A really excellent rundown on the incoherent judicial gymnastics threatening the most important reform in higher-ed finance, like, ever, President Biden's SAVE plan. by @ddayen https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-26-student-loan-rulings-unaccountable-judicial-power/

"This is the American story of the past 4 decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between 'too rotten to stand' and 'too big to care'" @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

@LesterB99 a friend sent me a bag after that exchange, but i still might buy one of the brands suggested (many of which were completely occluded from Google searches). i had planned to be traveling to Europe this summer but called it off, so it's less urgent a call.

what if Biden is just a morning person?

to be discreet is to have discretion but to be discrete is to have discontinuity.

@softwarepagan have you ever wanted to run an intelligence agency?

“I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to design large parts of a relaunch of medicare plan compare, the US government site through which hundreds of thousands of medicare recipients purchase their health care plans each year… I especially want to share this story because I want to show that quality software can get written under government constraints. It can! And if we all start believing that it can, we're more likely to produce it.” @llimllib https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2024/06/Serving_a_billion_web_requests_with_boring_code.html // a deep dive

@marick i’m envious.

I periodically — lately oddly frequently — repost this one.

Merge the Court https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7964.html

the american zodiac is the presidency you were born in. i’m a nixon. explains a lot about how things have gone.

@LouisIngenthron i guess i’m crediting the administration with some influence over this.

@LouisIngenthron i’d characterize that mistake, in either case, more as overestimating themselves. and i don’t doubt that there’s a lot of that! but there are also a lot of very brilliant, more detached people associated with this administration, and i think they might have considered the contingencies. prediction markets now have Biden’s nomination at 60-ish percent. which sounds about right to me.

@_dm @Simplicator i think Trump did a good job of not being that bad.

he confabulated on abortion and professed moderatehood by supporting medication availability, completely dodged questions about kicking out stable, attached long-term undocumented and climate change, questions on which his movement’s actual answers would alienate tye public.

if the strategy was let the public see Trump and be afraid, i think it failed badly.

@Simplicator i’m not sure how you do damage control from events like this. a public that already suspected the president has lost a step will just somehow forget?

@paninid i don’t know. domestic policywise it’s been by far the best administration of my lifetime. that earns them at least a little bit of benefit of the doubt in my book.

my theory is that the Biden Administration demanded an early debate precisely so there would be time for a change of course if his candidacy came to seem untenable.

i find this a bizarre, kind of gross invocation of Eugene Debs.

debates only for elections that don’t really matter, crest vs colgate? we are responsible for saving ourselves by conceding we face no real choice, shldn’t legitimize bad choices with a debate?

Debs ran for President from jail. Convicted felon, “opposed to the form of our present govt…opposed to the social system in which we live…I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable + orderly means.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/debate-trump-platform-january-6/678818/

@pluralistic argues that, since Congress is gridlocked and half-bought by the beneficiaries of extraction and enshittification, the Federal government should use its leverage as a buyer, set procurement requirements that cleantech purchases (i would say all government tech purchases!) should be resistant to enshittification, and to just plain bricking when a supplier disappears. https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

From @simondlr, an image of a subway station near Chongqing, China, at the time that it was built in 2017, and then an entry to the same station now.

As Simon says, "We should build more bridges to nowhere. We need to build more housing."

https://sceneswithsimon.com/p/protocol-thresholds-and-the-days

Here's what experts say to keep in mind.