Burnished rows of steel

Went down a rabbit hole and of course Maggie “withhold all the important details about Trump Whitehouse for my book because $$$ > journalistic ethics or the public wellbeing” Haberman is a NYTimes nepo baby.

To be clear, ALL “gifts” presented to any President are the American people’s and get archived for future display and historical purposes. No President ever gets to keep any gift given to them. And sure as hell not the illegitimate one currently illegally squatting in the White House.

The guys who came up with DHS (e.g. Bill Kristol et al) are now like "yeah, it was a bad idea and should be abolished." So abolishing DHS is not just moderate, its even the conservative position.

Take a look at all of the volunteer committee positions open in my town. This is exactly what local government SHOULD NOT BE. All of these boards, committees, etc should either be dissolved by the state or moved into actual town gov't and staffed by professionals. www.capenews.net/mashpee/news...

Unfortunately Boston hasn’t gotten the memo either. The “progressive champion” Wu has torpedoed housing construction (as well as safe streets efforts). At least the much hated milquetoast mods like Healey seem to get it on permitting and state overruling local control.

Notice how all these failures are administrative and human-centered failures and have nothing to do with the utility and usefulness of ALPRs? We need MORE automated traffic enforcement to make our streets safer.

As a former denizen of LessWrong, something I found interesting about it epistemically was the “small-c conservative” nature of assuming you DONT know all the facts and could be wrong and then trying to address your underlying biases. Of course it became “well we are LESSWRONG this we are CORRECT”

Bush II, at the nadir of his unpopularity, essentially told Republicans to run against him. Trump has strapped GOP to himself like a suicide vest.

Good. Farmers are a big reason we are in this mess, they get $100s of billions in subsidies a year, and still demand we worship the ground the walk on. They need to get to the find out part of fafo.

MAGA guy disappointed in Trump for taking Venezuelan oil when we have good god-fearing American oil at home and how it’s stealing American jobs.

*Looks at the history of White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis in the PNW* Yep, this is about right.

If SEC Shorts actually got Morgan Freeman for their latest I am speechless. If not that was a dang good impression (or a lot of money spent on Cameo) @conorsen.bsky.social

Did you know all your brain is doing is integrating under the curve when you throw a baseball? Something a TI-83 could do?

Our billionaires nowadays suck. Where are the new universities, new civic institutions, new public works? Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, etc where all brutal industrialists but they left behind a grand public contribution. Today’s billionaires are a bunch of ‘roided chuds.

GOP: Mercury or PFAS in your water? Don’t care! Anti-depressants or hormones in your water? Emergency!

It’s funny they think we might lose to China over AI when we’ve already lost in the field of renewable energy, batteries, and EVs. Those are the technologies of the future.

As a neoliberal technocrat this suggests that the best defense is a high-enough congestion fee

@daveweigel.bsky.social Unwillingness to actually answer this is because the answer is No. He loves Trump and wants him to win and hates Biden and his family bc Biden (rightfully) told them to f**k off

I am so pissed that Flock has destroyed the minor credibility automated traffic cameras were finally getting back. Speed and red light cameras save lives.

Also, what so few people recognize about eg Danish and European (esp Northern European) countries is that they have very high VATs (a type of sales tax) in which they explicitly trade private consumption of goods and services for public goods.

Oh we know Ken, and it involves a lot of trips to London with your mistress while buying her stuff with misappropriated state tax dollars.

We deserve this own goal.

Currently thinking about what series of tv shows I’ll eventually force my kid to watch, and I think it’s the following shows (in order): Parks & Rec, The Good Place, Brooklyn 99

I have only a $2500 budget to build a data science-focused work station. Can someone give me a good recommendation? Focus is memory, processing (CPU cores - I parallelize but don’t do AI training), then storage.

I’ve found myself in a weird place where I both reject Marxism-Leninism yet fully embrace a type of Liberal Vanguardism that I call Socialism with Neoconservative Characteristics.

If I can get his attention @jamellebouie.net I think this is the core of what is so disturbing about UET. It posits that the President is the most legitimate exhortation of the popular will (despite elections for the House and Senate) and thus must be allowed to act unabridged by laws and Congress.

Trump 1.0 already killed the Honda Fit bc of USMCA (the Fit didn’t qualify for tariff free entry under American made component reqs so had a 25% tariff which killed its razor thin profitability)

The truth is the only member of SCOTUS worth retaining at this point is Justice Jackson - Kagan & Sotomayor should be allowed to retire to a seaside dacha while the five GOP operatives get tossed in a deep, dark dungeon.

I think I have the solution for how we should deal with Trump voters: a poll tax. If you ever voted for Trump, you must pay $2000 x each time you voted for him AND pay a one time 5% wealth tax. Now I’ve solved your budget crises and dumb**s voter crises.

Post a perfect album from the 2000s I consider this one of the absolute best albums ever produced

Actually it’s Engineering, Maths, Arts, Communications, and Science - or EMACS for short

You can’t talk about debt without talking about how we got into a bad predicament, and there’s only one correct answer: tax cuts enacted this century

This is one of those arguments that sounds like slopulism but is actually, if anything, understated. 56% of Colorado river water goes to GROWING FEED FOR LIVESTOCK IN THE DESERT.

Such a good article; skewering the bad faith and self-serving/self-aggrandizement of a lot of these “progressives”. Wu’s first term was marked by killing construction and her second by killing safe streets, transit, and literally “her friend”.

I spent too much money to get quality solar powered post lights for my deck and solar powered landscaping lights for my walkway and dam g, actually buying quality non-Chinese non-Amazon products is amazing. So simple to install.

NEW AD: 14 years ago today, Ken Paxton stole someone's $1,000 pen. Today, Ken Paxton’s pen victim is endorsing James Talarico.

If I could sum up what Woke 1.0 actually was: it was this and “other people deserve respect”

I’d donate to make them listen to Tegan & Sara bc it will either convert them to the cause of brunch or drive them insane.

I saw yesterday that some right-wing outlets were running stories about me, which I’m used to. But this time I’m going to say something about it, because these were framed to imply that I was aligned with their own transphobia. ⬇️

Note also that this is what happens when your answer to fossil fuels is not “carbon tax” but instead oppose things likes pipelines and drilling leases and LNG terminals. These companies still get rich in the latter; in the former the public gets money and the same outcome

The IRS’s own research suggests about 3/4ths of the tax gap is from “small businesses” cheating on their taxes. So once again, buy big corp - they pay their taxes.

This pervasive view that we can achieve an European style (or even Canadian style) welfare state by simply taxing the rich is toxic. Across local/state/federal levels we collect ~28% GDP in tax revenue. The European avg is ~36%. You can’t reach that only “taxing the rich” you need consumption taxes

This is a good example of why there are two types of ex-GOP types: there are the Tom Nichols/Dispatch who still act blindsided by the fascism that arose from their side, and The Bulwark types who have given mea culpas about their roles. Treat the former with skepticism and the latter as allies.