Mark Shore

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help” said the man who twice* ran for, and held, the governorship of the largest state and then the presidency

* or three times if you count his primary challenge to Ford in 1976

then watch The Man in the White Suit too, in case you haven't already - also very funny in a different way, and starring both

there are quite a few newer series (many but by no means all British) on streaming services that are padded, slow, overly complex with multiple sideplots/red herrings, and that are also in the end kind of dumb

so I scroll through my phone while watching them because they aren't worth my full focus

a fun fishing trip on Lake Tahoe will settle misunderstandings and eliminate any bad blood

there may be correlations between CEO compensation and an organization's total payroll (not necessarily linear, with salary scaling and number of management levels) and if healthcare insurance companies function as profit-taking gatekeepers and middlemen, he could be right for the wrong reasons

if correct this would somehow simultaneously be both an encouraging and a discouraging explanation

it's very gradational for most species but genetics, mutations, and evolutionary biology basically require that the first true chicken had parents that were not themselves, by definition, chickens, so the unfertilized egg *did* come first

Adobe execs: whatever happens we can count on our loyal customers, who love us with all their hearts
Adobe customers: please torture the company before you kill it, make it a long drawn-out horric death, thanks in advance!

it's amazing that Canada, Australia, and much of Europe are going to squander once in a lifetime opportunities given to them by Trump and the GOP because of their own terrible RW politicians and parties

Some entertaining solutions for a stupid problem.

Exhibit A

former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei politely listens to the pitch but declines the bundled home insurance

future Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei sighs but knows how stubborn his dad can be

no jury in the land, etc.

governors: experience leading large organizations, commanders of state national guard, big egos but also need to appeal to retail voters, used to bossing around legislatures, no learned deference to or undue respect to Congress and SCOTUS 👍

look at that loser, holes in his hands and side and scalp
his feet too, someone points out
haha, you're right! good luck finding comfortable sandals now

"relax, we're fully insured," the corporate manager assures the captain and crew over the satellite link

Pirro checking with staff: so there's no rule that alcohol can't be openly consumed at Friday afternoon press conferences?
staff: uh...
Pirro: I thought not

a reluctance to *acknowledge* (or a propensity to ignore)... got mixed up with my edits there

I genuinely think that there's a reluctance in many circles – including legislative and bureaucratic ones – to ignore inflation's effects out of some misguided fear that acknowledging them would just encourage it

CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years LANGLEY, VA—A report released Tuesday by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General revealed that the CIA has mistakenly obscured hundreds of thousands of pages of critical intelligence information wit...

odds are decent you've already seen this classic, but there's always someone who hasn't

I mentioned it for two reasons - hyperbole for dark comic effect, but...

there are two or three governments that likely have live smallpox in secure state labs, but each of them is governed by increasingly malevolent and incompetent leadership, which isn't funny at all

the Demos is dead!
long live the Populi!

and before John Kerry, Republicans used a similar strategy against Michael Dukakis (aided by a carefully picked photo that made him, an Army veteran and then-leader of the Massachusetts National Guard, look goofy)

I don't want to blame Democrats but I wish their tactical readiness was better

people have started thinking about *polio* now

eventually, who knows, maybe smallpox makes a comeback

the important thing is that American farmers have a true friend in the Oval Office, Donald J. Trump The Farmers' President, who cares about them as deeply as he cares about any other person in the world besides himself

Palatir's CEO Karp claiming that his company's AI will result in "increasing the power of working-class men" is also such obvious bullshit that anyone who believes it is doing so because they want to for other reasons

even on brief vacation stops in Berlin and Rome over the past few years it was hard not to notice heavily armed police standing guard in pairs outside synagogues

in Rome and other Italian cities they often do that outside of big churches, but mainly if they are tourist attractions

not only not coming for the existing understandable reasons, but openly threatened this morning by Trump, the nominal host

there are tens or hundreds of thousands of Mesopotamian clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions that have been lying in museum cases and drawers around the world, untranslated

machine vision, OCR, and trained AI translation could go a long way to bringing their contents back to life

I'm very unimpressed with generative AI used for art and creative writing, both in terms of results and rationale for use

but for coding, data input and cleaning, and multiple other tasks (mundane or not) that required close and consistent attention to detail at scale, AI is now a game changer

Joe Biden repeatedly saying versions of "without Israel, there’s no Jew in the world who will be safe" was a typical Bidenism but also showed his frozen-in-time attitudes and beliefs

if he genuinely believed, as president, that 7 million Americans were unsafe under his watch he should have resigned