Well put. And that last 10% was always the hardest part, and now it’s almost impossible because emotionally you’re even less prepared for the slog ahead.

I would love to hear more about that.

I wish I'd kept a listing of that and other projects I worked on. But that never occurred to me.

A friend of mine wrote the Mattel Intellivision poker game. I was playtesting it (a very boring job), and got suspicious. I walked over to his desk and said the program was cheating. It was looking at my hole cards. He sighed and asked how I knew, and I replied it was obvious. He said he didn't have room to add code to improve its play otherwise. I don't know if he fixed it or not.

I have similar experiences. It has worked about half the time, but the code has to be pretty simple. I’ve many experiences, where we work on something complicated for an hour, and it is good compiling code, but then an edge case comes to mind that I ask about and Claude tells me the whole approach is doomed and will never work for that case. It has even apologized a few times for misleading me :) I feel like it’s this weird mix of brilliant moron. But yeah, ask for a simple HTML page with a few fields and it rocks.

I’m too cynical because at this point I can only believe this is to help billionaires and ICE hide their identities/money, or it’s to strip away all privacy (as bills are often named the opposite of their purpose).

Forcing everyone’s retirement funds to buy (at the artificially high and unsustainable price) is the scandal. Clever ploy to move more money from the plebes to the billionaires.

Good thing we can also preemptively divest on our retail accounts and just wait this out so we don’t get stuck bag-holding this turd sandwich. Ooh wait, selling triggers cap gains taxes.

What a great scam. So either dump all your index funds and pay the huge tax bill now or stay in and hope against all signs and odds that someone does something to stop this.

You can hedge the position via options without having a taxable event on passive investment.

How do you make sure each human gets only one vote?

It's not a vote. You select your own set filters/ mod lists

I guess it depends on what you mean by safe. My wife gets a lot of migraines from a lot of foods in the US (less so if she can get organic). When we travel through Europe she can eat anything without triggering a migraine. I’ve read the US allows about 10X more chemicals (pesticides? fertilizers?) than the EU, so we assume this is the difference.

My father-in-law always liked to see an exact number of democrats and republicans in congress, or congress held by one and the senate the other, for exactly this reason. With deadlock they can’t screw things up more. I’m not sure I disagree.

Congress has had one of the lowest approval ratings of anything in government for a long time now because it doesn't get things done. Most Americans are quite unhappy with Congressional deadlock being the norm.

It's also directly lead to the continued rise of the powers of the unitary executive - the EO that have become the norm in the 2000s are in large part because Congress has largely voided all responsibility for legislating.

Congress passes tons of laws - just not on subjects on which the country is divided. Is that not a feature? Other systems require 50% + 1 to radically remake the entire country. Would that be better? Or worse? Imagine if <insert your most hated President> were Prime Minister instead, and had control of a truly sovereign Parliament with virtually no guardrails at all. Better or worse?

EOs are a problem, but SCOTUS is walking at least some of that back in subtle ways, such as the end of Chevron deference. (Not that you'd get any of this from the media, who desperately want SCOTUS to devolve into the media-friendly horse race they've imposed upon all of the rest of politics.)

Congress isn't supposed to decide on social questions. Society is. Congress is meant to represent it. A divided Congress is accurately representing a divided country.

So much easier said than done. We have to get our elected representatives to make the change, but it is against their self interest. If this was the only thing people considered when voting _maybe_ it would stand a chance. And honestly, I suspect less than 20% understand how other voting systems could lead to better out comes. Heck, we can’t even use the metric system!