just used a credit card at a café. no other identification provided, just tapped the screen. it was enough to get me opted in to a Cash app rewards program and SMS list.

This is your final reminder.

i have so little to fear of death since my current condition so approximates it. who the fuck is usher?

odds that the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2024 General Presidential Election will be Biden and Trump respectively:

the facts are whatever justifies my conclusion, because i wouldn’t have come to my conclusion if it weren’t justified by the facts.

@admitsWrongIfProven meaninglessness can be very meaningful.

@admitsWrongIfProven everything will happen.

i might be an idiot, but at least i know i’m not useful.

Ignore this post and nothing will happen.

My sister’s new novel, “Help Wanted” — which should be out in a couple weeks! — is reviewed in The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/help-wanted-book-review-adelle-waldman/677176/

#AdelleWaldman

@taoeffect@mstdn.io and that guy who went to Comet was just an op?

i don't know whether the articles i read years ago linked that mail, but they did describe obscure pizza-related references from the Podesta mails as the source of the speculations. there's nothing in that mail that is a surprise to readers of the dread MSM.

@taoeffect@mstdn.io no. Pizzagate does not refer to that e-mail per se. Pizzagate refers to a set of beliefs that may have been in some measure related to that e-mail, and those beliefs are false.

@taoeffect@mstdn.io this looks like it may in its obscurity have been a source of pizza-themed speculations. perhaps some of those speculations included said claim about Comet pizza, to the point a well-intended believer raided the place looking for a nonexistent basement. the term PizzaGate obviously refers to much beyond this peculiar e-mail, though I don't doubt the e-mail is part of its origin story.

@taoeffect@mstdn.io what I mean by it is the claim that a pedophilia ring was being run from the basement of Comet pizza in DC. i’m guessing there’s some other meaning you have in mind?

Another reason to go hard on antitrust:

Too big to fail is also too big to jail, kryptonite to rule of law and the legitimacy of the state.

I mean Pizzagate isn't real, but it's hard to blame people for getting confused when all that #MoeTkacik details here is real.

On Boeing, with a sidelight of Epstein, the subject of a prior conspiracy to let off easy.

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-02-09-boeing-max-doj-epstein-deal/

#MaureenTkacik

juxtapose the phrase “ripe old age” with an image of the Grim Reaper and the idiom comes to seem pretty gruesome.

i still can’t get over that the James Webb Space Telescope works and is functioning and is actually something human beings did.

it's hard to live with the ex-post opportunity costs of your mistakes, but it's impossible to live without nearly infinite ex-post opportunity costs of mistakes.

it's not really what you miss that's hard to live with. it's what you almost didn't miss.

"in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things