You mean the thing where we put tons of greenhouse gases in the air which warms the planet and makes it even better for photosynthesizing life, but even worse for mammals?

The issue is that their brain appears to have been damaged by becoming a parent.

I’m not denigrating them, just the brain damage that becoming a parent has done to them.

but raising kids gives me a purpose

Ugh, this makes me shudder. It just sounds like “I’ve eagerly embraced my role as part of a procreation machine”.

I guess it’s necessary that some people become parents, in order to keep humanity going. And, it’s better if those people are doing it willingly rather than reluctantly. But, it just sounds like evolution reached into your brain and turned off some critical faculties in order to make you a more effective procreator.

its

Plus, at least one of the two economists got really, really hard watching his buddy eat some shit.

Ah, I was just looking at parliamentary systems. You’re right that FPTP really screws a lot of stuff up.

Whereas in a PR parliamentary system, it is extremely rare for any one party to have a majority

I don’t think that’s true. In Canadian elections majority governments are more common than non-majority governments. In Australia it looks like every government has been a majority government since the non-labour parties merged in 1910.

mean that people in the future should not benefit from a better system?

I think there would be a lot less controversy if it were about people in the future. If the plan was to make university more affordable, that would be different. Or, if the government introduced a student loan system where the interest rate was pegged to the inflation rate, I don’t think that would be so controversial.

What’s controversial is the student loan forgiveness programs. Rather than fixing the broken system so that university costs were more manageable, it’s structured as a targeted bailout of a certain group of people (people with a university education who haven’t yet fully repaid their loans) paid for by everyone else.

I don’t live in the USA and I never had student loans. So, this isn’t personal for me. I have to say, this seems like a ridiculous characterization to me.

People take out student loans to go to school, which improves their prospects of a higher paying job. I don’t really care about people who went to school and paid off their debt and whether they think that future generations should also have to pay off their crippling debt. What I care about are the opinions of the people who could have gone to university but didn’t because the debt required seemed outrageous.

Imagine co-valedictorians at a high school. One gets into university, takes on huge debt, gets a good white-collar job, and starts paying off that debt. The other sees how enormous the cost would be, and instead gets a blue collar job. I would imagine that if the white collar worker got their debts wiped out, while the blue collar worker got nothing, that blue collar worker would be pretty annoyed. I would also imagine that someone choosing to go into a blue collar job out of high school would be much more common among a certain group / class of people.

I see that as support for Newsom.

Then that’s your issue. You shouldn’t.

Who’s supporting Newsom?

The modern system of prime Ministers where the executive comes from parliament seems to play out better in modern politics.

Yes and no. The problem is that in parliamentary systems like that, if the government has a majority then they’re unstoppable. In a system with a president who has some actual authority, or a king who isn’t merely a figurehead, the Prime Minister can’t just do everything he wants. There still needs to be some negotiation.

On the other hand, the world has a lot of authoritarians in it who wore (and in some cases still are) supported by popular votes. People seem really bad at picking leaders who want to serve out a 4-10 year term, then retire to a cushy life afterwards.

“Liberals like you”, that’s a real asshat thing to say.

if they fuck around again, have them arrested. They have officers in the capitol

If that had ever happened, then it might be worth talking about. But, realistically the most you’ll ever get is “reclaiming my time”.

I think the US chose to have a president act as a sort of a king with a term limit. Other countries saw that and adapted it when they moved away from their monarchies, either giving the president king-like powers or giving them just a ceremonial role as head of state.

What’s funny is that in the UK and in many former British colonies, there’s still a king, but it’s mostly a ceremonial role these days. So, things have basically reversed. A modern king who’s a head of state is basically a figurehead. A president who is the head of a country may have monarch-type powers.

I wonder what the most effective way to fight this is. If it isn’t stopped both sides will do it more and more. If a democrat did it, I would really hope that other democrats would call them out on it. That might stop it. The other approach that might work is the Newsom style mocking of it.

If you understand how LLMs work, that’s not surprising.

LLMs generate a sequence of words that makes sense in that context. It’s trained on trillions(?) of words from books, Wikipedia, etc. In most of the training material, when someone asks “what’s the name of the person who did X?” there’s an answer, and that answer isn’t “I have no fucking clue”.

Now, if it were trained on a whole new corpus of data that had “I have no fucking clue” a lot more often, it would see that as a reasonable thing to print sometimes so you’d get that answer a lot more often. However, it doesn’t actually understand anything. It just generates sequences of believable words. So, it wouldn’t generate “I have no fucking clue” when it doesn’t know, it would just generate it occasionally when it seemed like it was an appropriate time. So, you’d ask “Who was the first president of the USA?” and it would sometimes say “I have no fucking clue” because that’s sometimes what the training data says a response might look like when someone asks a question of that form.

Canada does have a sort-of similar system. It’s just that the “president” in Canada is “the crown”, which is the Governor General representing the current British monarch. It’s much more of a ceremonial role in Canada, but technically the Governor General does appoint the Prime Minister.

Australia has essentially the same system as Canada. In 1975 the Australian Governor General dismissed the Prime Minister and picked the leader of the opposition as Prime Minister so that he could call an election. Described like that it seems like a blatant abuse of power. But, the background was a really dysfunctional government. One party had narrow control over the house, the other had narrow control over the senate, and the senate was blocking everything the house tried to do. I don’t know the full details of what happened in that affair, but it seems like it could be a good thing if a Governor General would step in in a crisis resolve a deadlock.

Canada also has the “confidence votes” part of the crisis in France. AFAIK in Canada losing a confidence vote immediately triggers an election, unlike in France where it can just lead to a scramble to see who can become the new PM among the existing representatives. Because triggering an election is a big deal, it doesn’t tend to happen too often. But it has happened. In 2011 Stephen Harper’s government lost a confidence vote, and there was an immediate election, but he won that election. In 2007 Paul Martin’s government also fell to a confidence vote.

For Americans who don’t have a similar system, a “government collapse” isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. It sounds like there’s a complete breakdown in law and order and nobody’s in charge. Really what happens is that the arrangement that so-and-so will be prime minister and his cabinet will be X, Y and Z is off.

Sometimes it means there are new elections. But, sometimes (as in the French system) it just means that the various representatives all negotiate among themselves to choose a new prime minister. The President then appoints that person. It can vary from the president rubber stamping the decision, to the President getting involved in the negotiations and playing a key role in choosing the next PM. Once the President makes it official, that person becomes PM and then chooses a new cabinet. Before a new PM is chosen there’s a bit of chaos. The government can still vote on things, but the normal process is disrupted because there’s no “first among equals” to lead. In the case of France, normally the President doesn’t (or shouldn’t) deal with the day-to-day running of the government. But, during the previous government’s collapse Macron stepped in to do many things the Prime Minister would normally do.

One minor twist here. In theory, a French President is supposed to handle foreign policy and defence. The Prime Minister is supposed to run domestic things, including the day-to-day government functions. One reason why this government lasted 14 hours (or 27 days if you count his full time as PM) is that Macron was seen as having too heavy a hand in picking not just the PM Lecornu (picking the PM is technically his job as President), but also in picking the PM’s cabinet (which is supposed to be something the PM does himself). As soon as Lecornu announced his cabinet, the rest of the elected reps saw that it was essentially the same as the one they just voted down a month ago. They said they weren’t going to work with Lecornu’s government, so Lecornu quit immediately.