Here is my hot take. His belief that he was failing, helped him succeed.
I don't mean this in a trite way. The character portrayed is supposed to be awkward and anxious. Feeling awkward and anxious in real life, left him in the right frame of mind when he walked on set. He looked awkward and anxious, because he actually was.
Actually feeling what the character is supposed to be feeling, is the heart of method acting. The upside of method acting is that it creates very powerful performances. The downside of method acting is that you have to experience all of the feelings of the depicted drama.
I am in no way trying to undermine your point, but I have to say as I read past that first sentence, it became impossible to not imagine Tobias Fünke's aspirational role as "Frightened Inmate Number Two" as the subject of your commentary.
I contend that shitty moderation was why it flatlined.
I enjoyed answering algorithm questions. Unfortunately, every so often, people who weren't into algorithms would show up. And somehow summoned each other. To close good questions.
It was clear that they didn't understand the topic. They couldn't recognize what a good question, or a good answer, was. I wound up going away, coming back every few years, go until my next bad experience, and leave again.
Each time, the population answering those questions was smaller.
I believe that a lot of good people left like I did. Then just didn't come back.
What they did is tried to prove that the conventional fuzzer won't find crashes. Where they found counterexamples, they fixed the bug and tried again.
In essence, a fuzzer takes random samples out of a space of possible inputs that could crash. They proved that nothing in the space of possible inputs could crash.
This is a strictly more powerful result than a fuzzer could give you.
It's not just that courts generally decline. It's now also against US law for them to enforce the judgment without assessing the Constitutional issues. And the burden of proof is on those trying to enforce the judgment.
The Mexican government and especially Santa Anna were not even close to saints and were not primarily fighting the Texans for reasons of slavery. The Mexican empire carved out slavery as being explicitly allowed in the Mexican state that become known as Texas.
This is no different than what happened in the Civil War.
Each side had a list of grievances. A big one on one side, was the preservation of slavery in perpetuity. The other side wanted to preserve the unity of the nation as a whole.
You are right that Mexico was not fighting to ban slavery. But it was clear that eliminating slaver was still in their roadmap. Texas had only gotten an extension.
Similarly the election of Lincoln wasn't an immediate threat to slavery in the Confederacy. But the Confederacy still was motivated to head off the long-term threat to their economic system.
So the fact that Mexico wasn't fighting to end slavery, doesn't contradict the fact that Texans were fighting to preserve it.
Opposition to that act was, "We're not going to create new states with slavery." It wasn't, "We're getting rid of slavery in places that already have it." Which meant that it was not a direct threat to existing slave states. (Though there was a prospect that maybe, some day...)
Lincoln didn't like slavery. But he wasn't trying to ban it. It wasn't until the war had been going on for nearly two years that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Which basically said, "If you're still in rebellion a couple of months ago, we're going to free your slaves." It didn't eliminate slavery for any slave state that was part of the Union. It was an incentive to surrender. It was 2 years after that until the 13th amendment was passed.
It is very unlikely that slavery would have been banned during Lincoln's time in office, if the Civil War hadn't happened.
Was there a long-term prospect of a threat? Obviously. But there was no immediate threat. And so the fight wound up with protecting slavery on the one side, and asserting the indivisibility of the nation on the other side.
This is exactly parallel to the Mexico-Texan issue. Slavery was not being banned in the rebelling states.
> Opposition to that act was, "We're not going to create new states with slavery."
Pretty sure you’re arguing in bad faith.
A group of anti-slavery people organized into a political party and elected a man who gave a speech declaring that slavery itself needs to be abolished.
Pretending that Lincoln wasn’t going to attempt to abolish slavery is just as bad as pretending the civil war was about states rights (states in the confederacy had mandatory slavery; no right to choose).
No, I'm not arguing in bad faith. You are oversimplifying and mischaracterizing someone whose complex views tried to balance morality and the ugly facts on the ground.
Lincoln's actual beliefs can be seen in his own words. Let's take, for instance, the first of his seven debates with Stephen Douglas.
In this debate, Lincoln made it clear that he morally opposes slavery. He therefore opposed allowing it to spread. But he pointed out simply trying to suddenly eliminate it would create even worse problems. He therefore did not support abolitionism. He even supported returning slaves to slavery if they escaped to a free state. He only supported containing the practice, and hoped for a better solution over time.
This balancing act is made clear in all of his speeches before he was President. It is even visible in the Emancipation Proclamation. It was only after years of war that he came to support the hard-line stance represented in the 13th Amendment. It is extremely unlikely that he would have gotten there without having been hardened by the Civil War.
There really was no immediate threat to slavery. It was only a long-term, potential threat.
Here is an exact passage from his speech laying all this out.
"When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,-to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.
"When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.
"But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave-trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbid the taking of them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter."
Mexico was about to end that carve out. But slavery was only one of the causes (and you're right about Santa Anna).
The myth is that Bowie and Crockett battled until their last breathes. The truth is that Bowie was sick and died in bed. Crockett gave up and was executed.
The connection is that shells, such as the hard part of corals, are made from calcium carbonate. When you put calcium carbonate in acid, it dissolves. This takes some of the acid out of the water.
In the long run, there are huge deposits of calcium carbonate on the ocean floor. Even if we burn all of the fossil fuels, the ocean eventually comes back to a neutral ph.
The problem is the short run. We're turning CO2 into carbonic acid at a rate that far exceeds what surface waters can handle. This is creating conditions where shellfish of all kinds are working overtime form proper shells. If they can at all. It even affects many kinds of plankton. This stress is causing large dieoffs. When we wipe out things at the base of the food chain, it has ripple effects through the rest of the ecosystem.
A number of the people who paid those downpayments, were invited to the recent Roadster demo. Where they got to see a similar car demonstrated, complete with flying. And with no sense of whether it will actually be built, or will be street legal.
Paper voting at least has a trail. Electronic voting leaves no trail at all.
Re: "voting the graveyard" there are following ways to prevent it:
An election monitor can manually count people coming to the polling station and compare it to the number of ballots taken out of the box. Monitor can observe how those votes are counted, and get a signed document with results. After counting the votes across the country, he can compare his paper document with official published results, filtering them by his polling station. Every step is verifiable.
Also, every voter must leave a signature. Signatures also can be verified.
> Me: With this voting technology https://spec.davinci.vote/ how can one verify that the voters are real people and not bots?
> ChatGPT: The key distinction is that DAVINCI can verify that a vote comes from an authorized cryptographic identity, but that does not automatically prove the identity belongs to a real, unique human being.
The algorithm doesn't solve these problems:
- how can I verify that voters ("voter census") are real people and not fake accounts made by govt? I can generate cryptographic identities all day long.
- how can I verify that at the end of elections government doesn't take people who haven't voted, and adds votes in their name using their cryptographic identity?
- if re-votes are allowed (they seem to be) how can I verify that re-votes are made by actual voters and not the government changing their votes in its favor?
- how can I verify that voters are not coerced to vote certain way by their boss at a workplace? For example, in my country, at some workplaces the employer (unofficially) requires a proof of voting, for example, a selfie from a polling place posted to a work chat.
- how can I ensure that the government does not know who voted how? In this case, the one who holds a private key, can decrypt the votes and identify voters who voted the "wrong" way.
The paper you linked to seems to not provide the solutions (I asked ChatGPT to read it for me). It is just a funny math exercise for mathematicians. Also I do not understand why it uses Ethereum and not my own cryptocurrency which obviously would be better because I would get rich quickly.
To compare, in paper voting people leave their signatures in the voters roll, and the marks on the ballots are also unique. While usually nobody checks them, it is still a better trail than a block in Ethereum blockchain that proves nothing. And in paper voting you can see real people putting the ballots into the box while here all you see is zeros and ones.
You just moved the goalposts. The question was electronic records could provide an evidence trail. You didn't address that.
Instead you just raised, admittedly with some more detail, the same issues that I did in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137231. While ignoring that every one of these failure modes also exists with paper.
For sure. The thing is that there are several problematic areas (registration, in-person voting mechanics, early voting, precinct-based vs. county-wide (or worse), mail-in ballots, etc). You can't fix everything all at once, or maybe you can, but you have to focus on each problem area separately because they are separable and it's easier to address the problems that way.
You should be able to go to the USPS and do a change of address for yourself. That way every time mail for you is sent to your tenant, it will go to you.
This is a great idea. I'll try it but I'm not sure it will work. I believe there is a time limit on the forwarding and it looks like not all mail is forwarded, including financial documents.
I just moved. Moving a business address was hard. For an individual, the only requirement ai saw was that I pay a small fee with a credit card registered to one of the addresses.
The quote captured the fact that a human reviewed proof could have mistakes in it. This is very different from a Lean verified proof.
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