Dear God, he's dumb enough to make me want to defend the UK.

Duverger's Law doesn't care how mad you are at the current Democratic Party, regrettably, but one of the rare benefits of how we pick party candidates is that we don't need to barge into smoke-filled rooms to get better candidates. We can recruit, donate to, and vote for them.

Yes? In a democracy people interested in a state senate seat (not the Congressional seat) have the right to run for any seat they're qualified for. If people don't like them, they can run themselves or support another candidate. Under CA's top-2 system, her opponent will probably be another Dem!

Hell, I drove a 1996 Honda Accord until the brakes gave out in January 2012.

Checked X and Truth Social and didn't see it there either. I'll eat crow if this stupidity is real, but I don't think it is. Also, now I'm glad I groused about the Laffer curve in last week's cannabis law class so any classmates who can see my screen know I'm not a Trump supporter. 😂

I'm skeptical. Took a quick look at the White House website and his TruthSocial and X accounts and didn't see anything on it (and also now I feel like I need a shower).

I think the closest modern comparison would likely be Ted Cruz. A demagogue who has a particular audience who adores him, but is utterly despised by his own Senate colleagues and thus deprived of influence.

I mean, this was an active argument on this website last month when the strategy was proposed and implemented. “Let them touch the stove” was a common theme!

I’m not the person to tease out the implications of this, but it strikes me as important. Our language distinguishes us from other living things, but no longer machines. Machines, however, do what you tell them, for better or worse. Exercising the ability to say no is, for now, uniquely human.

If you told me to write lyrics to a song set to the rhythm of “Modern Major General” about the history of dentistry, I’d ignore your absurd request. An LLM would cheerfully do it for you, no questions asked. People have been using that to catch out chatbots and automated messages that use AI.

I think most people are familiar with the Turing Test, but here’s the Wiki just in case: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_... LLMs pass the Turing Test as people before their development would think of it. Their output sounds like human language.

So now we’ve developed a new test: make a silly command.

Reminds me of Mark Cuban claiming young men invest in crypto because they don’t have bank accounts. Being unbanked or underbanked is a real issue, but there isn’t some magical way women have an easier time getting bank accounts!

Obama was also able to overcome this by being both a fairly new Senator and a once-in-a-generation political talent. Not a strategy that’s easy to replicate!

I like Chris Van Hollen a lot and at this point he might be the only Senator I’d even look at for a Presidential primary vote, but my current inclination is that he’d be better as either Secretary of State or in a Senate leadership position.

Andy Beshear comes to mind and seems potentially interested.