@realcaseyrollins @Chip_Unicorn if you have a call line that’s only open from 11-3 when people might want to call any time (ie it’s not some live event naturally restricted to the time window, like a radio talk show), i presume it’s because the provider is trying to limit the expense of operating the line (not the literal telephone expense, but the expense of dealing with calls).
@realcaseyrollins @Chip_Unicorn no idea. whoever does it, it’s what a stupid version of efficiency looks like, replacing human, accessible systems with much cheaper, automated, less accessible systems. it’s efficient only from the perspective of the system provider, because it shifts costs and losses to users.
@Phil in some ways it's similar in some ways it's different. to a lot of people, the existence of nuclear weapons is a moral abomination, it's much worse than, say, merely burning the money or wasting the resources. and yet those people do have to pay too. that's life in a shared political community. i oppose the Federal death penalty. i still help pay for the chair.
@Phil no. it is no more slavery to tax to support USAID than it is to tax to support our nuclear arsenal. (LOTS of people object to paying for our nuclear arsenal.)
@Phil see, i disagree! i think we do extraordinary things by collective action, which can be enabled only by some degree of compulsory contribution.
i certainly support the nuclear deterrent. i also support the work of USAID.
how should we resolve our disagreement? people can have different philosophical and policy views.
that's what CONGRESS is for in our Constitutional system.
@Phil i do what i can. but we join together in the provision of public goods, supported by compulsory taxation, because it is impractical for us individually to do these things and relying solely on voluntarism encourages free-riding. why don't you buy your own nuclear deterrent?
@Phil it doesn't give the president the power to refuse its laws. which not only acknowledge AID, but demand it do stuff, and allocate funds for that purpose.
@Phil yeah. you see, i'm not so zen. death awaits us all, but in the meantime, we build societies, which give us extraordinary benefits but also impose upon us positive obligations. when we destroy the sinews of that society, when we shirk obligations we easily could fulfill, i think that's called doing evil. i'm not so zen about it.
this is what "efficiency" looks like. https://im-in.space/@Chip_Unicorn/114077708550331811
@Phil No, it's not, at least not unless the Supreme Court takes us all the way to "unified executive" madness in defiance of all of our history and the plain text of the Constitution, which gives Congress clear roles in the structuring if the executive branch.
As for now, you're just mistaken, but I have no interest in wasting another day going around on it.
@Phil would you feel the same if a hospital you relied upon for dialysis suddenly shut down while no alternative was available? no one owes anything to anyone in your view, i guess. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/26/along-thai-myanmar-border-trumps-decision-to-suspend-foreign-aid-is-deadly-ntwnfb
@Phil we have been through this, and you are delusional. Congress has not agreed, USAID remains law, and the Supreme Court has not weighed in at all other than to stay a requirement to restore some funding pending a hearing Friday.
perhaps Congress *ex post* will bless this lawlessness, we'll see. but as for now, it is black letter plain obvious illegal.
@Phil lots of lying by that account. remember those condoms? $8B that was really $8M.
when you add the shit you don't like up, it's a tiny fraction of a big number.
@Phil if you suddenly stopped feeding one of the families you feed, without any notice at all, when you were perfectly capable of continuing for some time, so that other arrangements could be made, and people starved, yeah, that'd be something like murder. if you did it while committing some other crime — like taking a Congressional mandated agency to the woodchipper — it would be felony murder.
@Phil you are living in denial. USAID works via NGOs and also directly. the US distributes food, operates, funds hospitals, does myriad things. there was a humanitarian waiver by Rubio, but logistics is disrupted because providers who think the waiver applies to them can't get resources via more intermediate workers.
there is a lot of dependency. if we were going to break it, we could have planned a transition, made space for other providers.
these people are murderers of absolute innocents.
@Phil it is. it's probably not murdering the people you mean it to, though (which would include me, i guess). i don't think you have any particular animus against the kids who are dying in Burundi for lack of high nutrient peanut butter manufactured only in the USA, distributed by USAID. https://time.com/7258248/us-foreign-aid-burundi-patients-essay/
DOGE is murder.
it's unsurprising that Musk and Trump are such enthusiastic fans of LLMs.
they hallucinate in roughly the same way.