Nicholas Hunt-Walker

What did minimum wage get you each decade? In 2025, it buys you nothing but exhaustion.

There’s not a single place in America where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford even a modest 2-bedroom. Not one. That’s the economy we’re living in. #TrumpAffordabilityCrisis

It’s very funny for Trump to be trying to get cred as a peacemaker by using these Black leaders, after feuding with South Africa so publicly and what he’s just said about Somali-Americans. He’s so desperate for that peace prize.

must emphasize again that the government and courts have not only attacked trans rights built in the last 15 years and that were *explicitly envisaged as part of the Equality Act they are using to attack them* but forcing a rollback of *decades-old* policies by individual groups.

A stonecutter hammering away at a stone may not break it on the first hundred blows, or even cause a visible crack to form. But on the hundred and first blow it splits, but the final blow would've been meaningless without the hundred that came before it.

The plateaus are frustrating (for the things I'm actively trying to improve), but also the skill gap between what I can do right now and what I know I want to be able to do is frustrating. For the plateaus I try to remind myself of the anecdote of the stonecutter...

Plenty have stuck. Several of those listed I either had practiced or am still practicing for years (e.g. capoeira & minor acrobatics, music, physics, math, programming)

Music with various instruments, drawing, dance, martial arts & acrobatic feats, programming, physics, math, cooking, random handyman shit, alongside watching my kids grow and annoying the shit out of them by making them do things again and again for incremental gains

My favorite/most agonizing part of this is the following that works so much it makes me gag: haven't figured out how to do the thing? Have you tried doing the thing slower and paying closer attention to what’s going on as you’re doing it? Slowness reveals so much, but omg it pains me

Even though I consciously know better, from time to time I still expect a flash of brilliance to make me instantly good at something, or else be forever relegated to the Valley of Suck. And the flash of brilliance, like strength gains, only appears in retrospect after you’ve done your reps

I’ll gripe about/marvel at this until my last days of breath, but it’s remarkable how much skill level in a thing corresponds to your reps completed. You want to be good at X? How much X have you done? Have you tried…doing X more? You’ll at least reinforce what you already know, if not improve a bit

lol then I know when to stop!

🤣

I need my kids to grow up a little more before I go back to drawing. Being constantly interrupted/bogarted when I draw in front of them is exhausting and discouraging. I’m playing the piano at least weekly though. Sometimes daily

one thing worth observing here is that so many of these pundits aren't earnestly trying to understand what happened in the world as much as they are shadowboxing with people they don't like on the internet. stringinamaze.net/p/the-pundit...

Trump Administration Live Updates: President Calls Somalis ‘Garbage’ in Anti-Immigrant Tirade

credit to NYT for not sanewashing the appalling bigotry we saw today in the WH

"Even for Mr. Trump — who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries — his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry."

It really isn’t said enough how much these people straight up hate America. People should say this a lot more frequently. They simply don’t like the good parts of modern American life.

Haven’t been keeping track of progress like I used to, but there’s this. Also I hate the subjunctive. Also I’m playing with French now

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firefox AI and slop disablers from tumblr for the people from local hero mckitterick. Tried it on my end and the browser is significantly faster now

(copy paste-able in the alt text)

Pete Hegseth tweets "For your Christmas wish list..." with a picture of a book called "Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists"

This is what the so-called "Secretary of War" is tweeting amid reports that his department ordered a second strike to make sure they killed survivors of a boat they attacked that they allege with no proof carries drugs (which doesn't justify bombing them even it were true)

I’m still thinking about this and it really is one of those “everyone thinks Elon Musk is a genius until he gets involved in your field” moments. I’m gonna be a total bore and think about this seriously, please don’t read on if you don’t care what a landscape architect thinks about this shit… 1/?

🐱

Tag yourself, I’m the two bathtubs in the laundry room

Oh, don’t get me started on my hatred of coding interviews

The worst part of it is it makes getting assistance at home harder from parents that learned (and often last-used) arithmetic 15+ years ago. They can help with “carry the one” way readily after a full day of work than “decompose every number and add it back together“

*intended to write ”big fucking chunks” and got ”big fuck chunks” instead. But I’ll take it. It still works

and unfortunately the practice of just processing big fuck chunks of math problems has fallen out of fashion in homework (though it’s still in assessments so….???)

The new methodology prioritizes a strategy that works ok for the short term but doesn’t scale well with increasingly-complex arithmetic. The vertically-aligned method is a pain in the ass too, but the shit works and keeps a simple record of operations. What kids need is to get their reps in with it,

“Mrs. XXX says it’s faster“ speed isn’t great when you can easily trip yourself up after writing out 18 steps. Also god forbid you need to correct yourself in step 2 of 18. Then you lose whatever speed bonus you had as you cascade your changes down the line of numbers and operators

It’s not without its benefits—it trains you to handle numbers the way many people do with head math. But I do head math for operations that are easily decomposable & recomposable by digit, not when I want to show work for how I got to an answer in a non-confusing way for others to read & follow

Also becomes less sustainable as you’re adding more numbers together instead of just two at a time. You end up filling your page with intermediate steps, any one of which can suffer from an honest-to-god typo and throw off your whole calculation moving forward