the phrase 'the west' becomes awkward if the westernmost part of the west is no longer in it.
if tech treated tech like government, it would have mocked computing relentlessly for crashing so much and sent its own industry to the wood chipper. manual typewriters would be a token of a vigorous masculinity.
you can persecute jews for not cracking down on anti-semitism hard enough.
my god they love this shit. they laugh and laugh.
a thing to understand about Democratic Party professionals, from Congressional leaders to NGO-ists, think-tankers, and consultants, is their material situation is not all that different from Big Law — they lead lives of comfort that can be undermined if they find themselves especially targeted.
you start out so lonely. so you resolve, you struggle, you make enough money to buy the whole fucking world. so you do.
then you find there is no place lonelier than a world that you own.
@Phil yeah, these are your priors. they are ill-informed, but we will all pay the price for them.
@Phil they don’t have a clue what they are doing and what they are cutting. they are indiscriminate, firing on the basis of easy to fire (ie new or recently promoted) rather than any evaluation of merit. what roles have they killed just a bit less obviously important than nuclear weapons protection, oopsie? they miscompute and outright lie constantly about their “savings”. they themselves are waste, fraud, and a mothereffing ton of abuse. physician, heal thyself.
@Phil as i said, perhaps we’ll see how you like this brave new world your political movement is bringing on. i could be wrong, but i suspect you won’t (though even if so i wonder if you’ll attribute blame to malicious compliance or some other excuse). what if there is nothing as good as NOAA and plane crashes become more common again, in part because they fly blind into weather? oh well, you might say. price of progress.
i’m proud of NOAA, want to keep and even expand it.
@Phil do you have any reason to suspect a cumulative effect of vaccinations over all the other cumulating factors that have changed over time? i do know, for example, autism diagnoses have continued to rise even after childhood vaccines were stripped of thimerosal that had previously been alleged the cause. i’m not saying some difficult-to-detect cumulative effect is impossible. i’ve no idea why anyone would especially suspect one, though.
@admitsWrongIfProven i’m not sure about that. often the same people who blame strip (or provide the political support to those who strip).
@Phil i rely on NOAA to protect my life and property with hurricane tracking and forecasts. it has done an amazing job.
contemporary weather forecasts are reasonably accurate out to seven days. your claim was true when i was growing up, maybe when you were too, but it has not been for some time. weather monitoring and prediction is remarkably good now, and we rely upon it for everything from tornado warnings to flight routing. https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts
@Phil the issue has been very extensively studied.
@Phil have a nice flight. (replacing reliable, high bandwidth fiber with flakier, lower bandwidth starlink makes total sense.)
will that hurricane hit?
is that drug safe + effective? (it’d be better if FDA were faster. many clinical trials—including of unpatentable compounds—should be publicly funded. we need more people evaluating new pharma. more, not fewer, resources.)
enjoy giving your kid Vitamin A and hope for the best after their “study” tells us vaccines cause autism.
@Phil i think you are blind to how much you rely upon it, and how much better our world could be if we did much more with it. perhaps we’ll see.
we blame government for being inefficient when it is under-resourced, so we strip it of resources to make it more efficient.
i love canada and wish my own country hadn’t turned sociopathic.
“I think Trump is modeling himself to be our Caesar, ending the Republic and creating an Empire. He would be far better off, as would we all, if he modeled himself after Solon, the forgiver of debt.” https://econcrit.blogspot.com/2025/03/trumps-address-to-congress.html
the unfair part is, if you want to raise a lot of revenue from tariffs, it means people will have to pay a lot, and markets won't like that. surely there's a way to raise a lot of tariff revenue without making anybody pay it. back to the drawing board! where's Elon?!