get is the original frontend for dpkg. It is a full featured tool that lets the user give commands to dpkg, along with apt-cache, which displays information to the user.

    Apt is a high level tool for user friendliness. It combines some features from apt-get and apt-cache, as well as adds progress bars and other quality of life features. It also strips down some features the average user doesn’t use.

    So neither is a wrapper for the other. They are two similar tools that do the same job. Apt-get is better for scripting due to being a more rigid tool while apt is nicer for end users.


  • Sure you can!

    Get a coin, and flip it 100 times. Record each time it lands on heads/tails.

    Now get a devout believer, and have the believer continuously say devout prayers petitioning God to make the coin read heads. Then, flip the coin 100 times, and record heads/tails.

    Do statistical analysis to see whether there is a statistically significant difference between the control group and the prayer group. Pretty easy to verify if true.