@stevendbrewer yes. i think that's fair. he wanted to be transformational in the sense of "not red not blue but the united states", but he perceived that and undertook it as an elite project, where it was doomed to fail, because mostly elites divide over interest and recruit political passions to buttress their capacity to serve those interests. when the game is tug-of-war, you can't just heal the wound.
@jumbanho 🙂 i'm doing a lot of that now. i used to write more polemically more often, now i try to be very cautious and fair and nobody reads my stuff either!
@failedLyndonLaRouchite that might be how he rationalized it to himself. that doesn't mitigate its effect.
@stevendbrewer i guess i disagree, unless "transformative figure" is interpreted only on symbolic dimensions. on material dimensions, his administration had a great deal of discretion, and they chose to preserve stability at the top of our social hierarchies at the explicit expense of those beneath. that strikes me as the opposite of striving and failing to be transformative. 1/
@stevendbrewer Obama did run a scandal-free administration, though he's not lived a modest, Jimmy-Carter-esque postpresidency either. corruption needs definition. /fin
@jumbanho yeah. i should talk more about ObamaCare / Affordable Care Act and also about foreign policy. but this was just a quick response to Yglesias, those would each be long discussions. ACA is I think quite mixed, net good relative to status quo ante, also very flawed, also politically corrosive at the time, even as it has now become politically untouchable. on foreign policy i think the verdict would be less mixed and pretty bad.
@jumbanho (re the superlative, obviously a bit hyperbolic, i don't want to be in the business of comparing Obama to Pol Pot and claiming Obama more destructive. there's an implicit "of what?" i wanted to push back hard on the Yglesian erasure of what Obama's choices did to the consensus surrounding the legitimacy of the United States' core institutions. That's where "most destructive" is arguable, though again, i think it prima facie hyperbolic and not really a "thesis" to defend.)
@SmudgeTheInsultCat @pixelpusher220 it's like a gun buyback, keeps it off the streets.
[new draft post] Obama was the most destructive political figure of my lifetime https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/11/30/obama-was-the-most-destructive-political-figure-of-my-lifetime/index.html
@admitsWrongIfProven yes. i hate that. i'm a huge fan of including imports in the samples (even that renders it a bit pseudocode-ish, if as in Java the imports have to be up top). i love scala-cli, because your sample can be a self contained script, imports and dependency versions included. https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/
@admitsWrongIfProven I find that everything I have ever done I have forgotten, and I have to look it up all over again. If I have done it, though, I can look it up in my own work, which is better teaching material (for me) than random stuff on the internet.
@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch it's very good at wish fulfillment! it knows exactly what a function should do, and even has a pretty reasonable idea of where someone might put it. in LLM-world, just imagine what you want and it is real. it's like a car commercial or something.
@admitsWrongIfProven yeah, that's what i did initially, was surprised to see the ~ left alone. it's a bit annoying, it's a cli, when a user types --dump-dir ~/whatever the shell fixes it by --dump-dir=~/whatever and the tilde stays. oh well. i did it manually, substituting the system property (but rather than using string manipulation, calling homeDir.resolve(...) on a path that truncates the given path through the tilde plus file separator)
@admitsWrongIfProven I checked through Java 21.
Path.resolve is different. myPath.resolve( otherPath ) places otherPath beneath myPath. So if myPath is '/home/swaldman' and otherPath is 'foo/bar', myPath.resolve( othetPath ) is '/home/swaldman/foo/bar'
At some point I turned Google "code tips" on, but I've almost never used it (I no longer default to Google).
I wanted a lazy way in Java to expand '~' in file paths to home dirs , so I tried Google.
It gave me a very clear, precise, plausible answer!
But the method to which it confidently directs me... just does not exist?!
A screenshot of Google's very clear, precise, code sample, calling a confabulated, nonexistent method.
@dubiousblur@queer.af symbiotes do seem less desolate than intricate gears producing facsimiles of human expression all alone.
When CPI declines sharply, real GDP also tends to rise sharply.
I wonder if this isn't an artifact of NGDP as it is measured changing more gently than estimates of CPI. (I guess I should check the GDP deflator, rather than CPI)
Anyway, obligatory FRED graph.
Graph of 1-year % changes, real GDP and CPI-U from FRED ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ ). When CPI declines sharply, "real" GDP tends also to rise sharply.
I've been doing lots of little Scala projects that want to send e-mail, including HTML e-mail. The Scala mail lib I found was a bit elaborate (based on cats effects) for my purposes. JavaMail (now Jakarta mail) is annoying to use directly.
So, I wrote a little mailutil library that is pretty trivial to send mail with, and straightforward to configure.
Maybe someone else finds it fun. https://github.com/swaldman/mailutil
@admitsWrongIfProven not all that is good for you is pleasing!
@admitsWrongIfProven there's a bit of an ambiguity in my initial statement, did i mean pleasing to me, or pleasing to you? (i will helpfully assert that i meant neither exactly, but perhaps some kind of superposition.)
@admitsWrongIfProven i'd say we should probably keep our inclinations to ourselves, but this being mastodon, where many social proscriptions are aggressively enforced, that one is honored much more in the breach, whatever sort of breach you might prefer.