as somebody with a math degree, i find the headline "how the Bayesian superyacht sank" to be comical.

stick to sampling, people.

"please welcome the next president of the..."

never gonna give you up.

never gonna let you down.

also, they should have rick rolled us.

shouldn't "little jon" nowadays be calling himself "old ass man jon"?

i'm just looking through the dnc performers list. they want to run on empty fumes because they expect harris' policies to fall flat amongst....everybody. i get it. she didn't do well in the primaries for a reason; she has a conservative record and ran as a "progressive", so she scared everybody off. she has no real tactic, if she starts talking policy. she's absolutely right to avoid it, if she wants to win.

it's less that she's going to push people to vote for trump and more that if she goes out and talks that she's going to generate voter cynicism, which suppresses turnout.

so, we're not having an election, we're having a party. just don't forget to put the crack pipe down to vote. remember to vote!

remember!

remember?

it's just that this party is kinda lame, if you ask me. it's like somebody purposefully made a list of the most washed up, overrated pop stars of the last 50 years and put them altogether. the only thing they missed was hall & oates.

like, i wouldn't go to that party.

i'm just not thinking this is going to work out.

tariffs are neither bad nor good, but they are hard.

canada exports 98% of it's steel to the united states or mexico. if the united states asked us to put up a tariff on chinese steel, we probably should.

however, the policy may lead to inflation in electronics and other luxury goods.

i wouldn't expect that china would put up a tariff on, say, canadian wheat, as that would just hurt it's own people. chinese retaliation is likely to be outside of the realm of trade, but our relations with china probably couldn't get much worse than they've been recently, anyways.

i'm going to conclude that the steel tariff, in concurrence with an american tariff on chinese steel, is a reasonable policy. 

i don't think the data ever supported this policy in the first place, but they have to do this as a bare minimum so thankfully they are doing it.

i pointed out previously that you couldn't take them seriously until they re-regulated the process, and this is incomplete, but it's at least a bit of good news.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-to-reduce-the-number-of-temporary-foreign-workers-liberals-1.7014058

the cold reality is that no amount of intervention will prevent them from dying on the street, in the long run. but i don't want to see an industry develop around prolonging the life of addicts for weeks or months, which is what has been happening.

the cold, logical reality is that you need to either round them up and put them in jail or you need to wash your hands of it and let them flounder and die. anything in between may be well meaning but is just going to fail.

it's easy to predict what the government in alberta is going to come up with, and it's sending them to church to "find god" and "help themselves", and, frankly, albertans should be annoyed at such a waste of their tax dollars. but, i'd like to see somebody get this right, and it's not going to be a liberal government that does, in the end.

it's intervention or bust, but you have to intervene with intent and with force and you have to stick to it, and i'm not sure that a government in canada could actually do that without trampling all over the constitution. you would have to bring in draconian drug laws at the federal level, first. and, maybe the truth is that we should.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/alberta-drug-policy-dan-williams

there's been a lot of racist claims recently that jews are lighter skinned than (some) palestinians because they're actually all poles and ukrainians while the palestinians are indigenous, but have you gotten a look at what a lebanese person looks like?

the answer is almost identical to a white jew, and the lebs were never expelled from the region, although one will note that, unlike almost everybody else in the region, they're also roughly half christian. i haven't seen a study, but it would be an obvious observation that the whiter lebs correlate with the christians, while the darker skinned lebs are mostly muslims.

there's a reason for this, and it's that the region was in fact mostly lighter skinned up until the arab migration c. 700. roman palestine and greek and iranian israel/judah were pretty white places. the lebs and jews are both the remnant of that ancient population, which was displaced  by war and disease and partially replaced. these three subpopulations of white lebanese christians, white jews and white palestinians are the people that were actually there first, while the arabs moved in relatively late in history and brought a large number of african slaves with them, which darkened the skin of certain clans.

i'm just noticing this as i see pictures of lebanese politicians in the news. even the muslim ones basically look like italians, not arabs.