State of the Discussion

We can always look at the Lego test.

Surely that's something that we can't imagine having significantly different numbers for success/failure (say, within 5% of each other), right?

Fleeing from war, political oppression, and starvation in Ukraine, Sudan, and other parts of the world? No thanks, don't come here.

Are you the former runners of brutally oppressive and racist regime and really upset that you are no longer in power? Please come, thanks:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/12/us/trump-news

It should be noted that Trusk had the U.S. government pay to fly the Afrikaaners here. You can take the boy out of Apartheid but you can't take the Apartheid out of the boy.

A Holocaust denying podcaster has turned anti-Semitism into crypto. Making matters more worrisome, left and right anti-Semites seem to be finding common ground. A kid name Mo Khan who put up a "F*ck the Jews" sign at one of David Portnoy's bars after ordering bottle service got $10,000 from them. The right and the left can't make any positive arguments on why Jews should support them, only negative ones.

There is currently an internet rumor that DOGE is trying to get into the Library of Congress (Which is run by the legislative branch, not executive) and the Capitol Police (Also run by the legislative) is stopping them.

This is after Trump fired the head of the Library of Congress, which he apparently has the power to do, and supposedly appointed an acting director, which I am not clear he can do.

it is unclear what is actually happening at this point, but we'll see if Congress allows the executive to run roughshod over something _they_ own.

Lost in all this is this bit of stupidity: over what the president said was China’s failure to stop fentanyl-related chemicals from reaching the United States

Do you want to know how that actually works? Because it is astonishingly stupid. Here's the DEA explaining it: https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States_0.pdf

So, there a dozen different precursor chemicals for fentanyl, including a lot with legitimate medical uses.

China makes those chemicals, and ships them either to Mexican labs, or hilariously, to the US, where they then smuggled out to Mexican labs. (Yes, they are mailing drug precursors into the US, and then having to smuggle them _out_.) They are then turned into fentanyl, and smuggled back into the US, almost entirely though legitimate ports of entry with specially built vehicles using professional couriers , the majority of which are probably US citizens at this point.

You'll notice that China is barely involved in this, and moreover, their role is completely replaceable. In fact, India has already started to replace it. And by 'already started', I mean the DEA link there is explaining how they had started back in 2018. In fact, they may have already moved somewhere else besides India.

Fentanyl is sorta the ultimate logical conclusion of the drug war: A substance so potent that it has incredible bang for the buck (And thus incredibly easy to accidentally overdose on) and is made from precursors that even smaller. This is, literally, an unwinnable fight.

The best we can possible do is stop the _Mexican_ labs from turning the precursors into the real thing, which would be incredibly hard. That would require wrestling control of parts of Mexico away from the drug cartels (Which neither us or the Mexican government has been able to do for decades) or locking the border down almost completely to _legitimate_ travel. At which point the drug network would just switch to the illegal side and start using that. (Which it doesn't do now because people trying to sneak into the US for jobs and disappearing into 'somewhere in the US where they can get a job' are rather less trustworthy than American citizens in San Diego that makes a trip every Sunday and takes a standard cut and they can show up at the house of and break their legs if the drugs go missing.) So we have to lock _that_ down, also. We're like three impossible things deep at this point.

And that will just mean we start running the labs here. Which, as all the meth labs demonstrate, we are certainly willing to do. And we will do very poorly, making even more erratic quality, killing even more people.

There really is not, in any manner, a solution here. Drugs have won the drug war.

The thing we need to start thinking about is the thing we _should_ have been thinking about decades ago: Reducing the circumstances, both economic and social, where people turn to hard drugs, providing a place for them to be safe, providing _softer_ drugs so they don't go 'all the way', and providing a way back.

Because what we cannot do is magically stop them from having access if they want them.

Back in 2023, I mentioned how my friends' 14-year-old (at the time) was delighted to show us how he could make the AI spit out 800 words on The Underground Railroad.

Now, to be fair, I rarely have to do stuff that involves The Underground Railroad. Like, the kiddo's AI-written essay glanced at from across the room was the last time I had a real interaction with the concept. When it comes to being able to sit down and write multi-paragraph essays, well, I suppose that I do that sort of thing all the time and benefitted from decades of doing it and then doing it again and then doing it again.

I like to think that I'm good enough at it to break the syntactical rules in ways that engage the reader rather than alienate the reader (allowing the semantic content to do that).

And I don't know whether I actually benefitted from getting good (or good enough) at it or whether it's like how I learned to drive a stick or write cursive.

As I've said elsewhere, the issue is that we got used to the idea that "competently-written five-paragraph essay with only a few typos or run-on sentences, plenty of filler and light on analysis" means "B-minus". And now there's a computer that can produce that competently-written essay, grabbing bits and pieces from Reddit related to the subject so that it's not entirely filler, so what do we do about that B-minus? Obviously we could just raise our standards, but what does that mean for the people who came by their B-minus honestly? (It would have some serious effects on academic eligibility for athletics!)

Or maybe we say "screw it, use AI, what we want to see is you finding actual examples to support the argument instead of just giving me AI-filler". Which wouldn't actually be a bad thing, I think, because that's what is supposed to be happening here. It's like giving someone a box of Lego bricks and saying "build a structure", versus giving someone an unfinished log and carpentry tools and saying "build a structure". The latter does demonstrate a wider range of skills, but a lot of those skills are unrelated to the actual building of a structure; most of it's about prep work.

(On the gripping hand we'd have to address the fact that a lot of teachers probably aren't good for much more than "competently-written five-paragraph essay with only a few typos or run-on sentences, plenty of filler and light on analysis"...)

1) a criticism of "you're not strict enough to actually find all the things" is not an argument against attempting to find all the things.

2) the things the TSA actually does effectively filter for - articles hidden in shoes, liquids in quantity - actually could substantially affect an aircraft in a term short enough to be relevant.

3) the things they don't effectively filter for are addressed by other measures.

Than the Palestinian leadership should negotiate with the Israeli government rather than go on quixotic quests to destroy Israel.

The Palestinian leadership has not gone on any quest to destroy Israel, and has in fact been unable to get Israel to even _stop stealing West Bank land_ for the past two decades, which is an obvious prerequisite to even discussing any sort of agreement.

The cheating tools were a lot more primitive when I was in school but listening to tales of cheating always made it seem like you didn't save that much time from studying the material yourself.

The last part of my interview for a job with the Colorado legislature's joint budget committee was to take a bunch of information and with a 45-minute time limit, write a recommendation on what the committee should do. One of the JBC rules was that staff presentations always end with a "Staff recommends..." statement. The most common reason new analysts left at the end of the first session -- or sometimes mid-first session -- was that they had to choose. Not lay out six options and stop. Lay them out and say, "Staff recommends option three because..."

The Daily Princetonian reports: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ’03 ‘plagiarized’ small portions of his senior thesis, experts say. But how serious is it?

There are discussions over plagiarism theory in the article.

People seem to agree that it violates Princeston's "Rights, Rules, Responsibilities".

they’re not even offering the second [a negotiated deal]

If the Palestinians were to offer to match the last deal in 2007 or something like that including a RoR to a Palestinian state, then we'd see the Jewish peace wing re-elected to take it.

As recently as Trump's first term they've made it clear the Right of Return can't only be to a Palestinian state, it needs to destroy Israel as a Jewish one.

As long as they're still fighting over whether or not the Jews get a state, they also have to take ownership on not being able to negotiate a deal.

Than the Palestinian leadership should negotiate with the Israeli government rather than go on quixotic quests to destroy Israel. Even if they think a final settlement would cause a Palestinian Civil War.

This means that the final settlement would be Israel vanquishing the Palestinians, which would be morally horrible, Israel unilaterally deciding the borders of a Palestinian state, or a negotiated deal.

Israel not only isn't offering the last option, they're not even offering the second.

Which I also recall was met with a lot of cries of, “That’s your job, Mr. President!”

I don't remember that at all.

That's a pretty stupid objection. Yes, that is part of the president's job, but the president only functions because he has literally dozens of advisors doing a first-pass over things to bring certain things to his attention and let him ignore other things.

Having someone whose job is 'weird interactions and redundancies in policy' seems entirely reasonable. Honestly, I feel like that should actually be a white house office, where every department has representatives in it who can say to other department's representatives 'Hey, have you noticed that our two Departments have nearly identical definitions of X, and it probably would make sense to make them _actually_ word-for-word identical?' and things like that.

Which left me asking, “Well, isn’t that the President’s job? Don’t we have a National Security Advisor and a National Security Council to help him with that?”

You think the _president_ should be handed a bunch of information about individual threats from the FBI and CIA and somehow integrate that? And coordinate the two? What?

The National Security Advisor and National Security Council are intended to talk to the _president_, they are not any sort of inter-agency communications.

We'd have to see the people get weeded out to *REALLY* feel that.

(That said, I'm kind of suspicious that this sort of thing was made illegal by Griggs v. Duke Power Co, but he was an architect-kinda guy applying for something architecture-adjacent so I'm pretty sure that they could get this as being related to job duties.)

Eating the apple core and all is the only way to eat an apple as far as I'm concerned. If it's a good apple then the core is just a very slightly less good part of said apple and not eating it is utterly wasteful. If it's not a good apple then why're you eating the apple at all?