this is the best time of the year for hockey no matter what team you cheer for

the basic theory of DOGE was that if powerful people said it was fine it didn’t matter what the law said. I think proving that theory wrong is worth significant effort

This problem is not likely to improve vis-a-vis the province's post-secondary funding cuts @jhoegg.bsky.social was talking about this morning.

I like this deal for the US!

guys Allbirds was already basically an asset-free penny stock, it "exploding more than 300%" is stupid but its from a very low level and doesn't represent anything anything significant about the larger economy or the state of the AI industry

none of these words were in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Reminder that this “glut” of small units was approved under a planning process that took ~2.5 years to complete. Almost like that process is designed to allay the concerns of people who already own homes and has zero to do with the new homes themselves. www.thestar.com/real-estate/...

Have you moved off substack yet, dear reader?

Trump talking about losing the midterms as a fait accompli is a confession that the GOP plot to rig the midterms by redistricting is a total failure and one of the worst political gambits ever.

it's going great lads

i bet this goes crazy if you’re a dumbass

If you have standards or values, you can be excoriated or investigated for failing to live up to them, if you don't, you are completely free to do anything you want. That is the unavoidable lesson of the last decade of American politics.

BREAKING: Banner parent company to buy Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, staving off newspaper’s closure

Slightly maddening when serious news outlets drag everyone down to Trump’s level by using language like “feud” as if it’s some reality TV spat. Pope Leo delivered a moral critique of American military aggression. That is not “feuding” even if Trump responded with a deranged personal attack.

He has gotten crazier (and yes, where was this before vs. Biden coverage etc. etc.) But the more interesting angle is this is taken as newsworthy now specifically because Democrats started talking about it more. They don't lack the ability to do that when they want. Messaging matters.

What Tim's been put through by the federal government just for doing journalism is absolutely horrific.

I sincerely believe it is bad for society that it is impossible to talk to your online friends without catching strays from the genuinely disturbed

transphobia is a luxury belief, which is why it’s so prevalent among beltway types who don’t have real problems

Marx wasn't right about everything but one sense in which I am an ardent, committed Marxist is the idea that material conditions matter. They matter a lot. So we should work *very* hard to understand them, not just decide our own experience is universal as Protagonists of Reality.

Pierre Poilievre update:

Donating to online scammers posing as legitimate people in need is not morally neutral: You potentially are giving money to brutal slavery and human trafficking networks: www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2...

Not dunking on Zack or this post, I’m just always struck by how easily American journalists will admit that the media shapes public polling and political outcomes when they’re not talking about America.

Certain writers (*cough* NYT Opinion *cough*) overread the durability of illiberal nationalism and scoffed at pro-democracy appeals, but they only listened to each other, never allowing alternate opinions into their elite bubble. That left them unable to grasp everything from Hungary to Minneapolis.

ok NOW i bet Zelenskyy will thank JD Vance

Orban, Bolsonaro, Trump, and all the rest of these goons want you to believe they are inevitable and, once in power, invincible. They are not.

I hope Orban ends his life in a miserable Russian exile.

sick of these catholic converts showing up and saying "well I have a different interpretation of the scripture" no you don't. that's protestantism and a heresy. don't like it there's the (incredibly beautiful and heavily ornamented with precious metals) door

the reality of his war uncomfortably intruded on the carefully cultivated false reality he has created for himself and his supporters and he is desperately trying to reconstruct new boundaries for his false reality to prevent the actual reality of his loss from spilling in.

i will never forget how elon musk said absolutely nothing at all about the NASA artemis ii mission except one post making fun of that women who took the photo of the launch in the reflection of her glasses. he hates space

All of Trump's architectural plans look like a low-budget non-union remake of The Man In The High Castle

Hakeem Jeffries: "Trying to remove the president from office for gross misconduct will distract from our messaging focus, which is 'the president is extremely bad'"

i'll be sympathetic to the "men's issues" our national publications handwring about as soon as they find a real one that isn't self-induced

Just to crib Jan's great chart here a little bit - here are just a few of the headlines that came out when growth somewhat slowed in 2024 Many, many media outlets do not really know how to handle technological change like this

this is quite right and I also think a lot of people underestimate the force multiplier that is having multiple Apple devices in a household. Apple TV, Watch, iPad, iPhone, whatever, they just all talk to each other and hand off tasks without any extra work and it's hard to let go of that.

this is a really good piece, and I recommend reading it. but orthogonal to its point, the people saying "all genAI sucks" etc. are sounding like the attitudes @tvaziri.com (I think) describes re. CGI. there is CGI (or AI) you notice because it's bad, but there is also stuff out there you're missing

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago." If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

Jesus fucking Christ your dog pisses and shits on the ground please don't bring him into a place where I'm going to eat, or, even worse, a grocery store. I want to scream at these people but I'm going to get hit with a chorus of "but he's cuuuute" and it drives me insane.

I think it's true that public sector unions with inefficient work rules obtained by capture of electeds is indeed sometimes an obstacle to efficient provision of public services, but also if you had me rank the top 50 obstacles to efficient provision of public services that wouldn't make the list.

you can get to say slurs or you can have freedom of navigation, but it's one or the other boys

Cops fractured his skull for standing by in peaceful protest. And people in power claimed he assaulted the cops. No hell greater for those who smeared him. RIP.

your reminder that Ro Khanna spends his India visits palling around with literal nazis and supremacists and takes money from organisations affiliated with them for his political career and then comes and cries about the state of democracy in the USA for cameras

for Canadians of a certain vintage — millennials mostly but probably quite a few others as well — Gord is one of the main voices you hear in your head when you think of iconic hockey moments

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All the political and strategic and pecuniary explanations for why Trump does what he does are wrong. The man is clinically psychologically defective, in a specific and predictable way, and once you understand that you can accurately guess what he’ll do in almost any situation.

mood

The US press ignores the actual reality of Trump - an idiotic, unpredictable madman thrashing around with no discernible strategic goal or plan - in favor of this prefab political-thriller story about ticking clocks and deadlines and frenzied diplomacy. Incapable of living in the world AS IT IS

I assume every morning the NYT editors wake up with a deep, resigned sigh, and then commute in for their morning task of "trimming all the crazy parts out of the president's tweets so he sounds more like a normal leader"

Maybe it's my Ivy degree in political science talking, but people who threw "fascist" around incorrectly according to my checklist are going to be pret-ty embarrassed to discover he's simply a family annihilator.

This can’t be true. I’ve been told that supply doesn’t work. Developers and landlords in San Diego must be less greedy than in other places, like Los Angeles