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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I think Gene Sharp characterized it nicely in his essay, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. Notably, this essay has been cited as a major influence on the Arab Spring uprisings, so it’s especially relevant to the Syrian protests.

    Whatever the merits of the violent option, however, one point is clear. By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. The dictators are equipped to apply violence overwhelmingly. However long or briefly these democrats can continue, eventually the harsh military realities usually become inescapable. The dictators almost always have superiority in military hardware, ammunition, transportation, and the size of military forces. Despite bravery, the democrats are (almost always) no match.

    One additional point, he was adamant about the distinction between nonviolence and pacifism. For him, violence has to be on the table, but as a last resort. As the quote indicates, violence is where you’re at the biggest disadvantage, so why would you start there?


  • The biggest issue is water, and it would be difficult for them if they lose access to the Colorado River. Currently, only 10% of the river’s flow reaches Mexico, so it’s not unreasonable to believe that California would be in trouble if they don’t secure control of the upper basin. In any case, it would make for a complicated legal battle between an independent California, the United States, and Mexico.


  • You can read more about the scam they were referring to from Colonel Parker’s Wikipedia article.

    Presley had been showing signs of rebellion against Parker, and Parker believed that a stint in the Army would cure him of this. Parker was looking ahead when he persuaded Presley to become a soldier. Presley had wanted to join Special Services, allowing him the opportunity to perform while at the same time getting a more leisurely ride than other soldiers. Parker, on the other hand, was fully aware that any particular treatment given to Presley would instantly be used against him in the media and by those who disliked his style of music. If Presley could show the world that he was treated the same as any other young man, Parker told him, then more people would accept him and his music. Parker was also afraid that any attempt to block Presley from being drafted would result in a more detailed look into Parker’s own service record. He also realized that it would be an excellent opportunity to promote Presley by having the media witness his induction day, including the army haircut that would see the shearing of Presley’s iconic hairstyle.

    While Presley served in West Germany, Parker appeared to be in complete control, but he was worried about the outside influences that Presley might encounter there. Parker had declined to travel to Europe to visit Presley, denying that he spoke any language other than English. He sent Presley’s friends to keep him company, arranged for business associates to watch over him while working in Europe, and maintained regular contact with him. He was reportedly afraid that Presley would realize that other managers were prepared to sign contracts that did not require as much as 25% of his earnings.


  • I’m not an expert in the Bible, but I don’t think it really ascribes omnipotency to God. I think it’s better to understand it as God being able to do all that can be done. So He may have limitations, but they are such that no other being can do something that He is unable to do.

    From that sense, He is not able to save humanity freely, but he can set forth a process through which He can achieve this goal with some cost. I.e., He can create a divine being (that is either Himself in whole, Himself in part, or a direct descendant of Himself depending on your interpretation) that is able to spread His message and display an act of extreme self-sacrifice.

    I don’t really understand exactly what the sacrifice did or what needed to be fixed, but I do think the stories make a lot more sense if you accept that God has some limitations. For instance, I assume that Noah’s flood was his first attempt to fix the problem (by killing everybody except for the most righteous of His creation), but it failed because He can’t do everything and doesn’t know everything. And the story of Jesus was His next attempt to sort things out.

    But that’s just me thinking about them as fictional stories that really need to be edited rather than a divine and infallible truth.




  • There’s no need to be fair here. Insulin is absolutely essential for diabetics, and the head of the FDA trying to proclaim that cooking classes are a viable alternative is nonsense. For type 1 diabetics, no amount of healthy eating is going to get their body to produce insulin. For type 2 diabetics, it is possible to eventually get to a point where you can be stable without insulin, but not for everybody and not right away. Insulin treatment is the only way to survive with diabetes for an extended period of time, and the focus needs to be on ensuring that insulin is both affordable and accessible.

    Yes, there are things to improve in our food supply, but don’t let that distract from how egregiously insane his comments are about diabetes.




  • It has already metastasized in his bones, so it’s much more aggressive than most prostate cancers. After metastasizing there, three 5-year survival rate is about 33% with a median survival time of 21 months. But it’s also very rare for it to have already spread elsewhere before being caught, so I’m assuming that means that this is even more aggressive than normal and that 21 months would be optimistic. But I’m not a medical professional, so I can’t say how valid this assumption is.


  • Are you not aware of the different forms of English? There are several differences between American English and British English, “spelled” and “spelt” being one example.

    Collins and Merriam-Webster are both American English dictionaries, and the Oxford English Dictionary is a British English dictionary.




  • I think a better example for you to follow would be how “a napron” turned into “an apron.”

    However, I’m not a fan of “noone” as it doesn’t look like it would be pronounced as “no one.” It could perhaps be “no-one” or “noöne”, but they seem off as well. And very few people use umlauts in English to signify that the two consecutive vowels are separate sounds (The New Yorker is the only publicaton that I know about that does this, but I’m not sure if they stopped).


  • I was finally playing around with it for some coding stuff. At first, I was playing around with building the starts of a chess engine, and it did ok for a quick and dirty implementation. It was cool that it could create a zip file with the project files that it was generating, but it couldn’t populate it with some of the earlier prompts. Overall, it didn’t seem that worthwhile for me (as an experienced software engineer who doesn’t have issues starting projects).

    I then uploaded a file from a chess engine that I had already implemented and asked for a code review, and that went better. It identified two minor bugs and was able to explain what the code did. It was also able to generate some other code to make use of this class. When I asked if there were some existing projects that I could have referenced instead of writing this myself, it pointed out a couple others and explained the ways they differed. For code review, it seemed like a useful tool.

    I then asked it for help with a math problem that I had been working on related to a different project. It came up with a way to solve it using dynamic programming, and then I asked it to work through a few examples. At one point, it returned numbers that were far too large, so I asked about how many cases were excluded by the rules. In the response, it showed a realization that something was incorrect, so it gave a new version of the code that corrected the issue. For this one, it was interesting to see it correct its mistake, but it ultimately still relied on me catching it.


  • The WI Supreme Court consists of 7 justices who are elected to a 10 year term in a “nonpartisan” (though definitely partisan) election. They are the highest appellate court in state law and deal with issues related to the state constitution. Their decisions can be appealed to a federal court if it is in conflict with the federal Constitution, but otherwise, it would be the last court of appeal.

    Of particular note are cases dealing with electoral law and districting. Wisconsin has been considered the most gerrymandered state in the union since about 2010, and it’s led to situations where Republicans secured a supermajority in the assembly despite receiving a minority of the votes. The right-leaning Supreme Court dismissed challenges to these maps and allowed Republicans to enact laws that entrenched their power in the state (such as unfair electoral maps, restrictive voter ID laws, and removing powers from the governor after a Democrat was elected). Swinging the Court to the left is seen as the best hope of restoring fairness to our elections.