There was a Republican chode here in Wisconsin who voted twice to prove that people could vote twice. (The clerks caught his double vote, and he got prosecuted.)

Indeed. Notice, too, that the concerns about Biden’s cognitive abilities have instantly stopped? He’s still the President, and still in charge of the nukes. But no more news stories.

Meanwhile, the other guy has recently developed a habit of swearing at rallies, and there are a few articles about his wife asking him to knock it off, but nothing pointing out that a sudden increase in swearing is a symptom of dementia. At a town hall in La Crosse, WI the other day, he didn’t know why he was there at first. Still radio silence from the news media.

Funny, isn’t it?

Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.

I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (edit: work) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a few seconds at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.

Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.

This is probably 10 years ago that I read it, but I don’t expect that the numbers have changed much: The median number of lifetime partners for men is 4, while the median for women is 7. The median means that half of the group had that many or more, and half had that many or fewer. If every heterosexual encounter by definition has to include a male and a female, the way that that works out is that there’s a subgroup of men who have a partner count way over four.

In short, yeah, that observation checks out in the research. Among men, there are a few Wilt Chamberlains balanced by thousands with only a partner or two. (NB: extreme example for rhetorical purposes)

I’m too old to be an incel™; I was going through it back when the term incel was coined as a neutral descriptor. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have gone down that rabbit hole, because critical thinking comes very naturally to me, and the idea that it was women’s fault didn’t ever quite sit right with me. Women aren’t a monolith; they don’t get together and scheme. But if the incel phenomenon had been around, well, who knows? The camaraderie and validation of a group is incredibly beguiling.

Anyway, I was dealing with depression, which brought along a lot of other problems that caused me to be deeply angry and unsatisfied with life. One thing that really woke me up, oddly, was the song Toledo by Dan Bern. Specifically, the lyrics, “Maybe all the things you thought you got coming to you / Ain’t coming to you / Not in this life / And maybe all of the promises you thought were broken / Were never really made” In short, where was I getting the idea that life was fair, or that the universe owed me, well, anything? Not quite out of my posterior, because many cultural messages tell you that. But those messages are wrong.

So I decided to make the best of what life gives me, work on my own issues, and to have fun and do interesting things solo. And wouldn’t you know it, a year later…

…I was still single. What, do you buy into that trash about how you find “the one” when you stop looking? I’m still single years and years later. BUT! That’s okay, because “giving up looking” isn’t some fancy, new way of low-key actually-looking. The benefit has been being more satisfied with life, and doing fun and interesting things.

I read it. It was not garbage, it contains useful insights. I recommend that people read it to understand politics. BUT, NOTE, CAVEAT: Approach it with your critical thinking cap on. The author is an unreliable narrator, which is unorthodox in a work of non-fiction.

Exploitation is a loaded term, with many negative connotations. It’s more neutral to state the same thing as, “Nobody gets to be a billionaire without accruing the surplus value of other people’s labor.”

And that’s true of Notch, too. Minecraft wouldn’t exist without countless people who built the computers, the OS, the Java language, built out the Internet, operate the electrical grid, operate the payment networks, litigated and legislated copyright law, et cetera.

Now, you might say that all of those people got compensated for their labor, and it’s true. (That’s why the negative connotations of exploitation don’t apply.) However, the result of their labor unlocks immense value, which they do not share in because of the way the Internet developed. We could easily imagine a different scenario in which the online services won, an alternate reality in which Notch worked as a programmer for PepsiCo-Prodigy-AOL, and got paid a very good salary to create Minecraft for it. Then, it would be fair for the company to reap all of the subscription fees generated by putting the game on their network service.

We can say that in both scenarios, as long as we’re imagining, Notch would have put in the same amount of work. In one, though, he’d live a decent, middle-class life, with a corporation reaping the surplus value of his labor. In our world, he’s a billionaire, benefiting from the surplus value of others’ labor.

Honesty, I don’t think that there is a Great Filter. The Fermi Paradox strikes me as not very well-reasoned. A whole hell of a lot of things would have to go exactly right for civilizations to make contact, rather than it being the default assumption. There are lots of filters, not just one Great one.

But the closest to a Great Filter is that space is really, really. stupendously big. The chances of even detecting each other across such distances is vanishingly small, much less traversing them. Add in the difficulty of jumping the metabolic energy gap to become complex life, and that could reduce the density of civilizations down to a level that they’re just not close enough to each other in spacetime to admit even the possibility of contact. And we’re hanging our hat on some highly-speculative concepts like alien mega-structures harnessing whole solar systems to allow detection.

I think a lot of persnickety, smaller filters combine to make interstellar contact between civilizations against long odds. Perhaps the best we’ll get is spectral signatures from distant planets that are almost-conclusive proof of some sort of life.

British newspapers were only able to subsidize the use of the letter ‘u’ through taxes levied on the colonies, which led to the revolution. So who’s so smart after all?

Nah, seriously, the Normans added the ‘u’ to French-derived words after they invaded. English orthography wasn’t standardized, though. Johnson kept the ‘u’ out of a sense of tradition when compiling his British dictionary, and Webster elided it in his American dictionary because we don’t pronounce it. Neither spelling, -or or -our, derives from the other.

The dollar is metric, so we already have such a system. People often use kilodollars already, e.g. writing $2k instead of $2,000, but we could start using decadollars ($10) hectodollars ($100), too.

The first one is from Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which is the story of the American Nazi propagandist, Howard Campbell, who briefly appears in the more well-known book, Slaughterhouse Five. The second is from the show BoJack Horseman, specifically episode 12 of the first season.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

ETA, same thing a different way: “That’s the thing. I don’t think I believe in ‘deep down’. I kind of think all you are is just the things that you do.”

Okay, you do the high-speed rail. I was gonna say 15-minute cities, so I’ll do that. We’ll attack the same major problems from complementary angles.

I have no direct evidence, but it’s not at all far-fetched. The Obama administration set up a coordinated effort to share intelligence and plan tactics for the crackdown on Occupy Wall Street across the FBI, state and local police forces, and the banks themselves. The uniformity and brutality of the response to the university anti-genocide protests is… curious, at least.

If you can assign a second IP address to the network interface, then just do so, and bind the docker container to one, and Adguard Home to the other. Otherwise, the reverse proxy based on the server name is the way.

I’ve heard of Project 2025. It seems like the Democrats in office have not. Heck, just this morning, I read Jennifer Rubin’s op-ed about how Sen. Durbin (chair of the Judiciary Committee) is so peeved he’s almost on the verge of sending a Very Sternly Worded Letter about one of our Supreme Court justices being an insurrectionist.

Indeed. I keep asking what is the plan to stop a fascist MAGA candidate from winning the Presidency in 2028, when the Democrats don’t have incumbent advantage, and the historical pattern is a party flip, and have received only one (joke) answer. I have heard no talk whatsoever about how to handle a Biden win this year, although the MAGA politicians are signaling another attempt to overturn the election. (My state AG is still “investigating” the fake elector scheme from 2020; no way a prosecution will happen before the election, and likely never.) “Vote harder” is not going to be effective.

I do not, so I’ll take that back. It was widely discussed at the time, so I remembered it as Bush being there when the attack occurred, not that he left shortly before. I will say that I think it’s close enough for the point to stand that the Bush and bin Laden families had business interests in common, and had had personal dealings prior.

Thanks for the correction.

Correct. If journalists know something as a fact, they should state it, and share the source of that fact. If they don’t know something, but have a guess, they can say that it’s their own inference.

But to use weasel words to lead the reader to infer things that are not factually supported is, well, not a good look.

I haven’t forgotten that George H.W. Bush (the President’s father) was literally in a meeting with a member of the bin Laden family when the attacks occurred. The Bush and the bin Laden families were highly entangled in oil business dealings. I remember, too, that the only airplanes allowed to fly in U.S. airspace in the days after 9/11—all other traffic everywhere being grounded, stranding Americans far from home—were the flights taking members of the bin Laden family out of the United States, and back to Saudi Arabia.

I wonder why that attack on Saudi Arabia never happened?