nednobbins

As a multi-national, multi-ethnic, mutt, I am too.

Given that part of my mutt-makeup is Austrian, I'm offended that Austria and our northern neighbor have greatly contributed to this. Our deserved guilt over the Holocaust blinded us to decade after decade of human rights abuses by Israel.

We've seen this coming for a long time and, as a taxpaying contributor to the biggest funder of Israel, I'm ashamed.

There isn't. There's also no point in continuing a strategy that clearly favors Russia (they're the ones steadily gaining ground every month).

The better strategy (which Trump almost certainly won't entertain) is to negotiate a peace now and use that time to build a robust defense-in-depth at the current border.

It will be ugly because it will turn miles of border into a dangerous DMZ. But Russia already demonstrated that it works. Dig a crap ton of trenches. Build out bunkers and anti-tank traps. Ignore Geneva a bit and mine the crap out of the area. Lots of surveillance. Probably some experimental infrastructure to make it easier to deploy drones.

That would also need to be coupled with commitments to build out munitions plants in Western Ukraine; primarily artillery shells and drones.

This will work because it dramatically raises the cost of each meter of ground gained by opposing forces. Ukraine can get defensive infrastructure that they can cheaply operate, without significant external assistance.

The downside is that Ukraine would loose parts of its territory. The upside is that it has a far better chance of keeping the territory it still has.

There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.

Maybe. "Allowed" suggested that they wanted or welcomed it.

A bunch of formerly powerful people in the Republican party are now much less powerful. Many of them have been sidelined in the Republican party and replaced. Several prominent former Republicans have effectively switched to the Democrats.

The Republicans and Democrats have differences in how they structure their organizations but neither one wants to intentionally allow outsiders to take over.

Maybe. I think it's more likely that she truly believed that her milquetoast approach was actually the safer option. I'm not even sure Harris was exceptionally cowardly.

Many other people would likely have folded and taken that "safe" option.

The problem is that we needed someone who went well beyond just "not cowardice". We needed an actual hero. We needed a candidate who was willing to boldly face down big money interests, even when it seemed unwise and hopeless. Harris definitely wasn't that hero.

Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with "de-duping" as a database operation either.

The main components would probably be:

1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that's where existing duplicates would get removed)
3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn't valid any more.
4. Decide when you're going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

There's a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on "de-duped" databases.

The Democratic party, as it stands, is dead and the Greens are stillborn.

There's nothing but hopes and prayers to support the idea that the Greens will ever get anywhere in the US. They have neither a policy platform nor any individuals who inspire broad support.

It is absolutely possible to take over parties from within though. We've seen it happen twice with the Republicans. They tried, and failed, to keep the Tea Party from taking over. Then they tried, and failed, to keep Trump from taking over.

History suggests we have a better chance getting AOC to take over and clean house with the Democrats than we do waiting for the Greens to make any headway.

I agree. Her speech on the Monday after she got picked was great. She came out of the gate swinging. She laid out a solid initial vision with a realistic warning that it was going to be a hard fight.

Then she didn't.

Somewhere along the line she got cold feet and decided that not rocking the boat would be a safe option. She thought that pushing too hard would galvanize her opponents. Instead she tried to play nice with them and alienated large chunks of her base.

Harris raised 50% more than Trump. It’s hard to pin this one solely on big money influence.

I think that’s the point of this tour. He isn’t running for president. He’s trying to build a support base for a real alternative.

That’s presumably AOC but it’s still too early.

It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.

“De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.

It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.

It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.

A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.

Thank you for your thorough response. You make some good points. I think we're talking about slightly different topics though.

There's always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the "commonly known" reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.

For everyday speakers, the "logic" of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.

German speakers are generally aware of the "rule" that diminutives are neuter. If you look at this list words, some of them have non-diminutive forms;
Die Katze
Der Hund
Die Ohrlappe
Two of them don't really.

"Platz" is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of "Plätzchen" but it doesn't mean "(normal sized) cookie" (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but "Keks" gets around that confusion) "Magd" is the non-diminutive form of "Mädel" but girls aren't (generally) "little maids." I can't remember the last time I heard anyone say, "magd" to refer to a living person.

Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more "logical". Cats and earlobes aren't inherently feminine and dogs aren't inherently male.

My usage of "logic" in the context of German grammar, is that grammatical gender is often at odds with both self identified gender and biological gender. German speakers are generally comfortable saying "Der" about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying "Sie" about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, "Das" to subjects that are very obviously not neuter.

The reason for contrasting several languages was that I suspect there are different cognitive loads involved in correctly gendering people, depending on language. Many people notice that native Chinese speakers routinely "randomize" he/she/it. They don't just misgender trans-people, they often just forget which one means which. German speakers are pretty used to playing around with endings to imply additional meaning. "Dutzen" is often done without the word "du". Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.

As a final example, I'd offer the sentence, "___ ist ein fesch__ ___." I posit that if I insert "Die" vs "Der" into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, "-es Madl" or "-er Bua". If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.