It autoplayed another Japanese movie, but it's just been credits so far.

Note to media: police arresting peaceful protesters singing “give peace a chance” is not protesters “clashing” with police. It’s the state violating the First Amendment rights of people upset that human beings who did nothing illegal are being held without due process and being fed maggots.

[Norman Rockwell Guy] I do not think using generative AI, whatever you think of it, is comparable to having worked for the Gestapo and handing over persecuted minorities to torment and execution. that's... not a sane comparison. what is wrong with you.

It's Kurosawa night at Milton's. Now it's The Hidden Fortress.

Yojimbo is a great movie.

The largest single decolonization event by population in world history was Indian independence, but the collapse of the USSR was #2 by any definition. So of course decolonialists are pro-Soviet and pretty cold to India (left protests in the UK fly Irish flags but not Indian ones).

Either this is a less than three hour version of Seven Samurai, or they started it part way through. It wasn't on when I left here earlier.

It’s slower than the train, it wrecks the experience for folks in at least four parks, and you’re not that special.

Re: Sally Hemings. "That Jefferson managed to evade the scrutiny of white Americans for nearly two centuries tells us a great deal about the power of enslavers to bend reality to their will." (p. 100) Really enjoying this book. #booksky

Absolutely. Would have also been nice if Musk and his corrupt tech bros hadn't canceled the UI modernization grants mid-project

If you define “affordability” as “what the average family spends” you’re going to find that life is unaffordable for approximately 50% of families at all times. When there’s a boom, and spending goes up, that will continue to be true. If there’s a recession and spending goes down, also still true.

Would be a good time to make the UI system a bit better, even *if* we don't see spikes in unemployment.

When the car, truck, and SUV riders stop nearly running me over because they refuse to obey the rules of the road, then maybe I will start respecting the opinions of the driving activists. There, fixed it for you.

If you think this looks like a threat to free speech you're wrong. Threats to free speech are when sex pests lose their jobs as magazine editors.

because they like trump and want to help him and drawing connections between trump's guys and european nazis would not help trump

It's funny how well the logic that Biden should have stopped Israel from doing what it wanted to do is totally orthogonal to the logic employed to justify electoral abstentionism. Like either you have a duty to use the tools available to you to stop bad outcomes or you don't.

It will show ~50% of households. The data is constructed in a way such that it will always report ~50% of households. bsky.app/profile/best...

It's not only flat across time, it also flat across geographies. It's like we flipped a hundred coins in each state every year and then made a time series showing that the number was very close to 50%. bsky.app/profile/did:...

What this study does is create a bespoke measure of affordability and find that it’s basically been flat for a decade, minus a bump in 2021-22 (you know, when everyone was extra upset about the economy). NPR then cherry-picks a bunch of numbers to make it sound like things are getting worse.

we may think statements like this aren’t enough and don’t matter, but an extremely normie, super-Christian woman I work with is *obsessed* with Pedro Pascal and completely reworked her priors regarding trans rights solely because of his opinions on the matter

The methodology here is fairly close to "half of families have below median consumption".

People who respond like this are obviously smart enough to know this sort of thing is complete bad faith, but the social environment they’re in continually rewards and encourages any bad faith as long as it’s vaguely dunk-shaped. And here we see the result

Modern U.S. police are no better than extortion rackets holding us all hostage. They all need to be disbanded and replaced with entities under strict civilian control, no military equipment, and no military vehicles. Rebuild it all from scratch; the current forces are corrupt and cannot be reformed.

periodic reminder that bill de blasio basically stopped fighting with the nypd after they kidnapped his daughter and publicly threatened her you tell them no and they tell you they're the ones with the guns

This was truly the missed story of 2020 - cops ranging from unresponsive to outright hostile to civilian orders

Here's some data on lowering speed limits for those in search of some.

The overarching takeaway here - "Inflation isn't just bad, but wages are also flat" - is completely incorrect. Nominal wage growth was very high through Biden's presidency, which is precisely why people were able to consume and afford more despite inflation.

i feel like they were going for something different than why i took the photo

Horrifying. Looks like a bomb got dropped on them. When you drive a car on the highway in America, your life is at the mercy of drivers who are using their cell phones, sleepy, drugged up, etc, AND the traffic engineers who don’t care about your safety, just speed.

I really wish I could just celebrate this excellent news rather than have to wonder what RFK Jr. thinks of it

One thing that makes me angry is how much harder Platner's campaign keeps making it for Democrats to take the high road against Republicans — not in a "when they go low, we go high" kind of way but in a "we don't support Nazis and sex creeps" kind of way.

The term "investors" isn't really correct. Investors collect interest on the capital they bring into being. Rentiers collect rents on land or resources. Most of these people are rentiers.

This is actual courage from a politician, a willingness to do what is right, seemingly without a second thought given to what the political hivemind is saying at the moment. I don’t care how much money he has, someone who displays this kind of public decency under pressure has my vote

How many more studies does your city need proving that people on bikes and on foot spend more on shopping streets than people in cars? Bike-lanes mean business. #UrbanTruth

there's this weird narcissism to stuff like this which casts trump as a punishment for the democratic party for its actions, and which ignores the fact that harris had literally nothing to do with gaza

I feel bad for the people visiting from developed nations, they’re not used to our primitive ways

Was Joan of Arc portrayed as attractive? It's probably too late to question the lyrics of a song from 1999.

Every time I hear Genesis, I think about that time my sister was watching MTV and my mom yelled "That's the guy from 'Miami Vice'".

Heated Rivalry but for whatever the two male cardinals on the Cardinals’ bat have going on

I had never thought about how they were both boys until I saw a tumblr post celebrating gay cardinal pairs inside festive holiday snowglobes

Nithya Raman: Everyone's rent is too high Spencer Pratt: Why is no one talking about how unfair it was that I lost my fancy, museum-quality crystals when my mansion burned down?! Political Media: Why can't the left talk about issues voters relate to like Republicans do? bsky.app/profile/gspe...

There are solutions. They are cheaper than what we are doing now. But in the US we CHOOSE to have homeless people. We need to make better choices.

Ken Paxton is a cheat, a narcissist, a bigot, and a bully. He’s emblematic of the Trumpian turn in our politics. And we’re going to get a lot more like him. My latest: www.liberalcurrents.com/hell-is-empt...

It's genuinely funny a 74 year old senator got played by the most obvious conman ever and is now posting passive aggressively like a pre-teen who hasn't learned subtlety yet.

In 2014, New York City lowering the speed limit from 30 to 25 mph. In just the 1st year: Traffic fatalities fell by more than 22% Pedestrian fatalities fell by more than 25% The most dangerous drivers, those driving over 35 mph, slowed down the most. Via @transalt.org Speed is always a factor.

old enough to remember when the political media had a multi-day long tsk-tsk freakout about anti-semitism because ilhan omar said AIPAC was influencing elections with money. prominent trumpworld guys just openly seig heiling with european nazis? doesn't look like anything to them.

... That is *extremely* incorrect. A 64 year old who was working in 2023 and retired in 2024 has "income ex transfers" in 2023, but not in 2024. Remember this is looking at the *aggregate* numbers from the GDP report.

Notably, all the work is being done by dropping transfers (ie, more people are on social security as the population ages).