As a native English speaker, "I'll have a large small fries" pretty clearly means a large quantity of small type fries to me. It's the kind of thing you'd say sort of jokingly, but I don't think anyone would really struggle with understanding it.
I question your info hygiene if it's led you to a position where you think it's likely there won't be elections in three years. Obviously there will be elections, and either you know there will be as well and are being needlessly inflammatory or have a wildly uncalibrated view of the world.
You technically have a point, even Russia has elections. But that doesn’t matter because they are just for show.
In US you generally gerrymander to the max or throw all sorts of road blocks to discourage voter participation, but we might also see more physical harassment going forward, both for voters and poll workers.
I think the "mineral rights" deal might play into this. In the full interview[0], Trump mentions it right off the bat, and talks about how it "means we're going to be inside".
I think it goes in tandem with your number (3). Like you say, why would Russia not violate the agreement? I think maybe the move is "well now we have citizens in there working so don't blow us up". It's one thing for Russia to attack the Ukraine, but another if they have collateral damage that takes out Americans.
I don't even know how valuable the actual underlying resources are, so much as a bit of "kayfabe" between the Ukraine, US, and Russia, that things are different.
Zelenekys issue with that plan is the lack of guarantees, because of what happened the last time. He believes Russia will restrengthen faster than his country and when interest wanes, comes right back.
Trumps issue is he knows the lack of guarantees is a better deal for the US because we gain much and risk nothing. He wants to make a deal and get credit, i dont think he really cares what happens after. Maybe he does, i wish that to be the case. But i dont believe it.
The reality is there can't be guarantees only temporary peace. If the deal fails, Russia won't attack mineral deposits owned by US. US would probably send troops to "protect" US resources.
Right, on its face this is simply more of the "drain the swamp" rhetoric from his first term. The way the EO is written sounds "fine" to my high school civics ears: there's three branches of government, one is the executive branch, and ostensibly the president is the head of that branch.
The motivation of the EO was clearly articulated all throughout the campaign that, as you say, even within the executive branch there's a large swath of career bureaucrats who kind of do their own thing. And so if the people vote for something else, there's kind of a limit to what any new administration can actually accomplish. Arguably, this is by design and provides valuable stability, but I think you have to at least acknowledge that it's there, and people aren't crazy for noticing it and trying to change that if the career bureaucrats aren't actually on their side.
I thought Trump was laughably ineffective his first time around. I chalked it up to all the Russia Manchurian Candidate stuff and Trump's constant flailing and hiring and firing of staff. But I'm wondering now how much of it really was this large bureaucracy in the executive branch not really moving in step with the new administration, which is interesting to me. I think there was a JD Vance interview (maybe with Ross Douthat in NYTimes?) where he says people throw around "constitutional crisis" a lot, but that he felt we were already in one because Trump was asking the generals stuff about troops in Afghanistan and they weren't answering.
I know people here are primed to read the worst into everything, and there's some seriously apocalyptic predictions in this discussion. But my first impression is that the EO reads fairly mundanely and is meant to sound like it's addressing the "hostile bureaucracy" situation that folks on the right have been talking about for years. I guess we'll see in a couple years, how it all plays out. I wish people predicted stuff more and then looked back to calibrate themselves based on the results.
> The way the EO is written sounds "fine" to my high school civics ears: there's three branches of government, one is the executive branch, and ostensibly the president is the head of that branch.
Then maybe you need to get an understanding of human organizations in general and the US government in particular that goes beyond your high school civics days.
The president has no power or authority to interpret the law, not beyond the implicit power of every citizen to interpret the law for themsleves. The president has the power and authority to execute the law as written, mostly by appointing other people to do so in specific areas. The power to choose those specific people is already huge, directing their every move is neither needed nor desirable.
There are literally tens of thousands of laws, if not hundreds of thousands (when including regulations and binding court precedents) that need to be followed by the federal government. The president simply can't be an authority on all of them, it's not even remotely close to humanly possible.
Not to mention, very tight, military-style control is a a horrible feature. The President may get to command the army, but they are not commander-in-chief of the executive branch, civilian agencies don't and mustn't work that way. Government employees must uphold the law, and fulfill the role of their position. If they're not following the law, they should be fired, and a court may get involved to reach this conclusion. The president doesn't get to dictate what the law is and fire government employees who are upholding the law instead of the president's interpretation of the law.
My prediction was that Trump would abandon the Ukrainians and suck up to Putin, and as of today that's right on target. This calibration exercise is not reassuring at all.
You could ask "Is Putin more like Hitler or is Putin more like Ho Chi Minh?"
Putin does not try to hide the fact that he wants to restore the Russian empire and reconquer the former soviet bloc - a group of peoples who want nothing to do with him.
Ho Chi Minh wanted an independent Vietnam, got it, and never really expanded from there.
We either help the Ukranians stop Putin now or we fight a much bigger fight later. Hitler could have easily been stopped at the Rhineland, or at Czechoslovakia. But instead we got "Peace for our time".
I was there around that time, too, as an undergrad doing a UROP with Karger. It was truly a wonderful time.
That said, my favorite memory of the time is a little more low brow. One time I was waiting outside one of the single occupancy bathrooms in CSAIL for my turn to do my business. After a minute, who should come out but Tim Berners Lee himself. We carefully avoided looking at each other, as one does in this situation, and I went in and sat down.
The seat was warm! I remember sitting there grinning like an idiot thinking that my cheeks were being comforted by the residual heat of those of the creator of the world wide web.
In a similar low brow vein, I once took a wizz next to RMS in the old LCS building. When we were washing hands he tried to talk me into contributing to OpenJDK because we had previously talk a bit about a Java project I was working on for my UROP.
Karger's Randomized Algorithms class remains the only class I ever dropped at MIT. Still have PTSD from the psets for that class. Although I might have made it if it weren't for the fact that I was taking Compilers that semester, and 2 out of the 4 people in my group dropped the class. So my friend Dave and I basically had to do double the work for the final compiler implementation project.
I disagree. Absolute pitch is a neurological phenomenon. People who have it experience the world differently. It's not a party trick like you're talking about here to name a note in isolation.
There's a fascinating phenomenon known as the Stroop effect[0], where if you get people to read a series of color words (e.g. "purple blue green red"), where the words are colored, but in the wrong color, it slows them down quite a bit. This was used to identify Soviet spies by showing them colors written in Russian; native Russian readers were slowed by the incorrect coloring, people who didn't know Russian could read it quickly.
Well, the Stroop effect applies to music notes, too! People with absolute pitch are impaired from reading a sequence of note names when a non-matching pitch is played at the same time. People without AP can read it just fine.
People with true absolute pitch can't help but know immediately and automatically what note a sound has. It taps into the language center of the brain. Does your song trick give you such an overwhelming sense of the note, that if someone played a different note it would be noticeable and distracting enough that you can't read a simple word or music note on the page?
No, you've misunderstood. What people with perfect pitch are doing is a fast and more fluent version of what the other commenter describes. They may not experience or describe it that way but it's an area of interest for a lot of people and the research is clear.
> can't help but know immediately and automatically what note a sound has
Well, and what note does a sound have? What is "a note?" Is it just a name for a specific frequency? Then why enharmonics. Is that D a little flat, or are you just tuned to A 442? Oh actually we're in 24TET over here, that's simply a quarter tone.
Sound is just a sound, you need other context to make a note. To infer a note from a pitch, someone (with perfect pitch or not) knows already or is assuming a lot of context that makes that work.
But that context isn't universal, and if it has changed they'll need to find out how and adapt to it. The fact that they can adapt is because there's no universal mapping from frequencies to notes, either in their mind or anywhere.
Having (a) talked with acquaintances who have absolute/perfect pitch (b) read a fair bit of research (c) practiced the “trick” under discussion (d) had a brief mid-adolescent period where I experienced tones as having an extra layer of color/personality that was definitely distinct from note memory, everything points me toward the idea that it’s a different way of experiencing the sound itself. Like the difference between “they all look the same to me” vs frequencies having faces you recognized or if numbers came with fixed colors. Honestly the experienced part was a bit jarring and I think that’s part of why it didn’t take.
> This was used to identify Soviet spies by showing them colors written in Russian; native Russian readers were slowed by the incorrect coloring, people who didn't know Russian could read it quickly.
Hold up, I’m confused. How could people who didn’t know Russian read them at all? There’s probably something obvious I’m missing, but I just can’t parse this at all.
I think the idea is that you're reading out the color of the printed word, not the word itself (despite the fact that the word is the name of a different color).
So you might have, in a red font, the word "blue", followed by the word "green" in yellow letters. The correct response is to say out loud "red, yellow". This is hard to do when the words are in your native language. So if the words are in Russian, it's an easier task for someone who doesn't read that language, because they aren't distracted by the meaning of the word and can just see the colors.
Yes. And btw that is what naturally happens after about age 40, together with presbyopia. So real absolute pitch people stop enjoying listening to music at some point... it is a curse, not a gift!
More difficult. Also little people affected, so not much research going there, and most important, is just a nuisance, not a problem like not being able to see.
No. I think a lot of people would notice. Especially string players.
A lot of orchestra musicians don't like listening to recordings that deviate too much from their preferred concert pitch. I don't like listening to British or American recording where a equals 440 or some old German ones at 445-446. That is less than 20 cents.
Yep. There's so much ignorance around this topic it's kind of insane. I have no idea why so many people have such a vested interest in absolute pitch being something magical instead of a learned skill.
I've spent a lot of time with musical people, and it's very clear that it functions similarly to a foreign language: it's a learned skill that is easiest to pick up in childhood. Like distinguishing /r/ and /l/, if you start young you can do it, if you start late it may always be difficult.
Why we would assume that it functions differently is beyond me.
I made the exact same language comparison in another reply. Learning a foreign language after the age of 9 means you most certainly never will sound like a native speaker. I think perfect pitch is the same. But if you have something that is functionality perfect pitch, why is it not perfect pitch?
> Why we would assume that it functions differently is beyond me.
The cognitive bias to put some people on a pedestal and worship them for being extraordinary. The perceived rareness and specialness of absolute pitch.
Ah, bummer. Looks like it might be a factoid. I can't find it confirmed anywhere. This discussion[0] quotes a textbook giving the story, but says "whose veracity we cannot vouch". I forget where I heard it, and I took it for granted because it was interesting and made sense, but maybe it never happened.
I think people who (still) support him don't think it was a sieg heil, and just chalk it up as an awkward gesture.
Personally, I can't imagine why he would throw one, so a priori it seems like an unlikely gesture, though I admit it's strange what he does in the video I saw.
The most awkward part of it is the beginning of the gesture where he clutches his chest like he's having a heart attack. I've tried searching for what a sieg heil actually looks like and had a hard time finding videos on YouTube, but I don't think grabbing the chest is part of it, right? Can someone clarify what the gesture really is? The couple I saw from Hitler were just a swift raising of the hand from the waist.
An "awkward gesture" that has no other meaning in western culture. Which he made twice. It's not something you can do by accident.
> I can't imagine why he would throw one
That's pretty naive. He's a white south african who recently said that Germany's furthest-right party should "get over" being guilty about what the nazis did.
There are countless memes online showing pictures of other famous people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortwz doing similar things.
Anyway, even if it was a nazi salute, what would that even imply about him other than the childish edgelord aspect which is already well publicized? That he wants to gas the jews?
Still pictures though, right? Not actual videos of someone making the full gesture twice in a row.
What would it imply about him? He’s now a quasi-governmental figure aligning himself to the far right. He’s messaging to others on the far right that the federal government will tolerate them. Doing so will embolden them to take action.
> He’s messaging to others on the far right that the federal government will tolerate them. Doing so will embolden them to take action.
Well that's definitely more plausible than the antisemitism...
That said? Musk is exceptionally bad at understanding how his words and actions will be perceived and seems to make no effort to send correct signals. While also being a frequent troll who likes raising his middle finger to the "woke".
It being a big "fuck you" seems far more in keeping with his character than it being a subtle Machiavellian communication.
It appears it is something one can do by accident; Musk did. We seem to have here an accusation by insinuation that Musk is adhering to an ideology which he clearly does not hold. It isn't obvious what the anti-Muskians want done about this. It puts me in mind of when people were calling Trump a liar while he was on campaign - apparently unaware that he was running for political office! I suppose in the end when Mexico didn't pay for the wall they felt a sense of vindication.
I can understand partisan politics, but this is just sillyness. Can there at least be actionable accusations made?
Faulty logic that presupposes Musk made a nazi salute by accident to then evidence that as proof that one can do so by accident.
As for his ideology; Musk boosts many far right comments and addressed a rally of the German far-right AfD party, just before Holocaust Remembrance Day, telling them that Germany should get over "past guilt."
Both his grandfathers were proudly outspoken pro-apartheid, antisemitic public figures. It's how he was raised.
Are you suggesting the Germans shouldn't get over their past guilt? Everyone reasonable moved past that more than 50 years ago. I know some Germans; if they don't want to feel guilt over the Nazis that is healthy. Germany should not be defined by the Nazis. It wasn't this century, it wasn't these Germans and the circumstances today are unrecognisable compared to 1930s from an ideological perspective.
> Both his grandfathers were proudly outspoken pro-apartheid, antisemitic public figures. It's how he was raised.
Oh well then. Extending his arm straight didn't reach me, but racist grandparents? Nazi confirmed, my bad, I'll go invest in Jew ovens. Now everyone can move on; no point anyone bringing it up again.
True. I'll get downvoted to oblivion, I guess, but anyone who says that's a nazi salute is either unironically retarded or extremely dishonest. I want nothing to do with either one of those kinds of people.
I was surprised to learn when living in Bahrain that what I knew of as the "Persian Gulf", is there known as the "Arabian Gulf". Only tangentially relevant, but kind of interesting.
rayiner is a lawyer, I believe with experience in and around DC and government agencies. I always appreciate his takes because they're often counter to call it the HN zeitgeist.
They're asking you to clarify your argument, obviously. You say some federal law has been broken, they're asking you to specify which federal law you claim has been broken. It isn't rocket science.
A lawyer would charge you a lot to explain this to you you know?
What he asked is not currently public. It will be made public during the hearing.
A US federal judge (Not some random guy) is acting in accordance with being aware of a federal crime. (It's actually many more than one judge and one crime but let's keep it simple)
I'm comfortable with trusting a US judges read on the situation a priori. You could argue that it will be overturned and thus nothing illegal happened, which would techbically be correct. All talk about this is hypothetical, especially here in the deep comment section of some website.
As I said, what are you going to do with this information?
So - this is a "gotcha" question, not asking for genuine clarification. As if random citizens should have an encyclopedic recall to all laws.
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