Ranamar

Ethics aside, this take could use some contact with reality. Biden's expanded CTC didn't motivate recipients to vote to maintain it. Trump offered $5000 checks and it hurt him in the polls. The empirical claim that welfare creates single issue voters just doesn't hold up.

Some context around this, from a markets person. Historically in LatAm, leftist victories have led to sharp losses over the ~3 months after an election where the left wins. Stocks also typically underperformed into those victories. But 3y post-election, returns for leftists have been *higher*.

Solar has overtaken nuclear. A decade ago it supplied 1% of the world's power. In 2025 it met three quarters of global demand growth. Almost nobody saw it coming. I spoke to Jocelyn Timperley at BBC Future about why. www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

It's well-documented that the president maintained a years-long friendship with the world's most notorious child sex trafficker. It might strike you as odd there aren't direct allegations of Trump engaging in child sex trafficking.. except there are. There are SO MANY. They just never get reported!

It's ace week!!! Kembral Thorne, the hero of my Echo Archives series, is a biromantic asexual (like me!), which is super important to me but can get lost in book descriptions with everything else going on (Tired mom MC! Sapphic romance! Time loops! Layered worlds! Murder! Swordfights in ballgowns!)

I will accept the following applications of the ME IP: * XCOMesque isometric trpg * colony sim where you sisko for the citadel but for real this time * dating sim (duh) * more powerwash sim levels

I fundamentally don't care if the people of Brazil want more or less regulation, more or less taxes, etc. Their choice, not my business. But I *do* care if they're electing (or in this case, defeating) a figure who seems likely to become part of a global authoritarian movement.

I of course loved him as Chekov, but playing Bester on BABYLON 5 really showed his range. You really forgot the guy ever *was* Chekov in that role. RIP Walter Koenig.

Leyte Gulf remains arguably the most controversial battle in American naval history but the sheer capacity of the drama is still unsurpassed: the last clash of the battleships, the first Kamikazes, David McCampbell shooting down 9 planes in his MOH flight, the last stand of the tin can sailors…

I do not claim that you can pour everything into the gap between Trump on the one hand and Biden/Harris on the other, but into that chasm nevertheless fit a great many lives lost or ruined. It turns out there really was a difference!

do...do...do you think that the Germans chose the lesser evil in 1933? I would not, generally speaking, characterize the Nazis as a 'lesser evil' and think the world would have been a lot better off if, like, Zentrum or the SPD had won a plurality of the vote in 1933.

We need a good way of saying a series is adult in a “do your taxes” way

My ultra hot take is ME1 > MEA > ME3 > ME2 from a thematic/setting/plot viewpoint

Trump being the force that drives increased turnout in American elections is such a monkey's paw curls moment that I have to sit and stare at the wall sometimes

People on both sides don't realize how much of the valence of turnout has changed. It used to be that low propensity voters leaned left so the right used voter ID laws and similar to suppress turnout. now if they actually passed the SAVE act, it would suppress GOP voters.

A decade of this fucking shit

I think the Trump people have understandably come to the conclusion that this country hates women and misogyny is a cheat code for power. They may or may not be right. But I will grant that I see how they reached that conclusion from their personal experiences.

Everyone involved in this raid needs to die in jail tbh.

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

Telling that the writer, who isn’t on the usual NYT “trans beat,” did an excellent job with this story. Audible teeth-clenching at the waste and injustice despite the clipped prose

Thought the same but people generally trust the military (for better or worse) and distrust Trump, so it'll be mostly read as an endorsement over a distrusted president (to say nothing of Hegseth, the least popular member of a deeply unpopular Cabinet) bsky.app/profile/whim...

And prosecute Pete for war crimes.

The fact that the president's doctors are giving him the dementia test over and over again -- tracking his decline, most likely -- and that the president keeps bragging about having to take that test should be a five-alarm fire.

literally this comic except he apparently lives in Czechia instead of Nebraska

The worst thing about Bioware shutting down is the shitty treatment of the people working for it. But also it's becoming clear that they had assembled an absolutely elite team of modern science fiction writers to write the next Mass Effect game, and man it hurts that we'll never get to see it.

breaking news: foreign powers cause regime change in Iran and are quickly dissatisfied with the results

I'd wondered about this, from the discussion I've seen, so I'm glad to see someone really lay it out.

something that fucking sucks about applying to stuff is that you have to take every phone call even when theyre labeled spam risk. special bonus indignity

Grownup stuff is scary and has consequences, kids stuff exists in a cozy wonderland with guardrails and protections built in. You can see how it metastasizes into something unseemly very quickly.

They still make YA books like that, they just put them in the Warhammer section so they don't get cooties from the stuff for gays and girls.

I know I keep saying this, but it's surreal how Trump is every negative stereotype about America wrapped in one guy. Russia bombs a basket of puppies and he shrugs. Ukraine bombs a refinery back and he's like "NOOOOO! ALL THAT BEAUTIFUL, INNOCENT OIL!"

It’s wild how Russiagate and Epsteingate were both proven and it just didn’t matter.

So, obviously an insane 'aside from' but 1) the Nazis did not do good things and 2) my entirely non-specialist worth-no-more-than-anyone-else's opinion is we should probably talk about Holocausts, plural, perpetrated by the Nazis? They did many horrible things, one of which was The Holocaust.

Basically any open submission portal of any kind of going to be spammed to hell from now on; the era of being able to have *anything* unmoderated is over.

tech LinkedIn is depressing. logged in to see the goodbye post of a long-time Googler but absolutely. everything. else. in my feed is about AI. pro-AI, anti-AI, tips on using AI for coding, how to deal with reviewing AI-written CLs... is nobody writing software that actually helps users anymore?

i know several people have asked stuff like "... but where's all the new software?" and uh i guess we have an answer now. 3000-5000 clones of a cosy indie game about organizing your inventory. incredible work

As an aside, one real challenge in teaching a language at the college level I am finding is that however bright, diligent and disciplined your students are, they do not see developing a language skill as an important part of being an educated, well-rounded person. They're box-checking.

It’s basically impossible to describe the Boeing corporation without sounding like a paranoid schizophrenic.

My opinion on France is that we have enough problems over here and should leave France to the French unless Girl Hitler tries to take over the world. No hate, just saying the last country whose problems we tried to solve was Israel and love Israel or hate it, we didn't solve them. Know your limits.

It is, I think, very relevant when considering both strategic bombing and unrestricted submarine warfare in WWII that in both cases the Axis powers initiated a type of morally questionable warfare which they then found themselves at a disadvantage to material factors.