Relatable. If you think of something evil and stupid that can be done with software, you can be almost sure someone out there with piles of money, no morals, unassailable entitlement and indelible optimism is doing the same.

Massie is not dead. As far as everyone (including him) reports, there hasn't been an attempt to kill him. He's been opposing Trump long enough now that if a few dozen other GOP had gone with him, Trump would no longer be in a position to harm them by now.

It's generally reported that the anglophone world won't accept female leadership for historical reasons. This is weird, since almost all the modern anglophone world would speak Spanish if it weren't for someone named Elisabeth

My IDE has been enshittified

Our entire theory of markets, politics, public health and social order at this point is the Looney Tunes trope where if you haven't learned about gravity yet you can walk on air.

Either/or

I read that Trump voters "feel betrayed" by war. Is this religious devotion to not breaking kayfabe? He's been a lunatic bully his whole life. He's promoted "manifest destiny" for at least 6 years. No number of "dove" lies printed by the NYT could convince anyone this guy wouldn't start wars.

The challenge for the US press has reached the point of "we can die, yes including you, the editors, and real soon" vs "you can admit that not all positions people hold are equally good and not all beliefs are equally true." It's not clear which side they'll pick.

Me: I enjoy tech anachronisms (bikes. fountain pens) Voltmeter: 9V alkaline battery plz Me: Not like that.

Yep

Why did Dainse (the least mustache-twirling of the MT delegation) resign?

The weirdness will escalate until accusations of weirdness reduce

The weirdest thing about US political psychology is that people understand arguing to take something from anyone is the same as arguing it should be taken from them about stuff they don't have, like tax-free income over $1M/year, but not about stuff they do, like the vote or due process.

The most charitable view is that this is a side-effect of techno-optimism. My view is that in most cases it is the _purpose_ of techno-optimism (Not just climate change. If you believe tech improves over time you aren't allowed/obligated to try to solve any problems caused by wealth concentration)

For all the but how can we afford space exploration folks…this means we’ve already spent more on this war that started last week than Cassini cost in the 26 years it took to build, launch, and operate it.

"Murdering 165 girls is a distraction from the Epstein files." Um... what do people imagine is in the Epstein files? Suppose we find out the he murdered 3 more girls. What happens after that?

My wife mentioned that this is the one week when she can ride to work in daylight. I was briefly confused, since the days keep getting longer, but she's right, because of the clock change. We get a brief taste of light before the choices of our culture shove us back into darkness for another month.

Apparently our ranchers want state-mandated country-of-origin labelling on beef because they hope to compete on nationalism where they can't compete on quality or price. This is OK, IMO, but can we please get a rider on this law that forbids these people from claiming to be libertarian?

The reason so many of them could say "Trump won't start wars" and now say "I voted for this" is that they never believed Trump was peaceful, and never cared if he was either. They believed lying would recruit some useful idiots to help them elect Trump. They were right. It did.

There are two kinds of self interest, one that's not only self, and one that's not really interest.

People do what you pay them to do. You pay corporate executives to make stock prices go up, not to make better products. You pay politicians to get re-elected, not to govern well. You pay reporters to get a bigger audience, not to tell the truth. And so forth. Be aware of what you pay people to do

Combine the trans driver's license bullshit with the voter ID requirement bullshit, and you get systematic disenfranchisement of a group.

To whatever extent LLM code generators will reduce software companies' need for programmers, they will also reduce users' need for software companies. Coding agents could produce a new open source radiation. That needs to happen, to offset the worst thing about AI -- its dominant owners.

Or, more exactly, the American Nazi Party still has a slight Republican problem (Most of which is named Thomas Massie)

OK, I was sure texting 2fa codes was the stupidest security, but I was wrong. Merrill SENDS FUCKING CLEARTEXT EMAILS This would just be a sideshow of pathetic internet security slapstick comedy, except they are a bank and my employer forces me to use them.

Ding! Covid was proof that society could make the big changes needed to respond to a crisis or build a better world, but we really really don't wanna and many of us will throw a hissy if anyone asks again.

I misgender everyone, their cat, and their car when I'm trying to speak too fast, because my Spanish isn't great.

Some time back someone on here recommended I read "The Individualists," in response to me ranting about how TF a so-called libertarian could support Trump. Great Recommendation. Very interesting read. But the libertarian position it presents is still "free markets, free migration, and peace."

I'm used to conservatism being all Wilhoit's law all the time, but the new US conservatism is surprising because the protected-but-not-bound class is openly just "rich guys" and many voters seem to freely accept being in the bound-but-not-protected class.

This has more weight if we can get established Dems to say it, and hold each other accountable to it. Every Dem who expects VBNMW support this fall should, for example, publicly condemn Schumer for refusing this contract.

Repeated inputs with increasing proximity over time are the most salient.

most of the time, the problem isn’t getting information out, it’s getting people to pay attention to it before the next ten million things hit

Putting evilmorons.com in charge of everything was a bad idea

Barring some very strange event (like a successful infiltration of the Republican primary), everyone has to vote Democrat in 2028. Not doing so is morally and rationally indefensible. It means you don't care about your own wellbeing or about other people's lives. (aka "Stancil is right")

I googled "bayesian gimbal lock" (which I've used as slang) to see if anyone else used it. AI happily said this "generally refers" to the literal application of bayesian reasoning to euler angles. So that's a (very poorly enunciated) "no" :)

OTOH, if you *are* MAGA, and you are posting here, your best available angle is "all politicians suck. stay home" This is the exact message that got Bush Jr and Trump 1 in.

"networks are not built by simply throwing facts into a bag: it would be more accurate to say that they are built by throwing concepts into a bag," --The XBRL Book

The modern political axis that matters most is whether we consider the ruling class to be dragons or lindwyrms. (they're dragons)

The drunk uncle theory. You don’t argue with the casually homophobic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner to change his mind; you argue so that the closeted cousin at the kids table knows there’s safe people and better possibilities out there

Every Montanan GOP voter who calls themselves a libertarian needs to chant to themselves "I elected a guy who says 'we [the state] don’t tolerate defiance'" until they understand what their own politics really are. www.foxnews.com/politics/mon...

US Progressives: wealth separation is the most important thing in politics. US Conservatives: Yes. It's how we know who the rightful aristocracy are!

Submitted without comment

Incredible choice of shot for this banner image/headline pairing, even by North American Car Brain standards.

I guess Thomas Massie should have mentioned that in addition to being a safe gun handler and good swimmer, he also doesn't enjoy eating brightly colored frogs.

if you think she failed and you think she bears that responsibility, fine, i won't argue with you — but trump was a known quantity and nothing about his first 14 months has been especially surprising. shocking, enraging, destructive depressing, sure, but all of that was anticipated and warned about

This. Given informed, rational, self interested voters who care about outcomes, it would have been essentially impossible for any candidate to lose to Trump. The candidate might still be terrible. If so that should result in the GOP running almost-anyone-but-Trump and winning next time.

I will now be somewhat more conscious that I must keep death daily before my eyes when working with SQLite. I was not entirely unaware of this need in the past, but I didn't know it was a Code.

The good/bad news is that more creative workers and software developers need to start collectives and publishing companies and product companies without taking funding. It's a pain in the ass, but it's possible. There's no beneficent daddy.

Ironically enough, a higher fraction of naturalized citizens than native-born citizens will have proof of their citizenship on hand

Oh hell yeah. Let's oust that bastard. www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/congres...