I cannot recommend a life where your rep on here doesn't matter enough.

Childcare is hideously expensive in a way people simply do not understand until they've lived it and the benefits to society at large are significant.

Excellent thread. To amplify, however badly we have exercised our hegemony, however much very real risk our hegemony poses, retreating from the world is still an exercise of hegemonic power.

It's almost trite, but just because you turn inward from the world does not mean the world turns from you. Should we decide (as the post theo is replying to advocates) to "tend to our own problems" for a spell, events elsewhere are likely to become our problems too. History is a firm teacher here.

It is very difficult for committed internationalists not to be struck with a newfound sense of doubt about America's role in the world. You'd be blind not to question it now. But at the risk of exceptionalism: even a chastened, reflective, internally riven America is still a unique nation.

Also like, we have all of this prosperity because of the global international order and, it's part of the deal. So not only is it fair, we will actually be worse off if we stop supporting the global international order! Europe hasn't had a general war since we started and that's not a coincidence!

Welp.

A thing that i do think has become clear over the last several years is that a lot of Europeans assume our government/legislative system functions roughly the same way theirs do and no it very much does not.

No we very much do, we just have absolutely no realistic mechanism of getting rid of him before 2029

it's pretty impressive that Rise of Skywalker managed to do Dark Empire but worse and dumber

1. The vast majority of US citizens have never taken a citizenship oath to anybody. 2. US law, unlikely many lesser (European) regimes, does not generally recognize dual citizenship as a special category. You are either a US citizen or you are not, whatever other citizenship you might have.

Live cut to Brittany talking shit about Bluey

This is starting to sink in but nobody knows what the aftermath will look like.

Apparently Dolan's resignation was the result of "an obligatory retirement letter". I need a Curia-understander to help please.

It would be very good if deliverism works but IMO evidence points strongly against it or at least that it requires compliant institutions which we do not have.

Ah, I see. I suppose I want deliverism to work, but fear Biden proves it doesn't, so I want someone to explain convincingly why some future attempt would be different. Perhaps that's not clear

it’s not great when you can draw diagonal lines on the family tree

Do people realize that if you are a white straight man who owns a car dealership in the suburban area of a major city in the Midwest and decide to run for the State Legislature there’s like a 75% chance you’ll win and then can write a bill saying whatever the hell you want?

Don't forget that Fat Bear Week voting starts tomorrow at 9am Pacific/12pm Eastern. You can see the bracket and read about the bears here: explore.org/fat-bear-week

Michigan has a Democratic governor, judiciary, and senate. Please calibrate your panic about this bill passing accordingly.

In December 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked SCOTUS to grant cert before judgement to hear Trump’s immunity appeal. The court rejected that request and didn’t issue its immunity decision until July 2024. Trump’s federal cases never made it to trial before the November 2024 election.

Wedge's Gamble is I think my favorite of the quartet, but it mostly lacks in headlines since there's so much covert action. It also feels *extremely* TTRPG in a good way

RE: John Roberts and whether he / the Roberts Court is worse than Taney / the Taney Court, its really tough to say because they're kind of the same problem.

NB: Possible slight misinterpretation on my part of the particular table posted, see clarification from @xicad.bsky.social below, though the overall conclusion is still correct, as this paragraph buried in the Economist piece reluctantly acknowledges.

This hurt me so I have to hurt you with it. It's like the Ring.

i had entirely forgotten that they are both still married to other people

"kristi noem and corey lewandowski, who we can confirm are not only dating but running DHS together" absolutely cursed sentence

I'm gonna wait for a few months, they'll launch Kirkland Gender and it'll be just as good. If you don't need a fancy label on your gender it's just as good as the name brand genders for a fraction of the cost.

Jews are a closely related religion we owe some amount of kinship to and also very specifically a people we wronged telling stories like that and we decided, as Christians, that that was actually a pretty big fuck up and to repent.

I wonder if there's a mathematically optimum way to both encourage good behavior (resubscribe) and instill greater fear of pissing people off in the first place (stay cancelled)

Apropos of nothing Eric Clapton is really racist and I wish that were not so.

Question 2 was settled by Marbury vs Madison and yet.

Humphrey's Executor has been on the chopping block for a while. But I'd watch your wallet with Question 2, folks.

All this for Trump

far and away the most compelling argument for pro-natalist policy is how fucking dysfunctional greying countries are becoming politically. can't cut elderly benefits. can't raise taxes. can't let in workers. no throw only fetch politics until something collapses.

Maybe I just don't know how to read tech press releases but it's entirely unclear to me what NVIDIA's investment consist of and how much it compares to what if anything OpenAI is spending. Like is this just a loan? Free support?

George has some mild criticism.

I do *not* think that Mitt Romney was unfairly maligned: he ran for president, politics is a contact sport, & he gave as good as he got. But I do think that a certain kind of relatively low-info person on both the right & left doesn’t grasp just how big the gap between someone like him & Trump

To build on this, just as AI dooming is really a form of AI hype, dooming about how the authoritarians have won is really a form of cheerleading the authoritarians.

Making space for pro-life Democrats had some merit to it before Dobbs and I think it has a whole lot less now. TBD how it shakes out once people grow up with it always having been illegal (in their state)

I used to be a "we tax the rich because now that's where the money is" guy and I have become a "we tax the rich to manage the risk of oligarchy" guy due entirely to you know, *waves broadly* all of this.

This could be incredible. Machine vision has enormous potential just because of how slow humans are at reviewing video.

I mean if you genuinely, truly believe it's about to happen you desperately try to convince everyone you know to say the magic words.

This almost certainly ends in me handing over money.

Leaving a casserole in the freezer for the wicked spouse/children

Dancing grandma day

Another example of the same phenomenon; they are killing people so they can make videos of them killing people. There is not actually any policy that Venezuela or Colombia can enact to satisfy them, because the purpose is just content creation. Podcasters with the power of the Federal government.

The AC-130 is "what if we shot a howitzer out of the side of a cargo plane", which is some pulp-ass nonsense.

The A-10 is almost 50 years old it's actually not entirely surprising it needs to be retired that's just what happens with old dogs which can't learn new ooooooooooohhh now I get it.