Things in space and time

Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year

Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year https://theonion.com/third-amendment-rights-group-celebrates-another-success-1819569379/

Just a reminder for the maggot brains: the Rs have both the House and the Senate. They could pass a CR at any time with a simple majority vote to suspend the rule requiring more than a majority of Senators.

Crypto stumbles again.

Honestly, I think that’s what Bob Dole was going for too. He probably had the blue pill ad campaign in the works before he lost.

I am dealing with a “thorny problem” right now, today. It is hard and scary because IT IS ALWAYS HARD AND SCARY. But it is also where you do your best work. It is where stories go from “meh” to “WOW”. When I fix it - because that is the job - I will be that much closer to something worth reading.

It’s time for David Simon to finish The Plot Against America.

Getting to the point where the Dumbfuck-in-Chief, when told that the peasants are in full revolt by the guy who’s uncertain of the time-sensitive nature of the message, “Yes, they are.” We don’t even wear a suit for fucks sake.

I give shit to Jeffries (and Schumer) when they suck, so it’s also important to recognize when they’re doing it right.

This is doing it right. More of this, indeed. *Everyone* involved in the corruption of this administration MUST face consequences for their actions.

One nice thing about LLMs is that to be taken seriously, academic writers will have to get better at both reasoning and communicating that reasoning.

It’s interesting the way that the world these days seems to make us feel that we need to have an opinion on everything, even when having a certain opinion may not change anything we do, or anything about the way the world responds. We seem to be losing the ability or desire to just be silent on certain questions. (Silent and sad; silent and interested; silent and alert.)

Wisdom from George Saunders, in his newsletter:

If AI existed when David Simon was writing The Wire, there would be a season of The Wire dissecting how AI was destroying society.

Tech bros really really really hate creative people, don't they?

Weakening Patent Monopolies: The Most Effective Wealth Tax A wealth tax faces huge legal and practical hurdles. The better solution is to prevent extreme fortunes through smarter market and patents.

The best way to get a wealth tax is to make government-granted patent monopolies shorter and weaker cepr.net/publications...

When an eighth grader learns about asymptotes.

I'm not an expert on voting laws or policy, but it strikes me as quite a long shot that the GOP could actually get this done before 2026 and have it pass legal muster. Regardless, the fact that these OR GOP activists are talking publicly about their desire to nullify Oregonians' votes is bananapants

Ep. 18: September to Remember October 6 • S1 E18 • 44 min Also, we proposed a idea how to do a end run on vote by mail. Concept is based on what Trump proposed. When you vote, you check everyone's citizenship as well as voter ID. In a vote by mail state, you might be able to check citizenship during voter registration. You can send copies of your passport and your birth certificate in. How in the world are you going to check our voters? Voter ID, right? Vote by mail. So that creates a problem for Oregon. But if federal government new requirement is to check both, and if Oregon can comply with the requirements, what would happen to our election result? I'm talking about the entire federal delegation. For federal elections, we're talking about only federal elections. COMMON SENSE Vascluar

Ep. 18: September to Remember October 6 • S1 E18 • 44 min So entire federal delegation, congressmen and senators could be challenged, could be unseated because you didn't follow federal requirements to elect them. So I said the trade-off is worth it. You know why? Democrats control two Senate seats out of six congressional seats. We only control one. They control five. You talk about trade-off, right? COMMON SENSE Sanctuany

Two big GOP activists from Oregon were in DC last month for meetings with Trump admin officials. On their podcast they talk about a plan they discussed to nullify the results of Oregon's 2026 federal elections. Pass federal voter ID law, then refuse to seat OR delegation because OR didn't comply.

bsky.app/profile/artc...

Generative AI’s Impending Death By A Thousand Rake-Smacks Give it enough rope...

My latest newsletter is about how generative AI doesn't just need money to survive, but faith.

Every time we see another big genAI foul-up, that faith will waver, and its end becomes all the more likely.

whatwelost.substack.com/p/generative...

Er, I mean it's a discussion about space junk, ultimately.

I hope it plays out that way.

Starlink is a way to monopolize satellite communications with short-lived disposable shit, then keep everyone on the hook for launch costs to keep the network up.

Relatedly, I know a middle-school teacher in Indiana who teaches health class, and she is no longer allowed to discuss reproduction or LGBTQ+ issues, even though the vast majority of students and parents want her to teach those things.

My theological status is best described as "lazy agnostic," which is to say I am fairly certain that there is no god, but I'm not going to go out of my way to find out one way or another. If you're religious, cool, please don't use your religion as an excuse to be an asshole to other folks, thanks.

Out there on the internet someone has confidently asserted that I am a member of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, which is a factoid that comes as a surprise to me, and also, I suspect, to the LDS.

For the avoidance of doubt: despite owning a church, I am not a member of any.

Sam Hill doesn't seem to give a shit about line readings.

To be clear, what Yarvin is doing here is telling America's richest people who own much of the country's (and the world's) communications infrastructure that any non-MAGA politics that emerges after 2028 will be a wholly destructive politics that they must oppose with every fiber of their being.

Yarvin convinced a bunch of credulous tech billionaires that they needed to back an extreme, dumb, & wildly unpopular politics to “save western civilization.” We’re now getting that politics on steroids, and now he’s all “oh no, these policies are unpopular, must flee the country to save ourselves.”

The people who are most driving this narrative this are not doing this because they want to end systems of oppression. It is because they want humans in service to them as if they were robots.

This reminds me of “characters in books can’t consent to sex, so you’re actually a bad person for writing sex scenes” that goes around periodically.

Personally I'm not going to take human rights lessons from someone who expressly does not know what a human is