Trump has a history of using resource cutoff as a bargaining or coercive tool. hes doing it with Minnesota right now with the scandal and has done it with NYC. control over oil flows to European allies or other allies and adversaries gives his tactic more reach.
he did plateau, but he did achieve superstar status. people who achieve less still do “retirement” tours (to pay the bills) and book large crowds decades later.
to further this point. a lot about writing is style. editors sometimes smother the style in the name of grammar, conventions, or correctness, inoffensiveness. sometimes the incorrectness is the entire point, and the editor erases the incorrectness not realizing it was intentional.
ive heard of many professions complain about their version of “editors” from comedians, to video producers, and radio jockies.
Eh. You can have a very comfortable career doing work that still lets you look at yourself in the mirror. You don’t have to choose to burn the world to pay the rent.
Not in this case. If you’re qualified to get a job at a company who will pay you to sell out your neighbor, you’re qualified to get a job with a decent boss who’ll never ask you do to do this kind of thing, pays 90% as much, and is still many times the national average salary.
The alternatives are not doing evil vs starving. They’re getting paid well for doing evil, or getting paid well for doing good or at least neutral.
also another addition: i previously tried to upload an image for chatgpt to edit and it was incapable under the previous model i tried. Now its able to change uploaded images using o4mini.
i vaguely remember reading an article about solving the correlation between quantum decoherence and scaling of qubit numbers. i dont understand quantum computers so take it with a grain of salt.
but here’s what perplexity says:
“Exponential Error Reduction: Willow demonstrates a scalable quantum error correction method, achieving an exponential reduction in error rates as the number of qubits increases125. This is crucial because qubits are prone to errors due to their sensitivity to environmental factors25.
”
My migraines have been with me for ten years now and they have slowly evolved their symptoms and triggers. Started off more as typical migraines that happened every other day, though i had head issues everyday. it later evolved to neck pain, jaw pain, temple numbness, throbbing headaches, inability to think or process things. lots of cooccurring head symptoms include feeling of blood pulsing.
visited countless medical people, most offered no real solutions or relief.
only consistent insight, temperature baths for my head reduced at least tthe superficial symptoms but not the cognitive symptoms, the superficial symptoms seemed to be aggravated by sleep. the cognitive symptoms correlated to hard processing and thinking, straining the brain.
but the detriment to my life made it hard balancing work and responsibilities. worse is the symptoms are debilitating at times and invisible, good luck getting sympathy or understanding from other people with that being the case. im homeless cause its better to not have repsonsibilities and control how much i strain my brain than deal with the headaches daily and worse.
this whole ordeal makes you realize how limited the medical profession is.
Manhattan is great to be homeless in. free food available every couple of blocks, lots of social services. can sleep in hospitals, on the subway or elsewhere. good free transportation in the form of the subway. subways not a bad place to sleep, certain comedians did it getting started in new york. I do it.
cold isnt a big problem if u know what ur doing. during the summers u can spend all day at the beach and that makes up for it.
spend the day at the library working on the computer. police and security are relatively lax so long as you know how to blend in, some homeless people are less socially adept and dont take care of themselves so they are magnets for reprisals in a manner of speaking.
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If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg:
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Forgive me if i misinterpret you.
But i think theirs three relevant perspectives here whereof two and a half disagree with your points that americans dont punish people down on their luck.
first perspective is the common american sympathetic or not to homeless and their perspective on penal code. then 2nd, theres reactive use and enforcement of code, which is the main punishment for homelessness. and third is the figurative cognitive behavior modifiers but instead of being therapists they are american rulers who want subjects to behave in a certain manner ( more on that at the end).
first perspective is divided into two camps i think. empathetic yes lets not punish homelessness, lets help them out. they seem to have more influence in liberal states. then theres the “lazy bum” castigators, like trump said or would say. no sympathy, get a job types.
2nd perspective matters more because homelessness in-effect criminalized if police enforce laws and the laws are sufficient to cause more than a minor inconvenience to the homeless. Most states technically have all types of laws to put homeless people in jail, but in certain states and certain contexts do homelessness get more aggressively targeted and thus punished. its in the form of no body wants to deal with homeless people where they hang out at (nimbyism) so they have police remove them however the police are instructed and allowed to do, which might be making and enforcing laws incidentally target behavior homeless are more likely to do but everyone does like loitering.
3rd perspective is more conjecture but is based on academic documented equivalent cases in french and british colonies (found in david graebers writings) and extrapolated to say that people who make the laws in america must think like cognitive behaviorists specifically to wielding the threat of homelessness as a tool to modify the populations behavior to their agendas. this is conjecture but not unreasonable, and its substantiated.
But places in America do penalize homelessness if not intentionally implicitly. examples include hostile archtecture, no sitting rules in transportation hubs, sleep police in new york, and consequences for being, acting, or appearing homeless in various municipalities which sometimes results in jail.
People get jailed/locked up when they are a physical danger to those around them. The reason jails are the way they are is not so much to punish the inmates but far more relevantly, to protect them from one another. As it turns out, unfortunately, much of the supposed problem with the really long term homeless is that, rightly or wrongly, they are perceived as a physical threat to others. So, even assuming the best possible intentions on your part, whatever place you put the homeless is going to look a lot like jail.
This was a valid perspective in the 1960s - jobs grew on trees, most people who didn't have a job just didn't want a job. Some people built that perspective in the 1960s, and then never updated it despite jobs no longer growing on trees.
