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Cake day: June 5th, 2024

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  • Some people are going to die-- mostly women. More people are going to have their lives turned upside-down, especially immigrants and ethnic and sexual minorities. Many immigrants, even legal ones, are going to be expelled. Corporations are going to run wild as regulation is abandoned. People are going to be bankrupted by predatory healthcare firms at a much higher rate than now. Every form of corporate pollution, adulteration, cheating and chicanery will be tolerated. The judiciary will be further corrupted. The US will not only withdraw from NATO, but will try to shut it down. Ukraine will be handed to Putin on a platter. Taiwan, the Baltics, Moldova and Poland will be left to fend for themselves. The ethnic cleansing in Gaza will transition even further to a full-scale genocide. Every aspect of government will be handed to corrupt, incompetent fanatics: kakistocracy all the way down. The impartiality of the civil service will be destroyed and the 19th-century spoils system reinstated. Social Security will be privatized and gutted. Obamacare will be eliminated. Congress will hold show trials of Trump’s perceived enemies. Terrorist acts and sabotage of critical infrastructure will massively increase, and the clampdowns that follow will be used to further degrade what few rights we still have.

    But at least you won’t have Kamala’s pantsuit to complain about.


  • They’ll kill off the filibuster as soon as it gets in their way. They don’t care about tradition or institutional continuity. And anyway, the Democrats seldom resort to the filibuster, they just bend over.

    Trump and Musk will have a power struggle within a few months. Trump hates the idea that someone’s richer than him, and will want to humiliate him. Trump will dump RFK Jr too, as soon as Jr gets more publicity than Trump. What will be semi-permanent are the careerist shitstains like the Speaker, the God-botherers with their crusade against women, and the anti-immigrant scum.





  • There’s some theory and computer science behind parts. The value of peer review is evidence-backed. The idea that dev teams should self-organize is consistent with some varieties of management theory. Retros have been shown to have value, though the way they’re often done in Agile teams I’ve worked in has left much to be desired. Estimation with dimensionless points has zero evidential backing. The notion that the team should be able to set dates rather than having milestones imposed by management is, at best, woefully naive, since it presupposes a commitment by management that, in real life, few managers are willing to make. And in most cases where the shit has hit the fan, we later find that we needed more analysis, more planning and more design up front, rather than less. There are only certain application domains where you can get away with being as minimalist with those disciplines as Agile exponents claim you should be.



  • he was wrong about it being necessary to destroy capitalism before this happened

    I thought it was more that (using modern terminology) he viewed socialism as an emergent phenomenon that would arise due to the unresolved contradictions within capitalism. So socialism doesn’t require the destruction of capitalism in order to start, it’s more that once it emerges, it’ll supersede capitalism. The Leninist approach of destroying the old order, then building the new one at gunpoint didn’t work all that well (to vastly understate), leading to a long period of totalitarian state capitalism, where workers had no control over the means of production (which is the main attribute Marx ascribes to socialism) and degeneration into nationalism, imperialist nostalgia and cronyism.

    But so far, along with failed revolutions hijacked by totalitarians, the main thing we’ve seen is that spontaneous emergence of working, non-coercive socialist organizations such as co-operatives has been met with strong and sometimes murderous opposition from the incumbent capitalists.