William B. Fuckley

Totally forgotten 2018 drunk tweet: poppy seed low key kinda not the vibe. shitty dry ass muffins lol

2025 Bluesky post: god I love poppy seed, can’t get them anywhere these days because of woke

Insane person: I FUCKING KNEW I’D CATCH YOU IN YOUR LIES ONE DAY

Definitely a sort of insane feeling the first time you see someone you don’t know pull together a fucking collage of years of your posts to make some kind of imagined point. Not in a “hey I wanted to save that funny post you made” way but in a “HAHA CAUGHT, ACCORDING TO MY DOSSIER, YOU ACTUALLY…”

fwiw Alex Lee is someone who is usually very good on policy that I like a lot! But this is a catastrophic miscalculation.

there is one (1) thing that stops the GOP from doing this, and that is a viable threat of retaliation. that’s it. that’s the only way you stop them.

very dumb, very bad! @votealexlee.bsky.social, this is surrendering rather than taking a stand on principle. this is losing, not having integrity. Neville Chamberlain, not MLK.

My Democratic colleagues and I just left the state of Texas to break quorum and stop Trump’s redistricting power grab.

Trump is trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes. But first he’ll have to come through us.

It’s time to fight back.

My parents being small business owners made me *extremely* aware of much that shit sucks and how I’d prefer to be a well paid employee instead. But I guess there is something to be said for that kind of relationship with your clientele in non-economic terms.

Sort of both anthropologically interesting and kind of touching. Been a couple of these meetings where both he and they leave sniffling a little, clearly emotional. On one level makes no sense: he’s not dying! Still lives in the area, they can get lunch with him! But I guess not the same.

Dad is finally selling his business and returning, but there’s a substantial (as in over a year) handover period where he introduces the new guy to clients, etc. some of it pretty emotional, been working with some of these people longer than I’ve been alive.

Three oldest continual operating human institutions with clear continuity are the Roman Catholic Church, an English high school, and a Japanese construction company.

Say what you want about the imperium of man, very good land use policies. Definitely not afraid of density.

Tokugawa shogunate deep state

Anyway, if for some reason you want to read actually well-founded work on this from a well-regarded political scientist rather than pseduononyms rantings from a relative nobody, @eunjikim.bsky.social’s work is really interesting.

I do think you can lately see in some genre type media a very belated “oh shit maybe we should not have done this” realization in that they kinda go out of their way a little more to make slop action movies with more pro-social pro-system themes that aren’t just “trust only the Ubermensch”

We beamed “Genius Tech business guy held back by whining govt bureaucrats” into millions of people’s heads in HD at the worst possible time.

Goddamnit Jon Favreau you doomed the fucking republic.

My crank theory of art and politics is that the flagship character of the MCU being Iron Man at that particular point in time really did inadvertently boost Elon Musk’s image in the minds of millions in meaningful ways. If they had lead with Thor or some shit history probably turns out different.

Left postmodernists in the 1990s assumed that the "truths" of the marginalised and oppressed would benefit from abandoning an epistemological commitment to objective truth. It should have been obvious that the "truths" of the rich and powerful would prevail.

In terms of being solvable what needs to happen is some journalist or politician talking about something like the Sydney Sweeney thing being asked to explicitly name which elected dems said something and stuttering and being unable to reply. A high-profile viral humiliation is needed.

Someone on here posted “Abolish healthcare!” A few months ago. That’s funny, that’s interesting, that’s something people will have a good time engaging with. The right wing equivalent is just some weird racism, “You, know Finns are basically Jews”. It’s actually worse but more discursively boring.

I think the structural problem with democrats on social media is that left leaning people who are annoying are more interesting to talk with and about, and the internet flattens the distinction between annoying and meaningfully bad.

this is I think a lot of the category error that made some people in software world (that weren’t just stupid or malicious, etc) think that DOGE could just come in and fix government by being Good At Computer.

I would guess that in software a lot more of the work occurs in the world of bytes, cleaning the data, rendering it usable, making sure pipelines are smooth, etc. Not that we don’t do this with survey stuff, but much more of the expense and cost is located earlier in the data generating process.

This isn’t to say that data appears instantly in usable format for software things, I’m sure there’s plenty of things that I’d don’t know about that cause headaches. But there’s a different friction on the front end that you have when each row in your data frame is a actual person, business, etc

The minute you go slightly off the map of “nationally representative sample of people in rich country being asked things that can be asked in under 15-30 mins” your costs increase by an order of magnitude. And that’s not even that cheap to start with, it’s just relatively easier!

Actually I was way off: i just did some back of envelope math and it’s easily at least ~$150k in just expenses I know enough about to estimate. Again, this isn’t even counting labor costs at all, and we are a relatively cheap operation. High quality data is very complicated and expensive to get.

I currently am part of a project that samples a slightly difficult to capture sub population repeatedly with a high quality instrument. Our total N is less than 5k. I would conservatively estimate the total costs of this project at ~$50k, not counting labor. And we run on a relative shoestring.

I’m becoming very convinced of is that people in ‘tech’ (the subculture of social media, SaaS, etc, not technology in general) are so used to a particular kind of mostly world of bits dataflows that they massively underestimate the difficulty of world of atoms data generating processes.

yes they do in fact, that’s the thing about social media, it has cooked the brains of elites most comprehensively of all