jlar

Donald Trump says Canada has no right to exist.
I take the threat seriously. With our sovereignty on the table I support a national discussion on next steps.
But CBC thinks it would be fun to have an American DJ co-host whether we should exist as a nation.
Fuck that @ianhanomansing.bsky.social

Hard to understand why Oregon state senator Mark Meek would want to completely eliminate the 0.10% statewide payroll tax that funds transit (SB 160).

Oregon has some weird Democrats when it comes to transportation. #orleg olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2025R1/M...

AFGE Continues to Debunk Misconceptions About Federal Workers Sen. Joni Ernst, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and other politicians have continued to make incorrect statements about the federal workforce.

In 2024, the total federal workforce amounted to 4.3% of the federal budget. Like every private equity takeover, the books look better when you eliminate long-term financial "liabilities."

www.afge.org/article/afge...

Rules

1. MAGA do not care about contradictions, everything that they do is transactional, they are nihilists and are ONLY concerned with money and power

2. NOTHING that they say is true and they don't care at all, they understand the first-message advantage

1/

DOGE Mismanagement Principles Musk et al. don't know or care about the damage they are doing

DOGE is not a govt efficiency project. Firing 1 in 4 fed employees would cut govt spending by 1%. DOGE is a political control project. Firing and terrorizing public employees is a means to weakening state regulation & strengthening a personalist presidency donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-misma...

Birthright Citizenship: Barnett & Wurman’s NY Times Essay and their Bates Backfire Randy Barnett & Ilan Wurman had a guest essay in the N.Y. Times on Feb. 15th: “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship.” The bottom line is that their essay backfires, bec…

I dug into the only US source cited by Randy Barnett & Ilan Wurman for their theory - against birthright citizenship - in @nytimes @nytopinion:
Edward Bates in 1862.
He doubly contradicted their argument:

"Birthright Citizenship: The Bates Backfire"
shugerblogcom.wordpress.com/2025/02/16/b...

Maybe THIS will be the dumbest thing I read today: Florida’s education commissioner announced Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a book of the month to “highlight the importance of American pride.”

Can’t make this stuff up. H/t @ericcolumbus.bsky.social

Reminder that Aaron Swartz was facing 35 years in prison and financial devastation for trying to programmatically download and open the contents of JSTOR, which led to him taking his own life.

But OpenAI is going to scrape all of academia and make billions by plagiarizing it.

“Discouraging human creativity” really is the key thing that revolts me about the modern tech industry, especially compared to how much tech *fostered* my creativity when I was a kid in the 90s and 2000s.

Researchers Say There’s a Vulgar But More Accurate Term for AI Hallucinations It's not just your imagination — ChatGPT really is spitting out "********," according to a group of researchers.

“‘The machines are not trying to communicate something they believe or perceive,’ the paper reads. ‘Their inaccuracy is not due to misperception or hallucination. As we have pointed out, they are not trying to convey information at all. They are bullshitting.’”

Stupid CHRISTians following the words of CHRIST... what's next, loving our neighbors?

screenshot of a tweet from the fascist website The Federalist that says “There's Nothing Loving About Dolly Parton's False Gospel”

they came for Dolly. we ride at dawn.

spot on

The uses of hostages For Israelis, the hostages aren't just a graphic detail of the Oct 7 war. They ARE the war: casus belli, justification and primary war aim, all rolled into one.

I leveraged my Jewishness and my writer-ness to do this one. I think it's got some good insights, please share. theracket.news/p/uses-hosta...

And to follow that up, when I die does that fence now belong to the public? When my estate sells the land that fence is built on, a portion goes to taxes, isn't that sharing the value of the thing created?

If I need a fence built am I supposed to pay a congressman the same amount to build me a shitty fence as I would a skilled laborer who knows what she's doing? Sometimes skill has value.

It's a travesty that people will spend millions on Da Vinci's work but my children's drawings are relegated to my refrigerator.

Twitter post KTVU @KTVU Follow Upscale Mexican restaurant Calavera closes under weight of Oakland crime CALAVERA ktvu.com Readers added context Important context: Calavera had also settled a massive wage-theft lawsuit affecting over 263 employees in Apr 2022. This directly bears on their claimed reasons for closing; they have had to incur the additional 'cost' of actually paying full wages over the last ~1.5 years.

businesses love to lie about their own incompetence! Walgreens admitted closing their businesses and blaming shoplifting when it was entirely just poor planning! and now in Oakland:

Five-panel Vince McMahon meme where he’s getting hornier at the following text in order: Articles about plagiarism allegations against Harvard University's president Articles about hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman's reaction to articles about plagiarism allegations against Harvard University's president Articles about plagiarism allegations against hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman's wife Articles about hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman's reaction to articles about plagiarism allegations against hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman's wife Articles about press reactions to hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman's reaction to articles about plagiarism allegations against hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman's wife

👍

If I want to make myself angry I will remember about 65% of the country thinks holding cops accountable for wantonly killing people is extremism

White nationalist Stew Peters tweets clip of me joking, in response to an antisemitic troll that claimed Jews are unathletic, that sports are a Jewish plot "to divert the energy of the gentile while we take over the systems of power."

An antisemitic troll once asked me "why are Jews so bad at sports?" I said it's because sports are a Jewish conspiracy to occupy the most physically capable gentiles while we take over the world. Every so often, an antisemite finds this joke and thinks it's real and it is glorious:

But what if I start every reply with "Tom"? That's gotta count for something right?

Columbia University declined invite to testify

If your institution wants to know how best to respond to bad faith inquiries from Chris Rufo and his right-wing allies in Congress, follow the example that Columbia set:

Administrative roles are a huge time suck, and your own work agenda is often sacrificed in the process.

This is well known, which is why the most productive scholars are rarely admin and vice versa.

The idea that the presidency goes to the Best and Most Scholar is just deeply deeply stupid.

Now and then I think of when we were in traffic
When I felt I had to pee so badly I could die
Told myself I could make it through
Saw no blinker on your Subaru
The zipper merge is just a thing you should remember

BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO CUT ME OFF

Maybe I'll write a couple posts about the CFO of Goldman Sachs, make some really wild accusations that he stole a car in his 20s or something, and make sure the New York Times puts all of its Style reporters on the case, just constant repetition of my bad faith bullshit, laundering my attacks.

hot take: the rise of the youtube tutorial is one of the worst things to happen to hobbies. 75% of the time, a written description with about 10 photographs would be a better method of explaining things.

This goes up to 100% of the time when dealing with software issues