I'm old enough to remember a world where "What was Reagan's opinion of tariffs?" and "Did Reagan give this speach?" would just be historical facts we could all agree on, not a partisan religious debate.

"costs nothing" is important. If we start acting like there's a sunk cost associated to the first candidate (or second, or third), a year before the election, that rules out running good candidates. That's not specific to Platner. That process can't work well, systematically.

Holywood should respond to MAGA with work-to-rule. Make some films where the white male main characters talk like Trump, Kirk, and Thiel and act like ICE. (use exact words and real incidents, and make that publoc after the inevitable complaints)

i kinda think part of this is that Trump really likes the idea of a trilateral bargain in which Russia gets a chunk of Ukraine, China gets Taiwan, and USA gets ??? without interference from each other, and he's just having a really hard time identifying possible ??? targets

More of this

congress sounds so cool i wish it was real

"you get what you pay for" is not a monotonic relationship for most things. If you pay too much by enough, you get something worse. Many people comment on this about houses. It's true there, but they don't hold a candle to cloud compute tools.

Are tech executives paying attention to the trend where business-freindly magazines like "Fortune" now print headline text like "yearning for the world before tech ruined everything"? Do they care?

Online communism discourse is the weirdest. It mixes principled communists, people in real financial need, and a bunch of downwardly mobile wealthy underemployed, and you don't initially know who's which.

"Financialization" means decision makers don't focus on real outcomes and producers don't focus on goods and services. The more we do it, the worse GDP gets as a measure of wellbeing (and it's already bad for any developed economy)

Hey crypto folks, this is the moment. The government is shut down. Fiat currency is running dry. It's time to run the whole thing on $TRUMP. Go for it. You've got this.

3. While big oil, big tobacco, etc. serve as well-known cautionary tales, social media research poses novel challenges for independent researchers—perhaps most notably, access to the study system itself. It's like trying to study climate change if Exxon-Mobile owned all the world's thermometers.

Preventing oil drilling in ANWR was one of the first large environmentalist campaigns I was active in. I'm not a young guy, but it was already an old issue by then. We won that time, and dozens of other times, but eventually they won, once (during Trump 1) Fuck this shit.

I think it's better to be more sincere. It turns out it's very hard to do this on the internet, though. Everything that sincerely needs to be said is just too obvious and stupid. Buying things is optional. The people saying wind turbines harm whales never really gave a shit about whales.

Buying (most) things is optional!!

A left wing politics that is oriented around your rights and identity as an individual consumer instead of your responsibilities as a member of a social or political community is basically a left aesthetic pasted onto an internalized neoliberal ontology.

The point of questioning every established conclusion of the Enlightenment isn't that they want to create flat-earthers who reject the germ theory of disease. They want to prevent wide understanding of some downstream conclusions

This is what we get for electing DOGE and some deficit hawks. (and this isn't because they're incompetent. It's because essentially everyone who yaps about government spending is lying maliciously and actually cares about something else) finance.yahoo.com/news/us-hits...

It'd be a better metaphor if he'd destroyed the Senate chamber.

There’s also wasting less. We lose an awful lot of essentially every input and resource just because we can’t be arsed to pay more than the barest attention to efficiency, much less circularity. The main beneficiaries are the very rich - for them, this waste is profitable.

I share the outraged concern about why business leaders insist on building a dystopia. On the other hand, the answer is probably just "they want more money for less work and risk." Why do consumers and investors keep paying them to build horrible things?

look, the coalition is never not going to be a shitshow. that's what you get when you're the big tent and it's especially what you get when there's a real and present threat to the democratic order. but i'd much rather be us than the other guys.

I wouldn't have guessed "reify and externalize self-destructive thought loops" was a viable business plan, even by the (inconceivably low) standards of internet software.

GDP is just how much we spend each year. Nothing more, nothing less We've let people who think needing to spend more is the single, essential determinant of wellbeing make important decisions for far too long.

A general election is a choice between limited options. But a primary season is where you set those options. You can recruit! Agitate! Pick somebody new! Run yourself!

Both the U.S. marshal and the immigrant were shot by federal officers. You’d never know that from this headline.

Are the Louvre thieves now stuck with un-fencable goods, or was the heist commisioned by an oligarch who will keep the gems in their private collection (because the idea of not owning something caused them pain).

It's really OK to change your mind when new facts are presented. It really is.

Continuing to post a wikipedia article every day (that I remember) to single-handedly increase traffic. Today: What I thought of as programmatic architecture is also called novelty architecture, which wikipedia editors have decided is the preferred term. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty...

Media outlets who refuse to describe in plain terms what the president did because they find it objectionable are lying to their audiences and running cover for the president. It's as simple as that.

When I was a kid, listening to Operation Mindcrime, I wouldn't have guessed that it was the flag-waving, patriot-talking, billionaire-worshiping, "conservative" political party that was actually going to tear the White House down.

One characteristic of a working democracy is that the government doesn't spend every day pointing guns at large groups of citizens.

It feels like "under 65 years old, not an actual Nazi, and not paid by a huge concentration of dark money" should be an easier bar for primary candidates to clear.

I can imagine the screenwriters in our reality TV politics show brainstorming this. "We need a visual metaphor for the Trump presidency. Something simple that captures what he wants to do"

When encountering a really deranged internet leftist remember that deranged internet rightists are known to lie about everything including their identity. If a voice sounds like their goal is to prevent progressive political progress, don't rule out that this could be their goal.

It's fine that people have bad ideas. It's bad that the easiest way to monetize a bad idea is to make it worse.

I used to think anyone could grow up to be president, but "everyone is 12" theory is convincing me that growing up and being president are mutually exclusive.

Who's got a good estimate of the down-stream damages of a long-term full failure of the internet (not all computers, just centralized services and trans-continental transmission)

That failure by the press is critical to Trump holding together a coalition of ravening internet lunatics and relative normies who still think they are voting "conservative"

I'm off work today, and now I feel bad about it. We run critical services on US East 1 Dynamo. My coworkers are not going ro have a good day.

The two genders are: 1. people who are scared the oligarch-owned network-connected spy cameras in doorbells are sometimes broken 2. people scared they are sometimes working

I just read that people can't see outside their houses because the cloud service backing their doorbells is down. The future is even stupider than I thought. Maybe these people should... install windows. <ducks>

Who robbed the Louvre

Seems like all the best Gemini summaries are just "Repost the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page verbatim without attribution" Google could probably do that without using GPUs

So we're going to have an election in '28, it's going to be "We should have a king" vs "We should remain a republic," and the pro-king party is going to brand itself "anti-elite" and claim the "elites" want to screw you over by requiring you to engage in self-governance.

>being left is being unimpressed That's a luxury belief, and we can't afford it in this political economy. Burn it like a wicker man, so that people can eat in the future.

What!? I'm pretty damn jaded at this point, but ... what!? If this boat was broadcasting a pan-pan for engine failure then the US Navy knew it when they attacked. That's "ravening monster" level behavior. There are probably some outright pirates who would do better.

Hey if you are a federal employee (currently furloughed or otherwise) who attended a No Kings protest today I have a quick question for you I’d love to hear thoughts on, Signal is davelevitan.26 and you can remain anonymous!