I don’t even think they stand to benefit. I think when he blows up the US their assets will lose value, and depending on how bad it gets they may start having to hang out in some other safer country like a Russian oligarch spending all his time in Western Europe.

I think it is just pure force of habit at this point, like “Biden’s gonna tax the rich fuck him let’s get behind this disaster instead.” I mean, it worked for other disasters like Reagan or W, but I think they haven’t really absorbed how big a disaster Trump 2 would be.

The half a trillion dollars worth of student loan forgiveness passed.

A few things about this, It didn’t pass. It never came to a vote. It was an executive order. Centrists didn’t want it.

Wait, hang on. I may have misunderstood you.

If your central thesis is that Democrats in congress are mostly an uninspiring pile of centrist bullshit, and that Biden has to contend with them as well as the GOP in order to get progressive things done that he is trying to accomplish, then I will 100% agree with you. I thought you were including Biden in the centrist fakery.

Your description of getting behind Democrats because you wanted good things to happen, only to see the reality that comes to pass be mostly watered-down corporate-friendly garbage, sounds pretty accurate to me. It sounded like you were blaming that on Obama and Biden, instead of Manchin and the Republicans, is why we are disagreeing. But if you’re saying we need to get rid of the GOP in congress, and replace Manchin and Sinema with actual liberal people, as the solution, I will 100% agree.

Biden, in the only surprise of his presidency so far, listened to progressives on student loans

IRA? NLRB with teeth? Trillions of dollars worth of corporate tax increases? Those were not surprising to you?

And I just got to the paragraph where you call me Goebbels. Conversation’s over. Godwin.

I said that super confidently asserting something which seems to me to be the opposite of true, and relying on the assertion itself to be the explanation of why people should believe it, is a Goebbels tactic.

Like I say, I actually agree with you about the massive gap between what Democratic presidents get done and what they should be getting done. Where it falls apart for me is where to assign the blame for that.

Yeah

1. Biden got a ton of good stuff done, but even if you don’t agree with that, there is no possible way that an adult human being with any level of political awareness can claim that Trump wouldn’t be an objective disaster on an absolutely globe-spanning scale, or that we should do anything in this election than vote for whoever isn’t Trump. It’s like one of those video game puzzles that’s so clear and simple that it seems like there must be more to it. “Do you want to open and find out what’s in the box? Or for me to thrust this running chainsaw into your coccyx?” “What’s in the box?” “It’s a friendly cat, but why do you need to ask?”
2. Biden at the debate looked old as fuck and that’s a problem

It’s sorta boring when you just lay it out, but IDK how anyone could disagree with either of those

It is fascinating to me that the “Biden is in HUGE trouble in the election because of the debate” narrative is so unanimous in the media

In a way that “Trump is in HUGE trouble in the election because of his felonies” was not in any way

Even though from the tiny amount of polling that has apparently happened, the second one was a bigger deal to the electorate than the first one

Curious

Philly is also the city that violently chased the Patriot Front out when they tried to do a march, like literally just set on them whacking them with big sticks sending them packing back into their U-Haul van and driving away shamefully. Like Han Solo unhesitatingly shooting at Vader the instant he sees him sat at the dinner table for his big betrayal speech. Be like Philly.

The presidency is such a weird position. It’s like you’re kind of the boss, but you’re also kind of an employee. There’s a whole staff of people telling you where you have to go and what rules you have to follow, and you’re constantly getting shit on in public for your job performance, and everything bad that happens practically anywhere in the world is at least partially your fault. You can literally call the biggest military power in the world on the phone and tell them who to kill and (subject to certain restrictions), they’ll just go and do it, but you’re not allowed to drive a car.

It’s just bizarre. Like a lot of the American system, I actually really like the way the system is set up, for as weird as it is.

Fascinating. It sounds like your theory is that the Democrats floated the public option and the BBBA, just so they could go through an elaborate ruse following by killing it on purpose after months of work and preparation, only to introduce second weakened iterations of both of them (the ACA and IRA) which still did massive amounts for the country, and they went through all that just so their second version could… look wimpier by comparison to the initial version they shot down on purpose, maybe? IDK.

I’ll say this: If the average when put together, of brand X plus the Republicans actively trying to blow up the Washington Monument or kill all the Guatemalans or whatever the fuck, like a bunch of Batman villains, is a little trickle of sustained significant progress, I would say that the contribution to the average of brand X is probably significant and positive. To me. I wouldn’t look at that as a “well I guess there’s no difference between the two, and the lack of progress is DEFINITELY the Democrats’ fault, citation trust me bro” situation.

By way of example: The half a trillion dollars worth of student loan forgiveness passed. It got done. It was on the books, and then the Supreme Court told them no you can’t do that. Are you saying Biden controls the Supreme Court in secret and he passed it knowing it wouldn’t really happen? I feel like I’m stepping into some kind of Q universe where that’s exactly what you’re going to say, like John Roberts is Hunter Biden in a silicone mask or something.

The shit Democrats passed is nothing in the face of things they ran on and didn’t pursue.

The shit Democrats passed in the last few years is:

• 40% predicted reduction in US greenhouse gas emissions by 2030
• $150 billion worth of student loan forgiveness
• Big increase in working class wages even comfortably exceeding historic inflation
• Huge corporate tax increase to pay for all that

That’s off the top of my head; people have made these massive lists of accomplishments but sometimes it’s hard to tell which ones are substantive. All of those to me are pretty substantial.

I mean, I do commend you on coming up with a framing that makes it pretty easy to say “yeah but what about all the things they DIDN’T do” like the existence of some good thing that would have been theoretically possible somehow invalidates getting some particular good thing done in the real world. And also I commend the framing where you’re asserting SO FIRMLY Goebbels-style that anything they’re failing to accomplish is deliberately on purpose and definitely not the fault of the party that’s in lock step voting down things they are trying to accomplish. Your presentation is such that it’s easy to fall into “well he MUST know what he’s talking about, he is so confident in his presentation that that wouldn’t be clearly just completely made up.”

Both fairly solid arguing techniques. Bravo.

(Oh also recovering from Covid as if it hadn’t happened which basically no other 1st world economy has been able to do)

(Also, did the Democrats float the public option? I remember a bunch of left-wing people at the time talking about single payer, but I don’t ever remember it ever being acceptable to the Democrats and no one really hoping for it, just saying fuck this would be so easy if our country’s government wasn’t so awful but I hope we can get some health insurance of some description at least.)

Dude you gotta try harder than that; you’re just teeing me up to talk about the climate change bill and the ACA and all that other stuff and just go into more depth about everything I already touched on

Just say “but Biden invented bad Israel policy” or “Genocide Joe” or “blue MAGA” and then call it a day after making some kind of flippant comment; anything still in the realm of factual (implying that literally anything I said wasn’t a thing that happened) is gonna be a losing conversation for you

Oh, I know. I am just stating the message for the rest of the people.

The bad faith folks used to have these epic debates with me back and forth but I think they have mostly stopped doing that and I am heartened to think that maybe they decided that trying to say anything I was saying wasn’t true was an obvious losing battle and they were hurting their cause by even making the attempt.

You’re half right

Going forward from Clinton I think it goes, president by president:

• Budget surplus and great GDP (fuck the poor tho)
• ACA, attempts at gun control, the occasional drone strike as a treat
• Unions, working-class wages, climate change

I think as far as the Republican side it’s pretty much always been “more for me and my immediate friends,” yes. The Democrats have pretty reliably attempted to pursue policies which are trying to benefit “the country” though, with increasingly working class aligned definitions over time of who it is that represents “the country”.

Yeah. And Biden looked weak, which is like the killer flaw in all of American politics from which there is no recovery. From Reagan to Clinton to Trump, the US electorate has been full throatedly behind “you can take away all my rights and ruin my economy and collaborate with my enemies all you want, as long as you look charming while you do it bby” like a domestic abusee who doesn’t want to call the cops. But they will never forgive a politician for looking like a chump (in a way that they readily will for committing random felonies or attempted murders or massive corruption or treason.)

I am buoyed by the unanimity of the downvotes

I actually think it’s 100% true that Biden did a shitty job at the debate, exposing in painfully vivid fashion some flaws we already knew he had. On the other hand, so did Trump. And it’s weird that one side of that equation is getting such a shriekingly loud level of coverage and the other side is getting more or less nothing.

The couple of polls on 538 since the debate apparently show not much change in people’s sentiment (certainly not any kind of catastrophe that the news is trying to create with its self fulfilling prophecy coverage).

Keep posting the bullshit guys. I won’t say it won’t work, but at least from what I’ve seen people are mostly downvoting it when it is getting posted here.

If “hey look at this poll of left handed middle income women in swing states, Trump is ahead 86 points” is bullshit

Then “this one focus group of 8 Hispanic voters thought Biden did great, time to stop worrying” is also bullshit

Wait to see the polls. I am anticipating them showing some loss for Biden because the average American would rather have a vigorous insurrectionist running the country, than a visibly old person with good policy ideas. I would love to be shown proof that I am wrong in that but this isn’t it. I think Biden’s great, but he does still have to win the election, and the debate wasn’t a good showing for him, and one little focus group doesn’t change that and doesn’t justify the broad sweeping headline here.

GPT-4 generally doesn’t need fine tuning or anything no

100% right; unless you are using it a ton the API pricing is likely to be cheaper

You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:

1. Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
2. Take it out.
3. Boot it up.
4. If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.

GPT4all can do it pretty easily on a desktop with a good GPU. I think it’s unlikely that anything can run locally on your phone (LLMs are notably hogs in terms of even pretty capable desktop PC resources; there’s just not a cheap way to do them). You could use colab or something via your phone, and there is probably a little howto guide somewhere that shows how to do a Mistral setup on colab. It’ll take some technical skill though.

You might just bite the bullet and do $20/mo for the GPT-4 subscription also. It can also do web searches, I think, although in practice it’s pretty clunky the times it’s tried to do things like that for me. I’m not aware of one that does the “search the web for answers and get back to me” thing really all that perfectly or smoothly I’m sad to say.

GPT-4 is apparently the model to beat. I haven’t seen all that much difference in practice between GPT-4 and 4o. I’ve heard various claims about various other models outperforming it (notably including Claude) but I haven’t seen the claims materialize over the long haul as yet.

I have however heard that Mistral can get quite close to GPT-4, run for free locally with the right hardware, if you build up a hand curated set of around 100 query/response pairs from GPT-4 that are what you want it to do, and then fine-tune Mistral against that training set. I haven’t tried it but that’s what I’ve heard.

when Biden literally copies trump illegal border policies

There are three big problems with immigration at the present moment:

1. There’s a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons
2. We’re rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #1), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it’s fuckin dangerous
3. The whole agency in charge of the thing is racist and oppressive

Biden is unable fix the third without an act of God (or, without firing the whole system and then finding 40,000+ people who want to be immigration police who are not racist, so basically an act of God).

Biden is unable to fix the first two problems also, although they do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don’t wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time he tries to do anything about it, e.g. reducing the rate of people allowed to come across the border or increasing funding for ICE, everyone on the left as far as I can tell thinks he’s just being cruel on purpose for no reason and gets really mad at him.

So my questions are:

1. What illegal border policies do you think Biden is copying?
2. What specific thing do you think he should do, instead of trying to increase the number of judges and the funding for ICE, and compromising with the Republicans to try to get it done when they block him on it?

Jon Stewart for president with someone central to Biden’s cabinet who actually knows about politics and the stuff Biden was doing, as VP, to be able to give him on the job training on the actual politics part to match his sharpness level and his heart