The best predictor of future events is past experience.
Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
Similarly, some people always think that the current president will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never ever be able to get into power. And these people have been so far always wrong.
I’m not saying it can’t happen this time, but in my opinion, it is unlikely.
The real skeptical in me says it doesn’t even matter, no matter who you vote for, you’ll get John McCain.
> You being alive today is the best predictor of you being alive tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.
An unprecedented glioblastoma diagnosis would predict otherwise. When the facts in evidence become extraordinary, one must adapt the adage accordingly.
That's the point: you can "prove" anything by saying "the best predictor of future events is past experience" and then pointing to the obvious wrong past experience from which to extrapolate.
I'm unsure where you thought we were talking about "proving" anything with these statements? Forming illogical counter-examples doesn't show that the original premise was false, just that one can form clearly wrong examples of this.
No one has ever lived 150 years. Therefore there is nothing that can be predictive of living 150 years. One is starting with something that is known to be incorrect and then working backwards to phrase it in a similar way.
What do you do when the model you know to be best ("past experience") consistently fails to predict anything after an agent of chaos is introduced to the mix? Do you still stand by it? Can you really say past experience consistently predicted the events of this year alone?
If you're in the middle of a nuclear winter do you still insist summer is just a few months away based on past experience? And if you hear someone saying it will you believe it's anything other than disingenuous or ignorant?
I'm not sure how you can say every President left office peacefully when four of them left by way of being assassinated, but I do see that's not quite the point you're trying to make. I'm not sure why we'd be so narrow as to only examine US history, rather than history at large unless we're operating under some guise of American Exceptionalism.
Nixon?
Very technically left office peacefully but he would have been impeached and removed had he not.
Strange to note that his crimes would hardly warrant mention in the context of the current occupant of the oval office.
That's a very... pre-1748 kind of philosophy. Hume, Keynes, Russell, Popper and others have written at length about the limitations of prediction from past experience. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
Even if we accept that extrapolation is the best you can do, you'd still need to justify why the domain of "past experience" is exactly wide enough to generalise across current and previous US presidencies, but not so wide as to include even one of the numerous populist strongman takeovers in non-US political history. Proof by American Exceptionalism, perhaps?
This is why black swan events can be so devastating.
I saw another comment here about a month ago that said many people tend to round a very small risk down to zero risk. The comments were related to driving and the risk of serious injury or death that most people discount, but I think it also applies to other areas of risk in life, too, for many people.
Exceptional events are low probability by definition, and thus people tend to ignore the possibility, assuming instead that the status quo will continue to exist.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
That is false. On January 6th 2021 the sitting president fomented a mob to violently keep him in power.
If we’re going off your rule of past events being the best prediction for future events then we should all be shitting ourselves over the fact that this guy isn’t leaving peacefully
> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully
Considering the current US President tried to have his VP and Congress killed by an angry mob if they didn't hand over a second presidential term to him, we should expect the same this time, but better organized and with ~8 years of planning.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
I think you are forgetting a date that happened on the 6th day after the start of 2021. I would most certainly not call that pieceful in any way shape or form (and yes, I count that as part of leaving office, being the certification of the next president). By your logic this would mean that it is unlikely that he will peacefully leave office.
> Similarly, some people always think that the current president will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never ever be able to get into power.
As far as I know, this is the first time a president has completely disregarded civility, declared marshall law under false pretenses (not false alarm, specifically false pretenses), talked about crowning himself king, and various forms of rigging future elections.
So the fact that some people (allegedly) thought Clinton/Bush/Obama/Biden would crown themselves is pretty irrelevant.
>> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
That's why you're currently reading HN with Internet Explorer on your IBM desktop running OS/2 2025.
The adage about history as an indicator only applies to the steady state. It compeltely breaks down when with events that are so rare as to be unpredictable when they have extreme - good or bad - consequences.
ex:
"The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology."
And I would argue the world today isn't even close to the edge of the spectrum when it comes to lack of predictability or how extreme the outcomes may be.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully,
That's not how I would describe Jan 6 2021 not to mention Trump's other efforts to subvert the election results, and refusal to accept the results to this day.
> some people always think that the current president will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never ever be able to get into power.
Really? When has there been such a public outcry before? There have never been "No Kings" protests before, because they weren't needed. Even if you hated Reagan, Clinton or Obama, you knew he wasn't going to try to run for a third term, whereas Trump keeps publicly saying he might.
Not when you take into account how Trump has behaved in his second term and that there's an authoritarian playbook he's following that has worked in other contemporary countries like Hungary. What other president has refused to acknowledged they lost an election, and refused to acknowledge that they're not permitted a third term by the Constitution? There are former Trump officials from his first term who warned about his reelection.
What's going to doom US democracy is all the people in denial that an authoritarian coup could and is happening in America.
> Your use case is totally out of scope of my project.
You have a completely different use case from the OP, but still had no problem telling them that they were doing it wrong, so it’s pretty funny to see you use this line of defense for your choice.
For a legacy ISA like arm, the less worse compromise would be to use the project from the creator of ffmpeg and q-emu would did already wrote it, but in plain and simple C, namely compiling with most, if not all, "ok" C compilers out-there...
>All the 5G conspiracy theories are just a reaction to how aggressively and undemocratically 5G was pushed.
What the hell does this even mean? Are we upset that carriers and handset manufacturers adopting 5G wasn't put up for a vote? Did adoption of 5G cause some great harm to people?
They exaggerated a little bit on the timeline. But 20+ years ago 1gbps became standard, and today there are signs of change but 1gbps is still standard.
There is not any meaningful sense in which 2.5gb ethernet is "standard". There are no TVs with 2.5gb ethernet ports. Or even 1gb ports. Yet they all have WiFi 5 or better.
2.5GbE only started gaining steam when cheap Realtek chips became available (especially since the Intel chips that were on the market earlier were buggy). Those have been adopted by almost all desktop motherboards now on the market, and most laptops that still have Ethernet. Embedded systems are lagging because they're always behind technologically and because they have longer design cycles, but it's pretty clear that most devices designed in the last year or two are moving beyond 1GbE and 2.5GbE will be the new baseline going forward.
> It is bizarre that they are putting 100mbps Ethernet ports on TVs though.
It's a few pennies cheaper and i'm sure they have some data showing 70%+ will just use WiFi. TCL in particular doesn't even have very good/stable drivers for their 10/100 NIC; there's a ton of people on the Home Assistant forums that have noticed that their android powered smart TV will just ... stop working / responding on the network until it's rebooted.
I’m sure you’re right, but the fact that it’s almost certainly literal pennies makes it very lame. Lack of stable drivers is also ridiculous given how long gbps Ethernet has been around.
> It is bizarre that they are putting 100mbps Ethernet ports on TVs though.
It's not that bizarre. About the only media one might have access to that is above 100mbps is 4k blu-ray rips which can hit peaks above 100m; but TVs don't really cater to that. They're really trying to be your conduit to commercial streaming services which do not encode at that high of a bitrate (and even if they did, would gracefully degrade to 100Mbps). And then you can save on transformers for the two pairs that are unused for 100base-tx.
Streaming services are extremely compressed. Netflix only recommendeds 15mbps for 4k, even. A naive straight quadrupling of that for 8k is only 60mbps, and in reality they'll just dial up the compression anyway and probably use a 30mbps stream.
op here. I've come to rely on overseas news, plus alternative domestic US news. I won't mention my favorites, but they are sites operated by former reputable corporate journalists who were fired and went independent to their own sites, or to substack, and they rely upon donations or very light advertising.
So I agree with you, not a disaster, but a change in preferences?
I can reduce reported crime rates by simply not doing anything about the crime that is reported for extended periods of time. People understand that reporting does nothing and so they stop bothering to do it.
Except stores have continued to report shrink, not crime stats, this whole time.
That reported number did not go up, which was bad for the narrative they want to push, so the National Retail Federation, the largest lobbying organization for retail who publishes shrink stats for decades has suddenly stopped publishing that stat.
Wasn't 2010 the year when you had to have something like a PhD and 20 references to get a job flipping burgers at McDonalds? That's the worst economic year I can recall in my life, or maybe it was 2009.
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