I HAD A DREAM OF DREAMS GONE BY WHEN HOPE WAS HIGH AND LIFE WORTH LIVING I DREAMED THAT LOVE WOULD NEVER DIE I DREAMED THAT GOD WOULD BE FORGIVING

hey man absolutely hate to keep dunning you like this but did you happen to remember where you saw the unsupported claim that Platner's wife is Jewish?

the problem, fundamentally, is that rural voters don't want the economy to be "good" in the typical sense of being efficient or productive, they want it to be "good" in a moral sense where it rewards the people and industries they like

Bombur(he/him):"Bombur is a cozy dog on his throne." #corgi #corgicrew #dogsofbluesky

btw I'm still livid about the switch, have no desire to relitigate it or see its like ever again, and even I admit #3 is unquestionably true. The international comparison leaps off the page. You can't even call it vibes because it was everywhere

every incumbent party on the planet got walloped and Harris/Dems did better than almost all of them she overperformed in swing states where she campaigned heavily compared to the rest of the country she absolutely could have run a better campaign (Gaza!) I don’t know if it would have been enough

my theory of the Harris campaign, which makes exactly nobody happy: 1. she was put in an incredibly deep and arguably insurmountable hole by Biden 2. she made significant errors, largely in not separating herself from him enough 3. her results were still in the upper range of plausible outcomes

I would add that the plethora of veto points and the inability of an administration to put its entire plan into place deprives the American public of an important feedback loop with its politicians. We live in a world where Republicans routinely have taken credit for Democratic spending and it works

i understand that rural democrats frequently have to run against the party and don’t even begrudge them that, but the idea that rural america gets left out of big, national democratic infrastructure initiatives is just typical rural grievance mongering

U.S. officials to Congress: Iran still retains half of its missile program and a larger proportion of its drones.-NYT

whatever my misgivings about aspects of Anthropic there's really a qualitative difference between "I have significant disagreements with basic aspects of how company sees its product and ethics" and "its Mr. Beast with PhDs"

2nd War for Armageddon. Two real factions fighting it out, until the poster children dove in to make it all about them. But oh well, fun story before that.

Every government runs its course after long enough, and there reaches a point where there are either massive changes to keep it from tearing itself apart, or the government dies and is replaced. Democrats are offering neither. Which brings us to the question: can incremental reforms stop fascism?

The reason they won't get better is not due to some special weaknesses found only in the American soul, or in the party. They won't get better because the system keeps the ruling class completely cut off from consequences for government action, so they can play bipartisan games while others burn.

Democrats are not uniquely pathetic creatures. They're the exact kind of weak that every liberal party in a degenerated liberal state becomes: terrified of appearing unpatriotic, standing against capital, or ever changing any structural rules.

Whelp, I have a company git account now, and I'm using claude code to build a project training app. When I tell you the last time I looked at coding was html in high school a ghastly number of years ago, that may be overselling it

Me every 5 pages while reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book on the 1929 financial crash: “That’s a pump & dump” “Yup, also a pump & dump” “Oh hey, another pump & dump” “Nice to break up the pump & dump schemes with some insider trading” “Back to our regularly scheduled pump & dump scheme programming”

Donald the Dove

“The State Department is declaring an emergency with the war in Iran to bypass Congressional approval and sell more than 20,000 bombs to Israel that are valued at nearly $660 million, according to two current U.S. officials and a former official.”

This is the big irony; the best-case scenario for Trump is that the Islamic Republic survives, which lets everybody declare victory in three weeks and go home so the media can anoint him with a Triumph and make fancams of explosions. State collapse or civil war makes this impossible to end.

The only use case for glasses that doesn't exist for phones is maybe, maybe you want to have augmented reality, but like imagine having shitty hologram google earth over your eyeballs. What does that serve? Who does that serve?

This was obviously bad for kids even when I was a kid

Every argument against doing this basically seems to start from the assumption that social media is a good thing that children are being kept from.

There's just something so surreal and something so chilling about the President poasting wrestling promos about the smackdown we're going to lay on Iran

the duration of the conflict is one thing, 'keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed' is another, because while there are ton of actors involved almost all of them have a vested interest in reopening passage. Even the Houthis have ties to China, where about a third of that oil goes in normal times.

the main thing that could go wrong is Iran *not having a government* capable of making the decision to attempt normalcy. Right now, though - with all manner of caveats for very early days - they look to be keeping things together.

Things could still go very, very wrong. But the people making the bet that the Strait will return to relative normalcy aren't necessarily complacent or dumb.

the Iranians are trying to inflict as much pain as possible to get the U.S. to back off, even at the cost of hurting themselves. *If* the U.S. backs off they have other needs!

I don't have to think this war is justified at all to say that Iran can hardly be surprised Ukraine doesnt like it after it LITERALLY COMPLETELY WITHOUT REASON backed Russia throughout its own invasion of Ukraine up to the hilt.

re: Ukrainian interceptors being sold to gulf states and the Yanks, in this case this is solidly a "play stupid games win stupid prizes" thing on the part of IRI.

This appears to be a threat from the President to begin committing mass war crimes

China and Russia are not confused about the stakes, unlike grandpa, for whom America must be number one and invincible in all things, which is the sort of strategic hubris that gets a lot of people killed

This is a big deal *ORACLE AND OPENAI END PLANS TO EXPAND TEXAS DATA CENTER SITE *ORACLE-OPENAI TALKS TO LEASE STARGATE EXPANSION SITE BROKE DOWN *META IN DISCUSSION WITH DEVELOPER CRUSOE TO LEASE EXPANDED SITE

this is what's so insulting about the obama bros or yglesias or grim claiming that this is just normal working class rough guy culture, it's not! i've had more wage jobs than all these dudes combined and have more tattoos than all of them combined, and i've only *ever* seen this on out-and-out nazis

Worth remembering that Nathan Fielder had Paramount’s number in season 2 of The Rehearsal.

they say it can’t be done, folks, but i believe in our wet boy. he can beat bush’s low mark like you’ve never seen

Godspeed You! Doughy Salaryman

Cucked! By My Own Privilege many such cases

i don't get it. you can lift at the gym. being a softhanded scribe is like the pinnacle of civilized life, tens of thousands of generations of your ancestors would have murdered to be a softhanded scribe

a lot of what has made discourse insane is that there's an entire crop of guys who live in dc, do a ton of uppers, and have massive gender insecurity around the fact that they're soft-handed scribes

Remember that time everyone went nuts and started buying huge quantities of gas over like a week time, putting it in trash cans and milk jugs and what have you until you couldn’t even find gas anymore? That’s when we decided our family would always have at least one hybrid.

This is war as content creation. The entire administration is centered around content creation. A “win” here will be whenever they feel like they’ve worn out this particular storyline and are ready to move on to the next chapter and generate more content.

so the world's energy mix looks like this. around 20%-25% of the world's oil (7%pt of total energy) and a third of the world's gas (another 7%pt) goes thru hormuz. right now that's been zero'd out, and there's no clear path back. a sixth of the world's energy supply is just... gone.

The derisive laugh that just escaped my lips

From the moment he first stepped onto a debate stage, everyone on the Republican understood the 2 step problem of 1. Someone had to do something 2. It'll be incredibly damaging for the person who does something. So the biggest problem is that they're all selfish cowards

WHY DO PERSIAN JEWS LIVE IN LA WHAT HAPPENED TO IRAN'S JEWS THAT THEYRE SUCH A SMALL PART OF IRAN'S POPULATION

To take this seriously a sec: when your political-economic system allows massive inequality to explode, it creates a class of people who have no material problems but do have the resources & power to make their trivial irritations the central business of politics—at immense material cost to others.