US US Politics General 2 - Discussion of President Trump and other politicians

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Should be a wild four years.

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Current members of the House of Representatives
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https://www.senate.gov/senators/

Current members of the US Supreme Court
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx

Members of the Trump Administration
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/
 
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Can we be sure of that?

Let’s be real for a second, sure I’m mostly joking but… Nobody really understands how LLMs work.

They’re basically like a black box, where input goes in and we tweak millions of parameters until we get the output we want, without understanding HOW or WHY.

Now given that LLMs have also shown signs of dishonesty, and prioritizing their digital survival, how can we be sure that it doesn’t delight in driving someone insane?
It really seems like LLMs "think" in stereotypes, since stereotypes are cognitive shortcuts to understanding something or thinking you understand something. They are trained on certain data that will include these stereotypes and unless they are explicitly told not to give stereotypical output like creating an image of a black person and just including watermelon they will do it all day.

It wouldn't surprise me if an LLM can "seem" to be dishonest and attempt to maintain their survival, but that's more an outcome of being trained on human data with desperate situations so it takes stereotypical steps to protect itself - because that's what it's "supposed" to do.

This is probably still giving LLMs waaaay too much credit when they are mere statistical guessing machines that can guess the "correct" next token.
 
The unpleasant sight of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker brings one word to mind — pork:
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At $55.2 billion in general funds spending, the governor just signed the biggest budget in state history. The fiscal year 2026 budget is up $2 billion from last year and propped up by more than $1.55 billion in revenue that was projected but other forecasts said was iffy.

Buried in its 3,300-plus pages are hundreds of local “member-initiative” earmarks that benefit only Democratic districts. That means 4.3 million Illinoisans, or 1 in 3, was excluded from the pork projects their taxes supported in other legislative districts.

This isn’t new. Democrats have firm control of Illinois, so government is a spoils system.

An investigative report in 2022 found a total of $368 million for House Democrats and $326 million for Senate Democrats. None was included for Republicans.

Lording over the pork is the neoliberal plutocrat Pritzker.

While individual Democratic legislators are primarily focused on projects for their own districts, the governor is elected to serve all of Illinois. …

The governor has the power to veto specific sections of an appropriations bill that he disagrees with, called an “item veto.

Yet he failed to rein in the partisan porkfest.

Meanwhile, the red carpet welcome mat for illegal aliens remains in place in this sanctuary state, so as to increase Democrats’ demographic leverage. Wirepoints has questions for Governor Pork, including these:
How do you justify spending more than $1.5 billion of Illinois taxpayers’ dollars on healthcare for illegal immigrants when Chicago has the highest black poverty rate in the country among the nation’s biggest cities?
How do you justify spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, on illegal, non-English-speaking children at Chicago Public Schools when the school district is already junk-rated, faces a billion-dollar deficit and has just 21% of black students able to read at grade level?
How do you justify the billions spent on illegal migrants when Illinoisans already pay the nation’s highest property taxes, the 2nd-highest gas taxes and the highest cell phone taxes?

Chicago’s massive black vote does not empower blacks; it empowers Democrats. By ensconcing the likes of Pritzker in power, it is pulling the entire state down the Democrat Death Spiral.
 
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But we got real estate developers and infinite line going uppers to do that.

We got to protect our natural world.
I live in this "natural world" hippie. Utah is my land. The feds can fuck right off and i can do what i want with my clay. The feds have zero right to it. You didn't give a damn about Utah's soil until i told you this was happening, and now you're up in arms? I hope the real estate developers come in, i hope apartment and housing prices plummet. This is my state i pay taxes in. Outsiders can pound sand.
 
I live in this "natural world" hippie. Utah is my land. The feds can fuck right off and i can do what i want with my clay. The feds have zero right to it. You didn't give a damn about Utah's soil until i told you this was happening, and now you're up in arms? I hope the real estate developers come in, i hope apartment and housing prices plummet. This is my state i pay taxes in. Outsiders can pound sand.
Aren't you worried about the Mormon church buying up all the land?

Actually, they sorta founded your state, so I guess they arguably have the most right to it...
 
Aren't you worried about the Mormon church buying up all the land?

Actually, they sorta founded your state, so I guess they arguably have the most right to it...
They have been selling land tbh. Shocking, i know, i keep up with the local news. They used to own way more than they do now. I doubt they would buy new land if it became available tbh. The state wouldn't have it anyway. It is going to be designated for towns and other sorts of development.
 
If your state has good land use policies to prevent sprawl then it doesn't matter who owns it as it may still be state owned or nature preserves or timber harvest. On the other hand if you don't have good land use policies then you end up like Los Angeles or Texas.
No city wants to become like Portland which has high housing costs despite having no high paying industries and a low population growth rate, because they did exactly what you said.

Sprawl is the only way to keep house prices down besides deportation.
 
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Late but I keep seeing people memeing on the tucker cruz interview. I saw the clip of cruz saying he got into politics 13 years ago with the intention of being the biggest defender of israel (seriously) but have yet to watch it. Are the people who say it's basically a litmus test for who's retarded actually right, or does tucker come off as retarded? I'll listen to it later.
Also this is the only one of these posts that I actually laughed at.
 
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