Free speech absolutism is a nonsensical position.

Wow if Marc Andreesen said then it must be true.

“Peace deal”

The latest demand for Ukraine to just completely surrender.

How can such an authoritarian state be compared to Switzerland?

Its not, but we have a government that sees starving the population as a political tool.

Can you find any examples, ever, of the government threatening stores for giving discounts?

They are trying to starve people as a political tool.

Not for food stamps, but here's the feds going after a pharmacy for gift cards and co-pay waivers from 2015: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ednc/pr/pharmacy-company-agreed...

Here's one for a pharmaceutical company, the details aren't quite clear but it sounds like they were funding co-pay assistance programs for their medications specifically but not others: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/teva-pharmaceuticals-agre...

Here's a broader NPR article from 2008 covering the same idea: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/09/6091508...

Here's a 2024 article on the possibility of subsidizing outpatient housing for drug rehab being a violation of the statutes: https://www.startribune.com/many-minnesotans-in-addiction-tr...

Here's a attorney website noting that any exchange of cash for EBT benefits is a violation of the law: https://usda.attorney/snap-violation/ and a discount that is explicitly for EBT users is almost certainly a violation of that.

Realistically the fact that there is an entire process for getting a waiver for "incentives" for SNAP recipients (https://www.fns.usda.gov/form/snap-incentives), and that particular site has been up since before Trump took office and this one from 2023 for a government program that specifically says you must apply for a waiver: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/healthy-incentives suggests that this is another one of these cases in this administration where the brokenness of the system that has always been there is only finally coming to light for a lot of people.

Conservatives were not wrong when they said (paraphrasing) that a government powerful enough to give you everything is a government powerful enough to take away everything too. It's just in this weird timeline we find ourselves in, it's the "conservative" party that's being the monster they feared for decades.

Maybe don’t let assholes openly spout racist bigoted rhetoric.

They should have tossed him. They didn’t and now the way get to deal with the fallout of tacitly endorsing his positions.

lol, Silicon Valley has always been evil.

For certain values of "always". I feel many of the original tech startups were genuinely interested in research, pushing limits, etc. Intel/AMD weren't "evil" as far as I can tell - nor the EDA infrastructure.

The social media era (Fbook) is when it started feeling like "majority of new companies are evil". Of course, if Palantir is Sauron, Oracle is Morgoth..

/Almost/ always

I'll give you Xerox.

The rest ...

I was thinking back even farther: Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, Community Memory, etc.

Silicon valley is a place.

Government contracting is an activity.

The two should be very far apart and yet somehow they're joined at the hip.

Always have been.

In large part, government contracting is what created Silicon Valley. https://steveblank.substack.com/p/if-i-told-you-id-have-to-k...

Government contracting is the only reason silicon valley exists. It'd just be another valley.

Alas... it's unclear who you're replying to. Are you calling me a liar or Vance a liar (or some other poster here a liar.) I think Vance is more of a Bullshitter in the Frankfurt meaning of the term. Me? I'm more of a liar. If I propagate an untruth, I usually know it's an untruth and am doing it for a specific purpose. That being said... I do try to limit the number of lies I tell. I also try not to lie to myself, but that's the most vexxing of all. Figuring out the untruths you believe because it makes your day easier or frees you from having to help someone you would rather not help is hard.

Not that I'm implying you're a Liar or Bullshitter, but we're all bozos on this bus and give a sinner a break.

But specifically, I am not lying when I say that some people have cast doubts as to the degree of poverty Vance lived in as a child. And if you're saying that the people who say Vance didn't live in abject poverty for most of his childhood are lying, then I don't know what to tell you. We all have to choose what we believe. Some people believe vaccines cause autism. The data supporting this assertion seems kinda thin when I look at it. But having tutored a number of pre-med students through stats classes, I'm not confident members of the AMA are the people who should be doing medical research (thankfully that is changing recently as we get more MD/PhD programs where they teach experimental design.) But I digress...

This seems like one of those "fact resistant" issues and I apologize for bringing it up. People on both sides of the "is J.D. Vance a poop-head" debate should understand there's plenty of mis-information out there and while some people may believe he's a cynical charlatan banking coin on the suffering of people in Appalachia, others believe he is bringing light to a largely under-reported pandemic of systemic under-investment in rural quarters of our country.

It's probably a good idea to examine your own beliefs and biases, and maybe this is a good touch-stone to begin that process. Why do you think Vance is a dork? Why do you think Vance is a valiant defender of social justice for an under-served community?

Even if your robotaxi only manages 2000 rides that’s still down to just 10 cents a ride to cover the cost of hardware.

It’s nothing.

All taxis are variants of mass produced cars, that will not be different for robotaxis. The mass market is the enabler and there every tenth of cent counts.