if you were sorrows, they could drown you every night, but in the morning you’d come back stronger every time.
u do u but i prefer the dopanice hits.
“The problem (well, a problem) with bad actors and corruption is they push the good ones out… over time the good ones get stomped on and pushed out. They're a threat!” @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2024/01/bad-apples.html
// great point.
it used to be “apres moi, le deluge”, but now every political actor makes its case as “sans moi, le deluge.” our politics has given up on hope for the efficiency of blackmail.
“‘You know what was good about the Second World War?’ Nayyem asked wistfully. ‘It ended!’” #MashaGessen https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/ukraines-democracy-in-darkness
"No democracy perfectly distills the will of the people. But America is uniquely terrible at achieving democratic outcomes." @ddayen https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-29-america-is-not-democracy/
Text: Exactly what part of democracy are we trying to save? Is it our democratic legislature, gerrymandered and malapportioned beyond recognition, with supermajority thresholds that deny rule even by that corrupted majority? Is it our democratic presidency, which Trump legally took over after losing the popular vote in 2016, and George W. Bush in the same fashion 16 years earlier? Is it our democratic judiciary, morphed into a super-legislature and habitually twisting the Constitution to advantage those with power, money, and influence? Are we worried about a democracy that can be so easily purchased, where corporate lobbyists either win whatever they want on Capitol Hill, or win by regulatory change or international trade treaty whatever they don’t? Has this government, where the most important modification of our democracy’s original sin, the second-class citizenship of Black people, is now being steadily reversed by state legislatures and the courts, earned our support? Is there despair over losing something that has produced unequal opportunity, unequal justice, and the conversion of economic power into political power? Where can we find this democracy we need to fight to preserve?
[interfluidity-main-mastonotify] New Post: Cold December, by Steve Randy Waldman https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9926.html
[New Post] Cold December https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9926.html
[tech-mastonotify] New Post: Feedletter tutorial, by Steve Randy Waldman https://tech.interfluidity.com/2024/01/29/feedletter-tutorial/index.html
TIL much of Canada has implemented something like carbon-tax-and-dividend! But apparently the dividend part has not been very clear, undermining much of the point of the plan. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2041709/millions-of-canadians-get-their-carbon-tax-rebates-today-so-why-do-many-not-believe-it
i’m not “getting old” i’m a gerontonaut.
"UNRWA is paid to support people in refugee camps as refugees, and the UNHCR is paid to get people out of refugee status and to become normal citizens. This, along with its focus on only one group of displaced people does not produce best outcomes for the people that they ostensibly support." @40Years https://40yrs.blogspot.com/2024/01/unrwa-is-problematic.html
is the ad industry going to morph into selling manipulations of AI weights that make your thing more likely to come up in response to related prompts?
will AI come to stand for “Artificial Influencer”?
Not the greatest vocabulary lesson for the kids.
An image of a tornado, captioned “Can you survive hurricane?”
Image of a “Ride the Hurricane” booth from a distance, for context.
Sometimes I think the main role of tech figures who now weigh in loudly and proudly on public policy (Musk, Sacks, etc etc) is to make traditional policy elites — as compromised and deeply flawed as they are — look sane and competent by comparison.
someday we will all wake up and realize that nowhere actually exists except Canada.
both too much and too little wealth are terrible for people. the very rich have it all, but most of them have completely lost it.
I dropped dropbox for sync.com, but I’m having problems now with sync.com. Any other recommendations for this kind of service?
I’d think about self-hosting, but I don’t know an economical way of setting up a server with ~2TB of not-cold storage.
(I don’t want to physically self-host. I want sync and backup reliably available if my house burns down and when I travel.)
You can get a decision with no impact to your credit score.
When you think a person is extremely wrong, but the whole reason you do the things you do is in hopes you'll make some small difference so that people like him can look back and say they were right all along.
#KevinDrum on his historicostatistical pollyannaism. https://jabberwocking.com/just-how-bad-are-things-really/