what does he do about the fact that in most states midterms and statewides are on the same cycle, so "canceling the elections" might mean that tennessee doesn't have a governor next year. how does he convince tennessee republicans to give up power in their own states?

That turns out to be not true. Zinc Chloride smoke grenades are white. There's bad information circulating that coloured smoke grenades are zinc chloride. Heck I used to think that but then I checked the books and it turns out to be not true.

A 🧵: A complete list of the ways it is physically possible for Trump to make any of the 50 states hold elections as scheduled. Spoiler: they all result in him having LESS authority than today.

I hear a lot about how Claude Code is apparently better than human and people perplexed at normies saying "AI doesn't work". I think I know where that's coming from - "AI summaries" on web searches. I actually read one today and found:

Scary economic indicator: I was just visited by a door-to-door vacuum salesman. Moved into this house in 2000 and that was the first.

Not really sure whether to claim the Scioto, the Hocking, or the Neuse.

Wonder what happens to all the tax-inverted companies when we go to war with Ireland?

With Trump going full authoritarian on Venezuela-Greenland, ICE, and the Fed, the response has to be serious. Four Republican senators (Tillis, McConnell, Murkowski, Collins?) could announce they’ll caucus for now with the Dems to give them control of the Senate to check Trump.

Gerardus Mercator is about to have been very puzzled by all the time travelers showing up.

man, how is this gonna go on for three more weeks let alone three more years

facts just cold, hard facts

A group of young kestrels is startled by the presence of a butterfly. 🤣🤣🤣

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon, and we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden.

Cut myself with a butter knife, while using it to saw through a bagel.

War story where I ended up doing this though it of course wasn't a compiler bug. PPC 32-bit Linux. Heap corruption SIGABRT in std::~vector<class px::X>.

p.s. the point of impeachment right now is not Doing Something!!!!!!! the point is getting every single current extant GOP elected on the record saying they’re okay with Congress being cucked by the President in order to do war crimes, a valuable thing to establish for midterms

Vindication!

Jan 1: this is the year of new Me Jan 12: [eating shredded cheese directly from the bag] new years resolutions are a bourgeois construct for disciplining bodies into productive units for capital

And I think liberals should stop taking the bait and ceding ground on immigration. Immigration is good. Multiculturalism is good. Free trade is good. Stop being embarrassed to say so.

If these chatbots are going to continue to exist, which evidently they are, I feel like a near-necessary safety feature these companies need to implement is what Claude does, where if you're being rude to it, hitting on it, or saying bonkers out of pocket shit it will just tell you to fuck off

It's kinda funny how every third political post on has some variation of "oh so you think there's going to be elections how cute" in the replies while the daily news is of Republicans getting boatraced in elections, manufacturing the reality you desire to be outraged about isn't just a rw phenomenon

I keep banging the drum but voters can and do change preferences and that "every single election is competitive" is actually pretty atypical and isn't a given

This story is really going to be evergreen, isn't it pervocracy.com/art/fiction/...

Yeah, the data leakage & identity theft concerns are secondary. The big problem is the obviously-bad-faith voter purge this will enable. BEST case: it goes through some tool a DOGE kid vibe-coded, cancelling a bunch of citizens and not actually finding any real errors. 1/

That's definitely a problem the software industry needed to solve - excessive quality.

I don’t mean to sound extreme, but I don’t think we should have torture camps for people with criminal records either.

Wrong. The First Amendment protects our right to record law enforcement activity in public — full stop.

This is the contemporary version of Aesop's Grasshopper and the Ant story.

"The #1 movie when you were 10 years old is how your 2026 is going to go." Get in, losers, we're defeating an evil empire.

please don't resign yourself to horror. please don't believe that a bad future is inevitable. please believe in and fight for a better future for everyone.

I have to say it's very funny to me that Serious Bluesky Economists keep going on about how individual economic sentiment is untethered from reality but not how visibly, obviously unmoored the markets are in the other direction

100%. For example, what if voters aren’t asking for a line graph showing retail theft going down, but to not see any context-free, undated mass shoplifting videos in their feeds? Good luck with that if our palantíri algo overlords don’t wish it.

Dumb policy but like, the big AI companies all have: 1. Aligned themselves with Trump and Gulf royal families 2. Blew off electricity cost concerns for data centers 3. Advertised their products as mass unemployment machines Time to lie in the bed they made!

My own 2020 piece on Dad Rockness, in which I offer the exact moment I think U2 dropped into that territory: whatever.scalzi.com/2020/08/09/i...

There were multiple dimensions of unAmerican in how that guy was treated, even if every accusation the government threw at him was true!

Need a basic many episode per year show about a rag-tag group of IRS agents who solve evil tax crimes.

The correct political strategy imo would be to file new articles of impeachment first thing every weekday morning based on the impeachable shit he did the previous day.

I would encourage anyone who is questioning the security of our elections to volunteer at their local polls! It’s a bunch of regular people like you and me, working hard to ensure that the vote is conducted according to the rules

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

Krugman's newsletter today is very interesting, an interview with an expert in AI & finance. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug... Things that surprised me: 🧵

So many rock songs are about sex, drugs or rock-'n'-roll, and I'm a sucker for the latter.

best package warning graphic i've ever seen 🪶

Yet the transphobes became obsessive about this issue upon trans people in general becoming more salient to them, and act as if _this thing that is already happening and manifestly not causing any great harm despite persisting for decades_ is on the verge of collapsing civilisation!

Yeah, in software the choice on offer is never "build" vs "buy", it's "build" vs "buy AND build" via integration and customization. Sometimes this adds up to less time/effort/maintenance than "build", annoyingly rarely though.

My common case: calling the pharmacy to refill a C2. Trust me bro, your automated systems do not let me do this. It's The Man's fault, also his fault that I have to do it monthly per person. Walgreens's bot makes me ask twice and listen to some recorded info (like pharmacy hours) every single time.

Trust me, I'm not calling because I *want* to talk to a human. I'm calling because I have to.

Engagement KPIs have been responsible for infinite scroll UI traps, RecSys radicalization spirals, public shame brigades, and basically every modern ailment novel to the past decade. At some point, you have to recognize that the problem isn't any one technology, it's the metric.