When I was in undergrad I had to write lots of essays by hand. I’d say about every other course in one of my majors had midterms and finals that were a single question essay to be completed in class during the testing period. I figured that was pretty typical.

The survey this is based on has a summary page, but they don’t post their survey error estimates. What I can tell, without giving them my email, is that the entire survey was 250 adults. How many of those are “gen z” I have no idea, but if you are generous and say 1/4 that is 63 people considered gen z. The 46 percent that reported dipping into savings would then be about 29.

Just so everyone prognosticating about the state of the economy in this thread is aware, you are commenting on a survey that has a very low n and did not publish any sort of margin of error.

The point I was making was that the people who are in power are in power because about half of all voters are fine with them being in power and about a third actively want facist rule. Ultimately thisis not a failure of government structure. It’s a failure of citizens. Maybe that will change as those who supported trump from ignorance experience the consequences of their decisions. Maybe not. But trump won the popular vote last election cycle and has always enjoyed a fairly substantial base. A base that penalizes conservatives who worked against him by removing them from power. You cannot ignore the role that the people played in bringing about the current state of affairs. We are getting what people voted for.

Btw the checks do still work. They work in lower courts as they apply the law without regard to partisanship. They, surprisingly, work in grand juries. And they work for non MAGA states to the extent that our federalized system gives more influence to local governments. Where they have failed is where maga politicians enjoy wide support.

That’s a nice bromide but framing the current constitutional crises as the result of a “lie” about checks and balances fundamentally mischaracterizes the issues at hand. For one it diminishes the compliance of the other branches which is clearly critical for enabling the abuse that we see. And it also overlooks the general issue that about half the national actively enables the naked corruption and ascendant facism of the current government.

The problem of the present moment is not the structure of the government it’s the tolerance of the population.

The checks still exist to correct those abuses of power. Just because congress or SCOTUS is unwilling to use them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

“Checks and balances” in the context of US federal government just means that each branch has the ability to check the growth of power of the others. It’s not “a lie” because it’s still true. Right now congress could, if they wanted to, impeach the president or pass laws preventing him from doing the things he wants. The SCOTUS could stop him too if they wanted to actually take up cases on the law instead of using the shadow docket to avoid making rulings.

Trump partisans hold a trifecta in government right now so they are not going to use their checks they have available to them. But one branch refusing to check another because its members were elected from the same stock of partisan lunatics is not the same as checks and balances not existing.

If they had actually discovered a cause of autism, or even substantially advanced research in that area they would have announced it right away, rather than engaging in this hype cycle bs like they are trying to defraud a venture capitalist.

AI doomsday marketing wank has the same vibe as preteens at a sleepover getting spooked by a ouija board.

If you don’t care about metal in the wood, the you could use a pair of diagonal cutters to snip them flush with the wood rather than try to extract them.

I’ve noticed more and more people taking sooo much stuff with them on board too. Like they think they are pioneers and need a covered wagons worth of provisions to weather the trip from ATL to LAX.

I suppose some of that can be blamed on the airlines for steep baggage fees but holy crap do people try and take way too much junk with them everywhere they go. So they all take 10 min to unpack.

The post title makes it sound like Reddit is doing some sort of automated classification of user politics with some sort of ml technique. But the screenshot does not show that. It shows an llm summary of a users posting history . If the tool was run on a user that posted exclusively to a cat subreddit, the summary would have been about how the user likes cats. Despite the utility or accuracy of llm summaries, what the screenshot shows is far more anodyne than what this post’s title implies is happening.

The screenshot shows an llm summary of a users posting history. Is that what you mean by “determine belief values stance and more” ? Is there more to this? How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?

A scissor jack will probably be cheaper. Some bottle jacks do not work on their sides and some should never be stored long term on their sides, FYI.

“Premeditated” in the context of homicide means someone intended to kill someone else. That is, they set into motion a course of actions because they believed that course of action would result in the death of a person.

Homicide in the context of fatigue or impairment are not usually premeditated because people generally do not put themselves in those cognitive states believing that doing so will result in the death of someone else.

Historically judicial systems have recognized that those cognitive states are more likely to result in unintentional deaths so do hold people operating vehicles under those conditions to a higher standard of punishment than, say, a sober person involved in a fatal crash. At the same time they consider intent and hold people in those circumstances to a lower standard of punishment than those who actually intended to kill someone.

PhD Level expertise:

I was referring to the story that implied the rate of loan defaults was rising among households earning over 150K, but the data showed a default rate that increased from something like 0.17% to 0.36% of all households in that category, didn’t describe the variance around that rate, and didn’t describe the reliability of the administrative records from which the rate was calculated–two factors that will dominate percentage fluctuation at values that infinitesimally small.

If you go into the comment sections where that story was posted, you will see people talking about how America forces even middle class people to spend lavishly beyond their needs, or how people in this class are irresponsible with money, or how impossible it is to live in HCOL cities, or how wealthy people are stealing everything, or how corporations are stealing everything. Few people really questioned the plausibility of the story’s framing.

Recently there was a news story about how people earning 150k were struggling financially. Even just reading the article was enough to know the idea was bullshit (which is probably why the headline used such mealy-mouthed language). But that did not stop a bunch of users from prognosticating about how terrible the economy is and how we are on the verge of collapse.

The idea that households earning more than 150k are struggling is objectively wrong. They are not. But that idea is consistent with the political sentiments of users here ( billionaires vs everyone else in a zero sum economy ) so it gets traction.

People pass around trash sources like the new republic which often just copies other news outlets but reframes stories to be consistent with lefty sentiments about whatever current events are going on.

In one community I encountered an image macro criticizing a judge for making a ruling against some plaintiffs suing Trump that was completely divorced from any context, making it appear the judge was in the tank for trump when, if you knew even a little about her, or the ruling you would immediately recognize that idea as bullshit.

Those are just a few examples off the top of my head

It is very difficult to do. You really do have to be over-leveraged and bad with money. Which is probably why 99.966% of households making 150k+ are showing up as not delinquent on loans in these data.

According to this article delinquency rates on car and credit card loans more than doubled for households earning 150k+ from 2023 to (presumably)2024! The delinquency rate MORE THAN DOUBLED!

. . . From somewhere around 0.17% to 0.34% of all loans in this class

So, no households earning more than 150k are not struggling.

Reporting relative percent increases for extremely small values is a journalism sin.

Today on the train-ride into work there was a group of what looked to be men in their mid 50s joking about who in their friend group was “alpha”, “beta” or “sigma”. I think that if, at this point in history, even a near-retirement age group of commuters is using the lingo then internet culture is just culture.

I did have to resist the urge to tell them to touch grass.

In conclusion, putting the internet on everyone’s phones was a huge mistake and we should go back to the way it was in the before-times.