So first is to accept this is more philosophy/religious sort of discussion rather than science, because it’s not falsifiable.

One thing is that we don’t need to presume infinite recursion, just accept that there can be some recursion. Just like how a SNES game could run on a SNES emulator running inside qemu running on a computer of a different architecture. Each step limits the next and maybe you couldn’t have anything credible at the end of some chain, but the chain can nonetheless exist.

If U0 existed, U1 has no way of knowing the nature of U0. U1 has no way of knowing ‘absolute complexity’, knowing how long of a time is actually ‘long’, or how long time passes in U0 compared to U1. We see it already in our simulations, a hypothetical self-aware game engine would have some interesting concepts about reality, and hope they aren’t in a Bethesda game. Presuming they could have an accurate measurement of their world, they could conclude the observed triangles were the smallest particles. They would be unable to even know that everything they couldn’t perceive is not actually there, since when they go to observe it is made on demand. They’d have a set of physics based on the game engine, which superficially looks like ours, but we know they are simplifications with side effects. If you clip a chair just right in a corner of the room, it can jump out through the seemingly solid walls. For us that would be mostly ridiculous (quantum stuff gets weird…), but for them they’d just accept it as a weird quirk of physics (like we accept quantum stuff and time getting all weird based on relative velocity).

We don’t know that all this history took place, or even our own memories. Almost all games have participants act based on some history and claimed memories, even though you know the scenario has only been playing out in any modeled way for minutes. The environment and all participants had lore and memories pre-loaded.

Similarly, we don’t know all this fancy physics is substantial or merely superficial “special effects”. Some sci-fi game in-universe might marvel at the impossibly complicated physics of their interstellar travel but we would know it’s just hand waving around some pretty special effects.

This is why it’s kind of pointless to consider this concept as a ‘hard science’ and disproving it is just a pointless exercise since you can always undermine such an argument by saying the results were just as the simulation made them to be.

It’s quite possible, but the waters are muddied since every legendary facet was treated as fact, so the historical record is relatively less reliable given how much of it was manipulated in the name of faith.

Well for Trump, either way there will not be another election. Either the system stays intact and he is disqualified or he says screw the system and stays in office. Our he dies first.

That’s how you get a promotion.

I wish I was kidding.

Well, they exist, and there’s a theoretical market, but it’s just that Tesla isn’t particularly the leader in any except maybe personally owned self driving, but that’s mainly because Tesla’s willing to test in the streets while others are more traditionally conservative about the safety thing.

Pre-unmasked Musk, Tesla might have done well as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Smart people wanted to work with a seemingly smart company, so it was a positive feedback loop.

In the post-Twitter acquisition world, the shine has kind of come off around the concept of working for Musk, and more keenly so with the coverage of what sort of person he truly is.

Still all over the place and still claiming it’s all just ‘owning the libs’.

Just yesterday I heard a republican congressman saying “He’s just trolling the democrats”.

While they certainly had some popularity, as you said enough to feature in bttf, and people remember obsessions with trucks like Bigfoot, generally it was still a more narrow niche.

Sedans, station wagons, sports cars were all pretty popular. Even the first big family vehicles were minivans that tended to have lower noses. The trucks of the time were downright sane compared to the modern mandate of trucks cosplaying as semis.

The 90s saw the rise of the suv.

But yeah, the critical factor for that timeframe in the chart would seem to be touch screen phones.

Nah, I can’t afford to spare $1k to rent that for a week to wear.

I think they may be more horrified finding out their children become those things, but I don’t think they actively fear that possibility in advance. Contrast with the gay scenario where a fair number of parents actively fear that possibility well in advance of any signs that might even be a thing.

Yeah, this is one of those terrible ideas even if you thought that, in theory, you were onboard with ‘anti-DEI’.

Out of the blue the wrong person gets randomly pissed at you and invokes the highly subjective clause and suddenly you owe them $1.5M…

Except how bad was it for Microsoft?

They didn’t lose share. For the people that rightfully saw Metro as a painful dumb direction in Windows design language, they just stuck with Windows 7. Microsoft didn’t have upside they wanted, but they didn’t have the downside.

They tried to pump life into their mobile platform by throwing their desktop platform under the bus. Because they have zero competitive pressure, they attempt to do that with essentially zero downsides. Just like now they can make their OS little more than an advertising platform for the Microsoft Store and Microsoft services without real repurcussion.

For one thing the filibuster standing rule can be ditched by simple majority. Neil Gorsuch’s nomination is in fact an example of the Senate overcoming the filibuster if they want to. The SC nomination was so important to the GOP they did it.

However, the consequences of the government shutdown are not as important as having a conservative majority in the supreme court to the GOP. Or the GOP are intentionally delaying as a strategy to try to let the narrative of blaming the democrats sink in before they ‘miraculously’ overcome it and take credit for fixing it after the democrats ‘broke’ it.

Work with a food bank and this is spot on, except they do get food donations that make sense from farmers and food service companies. But people buying food at the grocery store will do worse than the food bank can do with their connections, experience, and volume.

I still wonder if they are banking on making 2025 just such a miserable year that it’s comparitively easy to make 2026 feel good.

Turn SNAP back on, dial back the tariffs. People feel a remarkable improvement in food security and prices. Might still be in worse shape than end of 2024, but people will tend to remember change in experience rather than their experience in absolute terms.

The narrative will inevitably be that somehow the GOP figured out how to overcome those pesky democrats and restore the things that the democrats broke.

If things remained persistently broken, then the narrative couldn’t really overcome people’s actual experience. They strongly branded and made it clear that this was the Trump show, he’s got the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch. When it comes to ‘right now’, it’s hard to ignore that reality. But once they make it ‘last year’s problem’, then mental gymnastics can resume to blame the democrats.

Hell they could resolve this crisis by ultimately letting the democrats have what they are asking for and the voters would still credit the GOP with restoring the benefits that the democrats are demanding. They’ve already set the stage by saying democrats want to give all the money to illegal immigrants (which they explicitly don’t) and so there will be some BS to claim they ‘compromised’ by getting the democrats to give up illegal immigrant eligibility (they aren’t eligible and were never asked to be) and then take credit for the ‘good’ version of the outcome.

Even if it passed the house, wouldn’t Trump just veto it?

Remember even in his first term the GOP lost the midterms.

His first term was bad, but not nearly as bad. We didn’t have military occupation of our own cities. We didn’t have masked men abducting people off the streets into unmarked vans. We didn’t have a trade war with practically every other country. We didn’t have massive inflation after a prior year of massive inflation. We didn’t have suspension of food security. We didn’t have farmers being undermined by all this while a huge bailout is done to a foreign country. We weren’t mobilizing our military for an apparent invasion.

So the Democrats might have a chance. Removal from office may not be on the table, but at least some check on executive power might be exercised. We may be stuck with a PJ2025 executive branch for at least the next couple of years after that, but at least maybe there can be some mitigation. It’s at least worth a try.

Depressingly I wouldn’t characterize the last decade of elections as being as much a Republican or Democratic loss as much as pretty much every single election being a loss for whomever the perceived incumbent of the time.

I think I’d rather have fruits and vegetables than impossible beef. To me it tastes worse than beef or vegetables just being their natural selves.

I read that maybe beyond meat does it better, but haven’t bothered to try it.

With many bearaucracies there’s plenty of practically valueless work going on.

Because some executive wants to brag about having over a hundred people under them. Because some proceas requires a sort of document be created that hasn’t been used in decades but no one has the time to validate what does or does not matter anymore. Because of a lot of little nonsense reasons where the path of least resistance is to keep plugging away. Because if you are 99 percent sure something is a waste of time and you optimize it, there’s a 1% chance you’ll catch hell for a mistake and almost no chance you get great recognition for the efficiency boost if it pans out.

Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.

To keep in mind that another true believer is RFK Jr. While a true believer in some ways can be less vile, they still can be even more dangerous than the ones running a con.