Sam Ladner

ICE is hiring! US immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking for highly motivated, morally indifferent individuals to join our team. Open positions include: Senior Goon Racism Enforcement Office Unmarked Van Driver (Part-Time) Experience with children a plus usajobs.gov

From this month's edition of The Onion.

I’m so sorry for your loss. Pixel had a good life.

JK Rowling calls for Marks & Spencer boycott amid hysteria over 'trans' employee JK Rowling has called for a boycott of M&S after a customer complained an allegedly trans employee approached herself and her daughter.

The other day I got a bra fitting from the most knowledgeable staff member who was also trans. She knew what she was doing! jK Rowling can get stuffed www.thepinknews.com/2025/08/06/j...

White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite The White House has instructed NASA employees to destroy two major, climate change-focused satellite missions.

Good morning to everyone except the climate deniers in the White House futurism.com/white-house-...

It’s a proliferation of image-based posts that bother me. I miss Twitter c 2012

I am weirded out by the sheer volume of image-based propaganda on this site. It’s like Facebook arrived overnight.

Liberalism Doomed the Liberal International Order A less legalistic system would help protect democracies.

Ok, I did read this entire article and they have a point: liberal world order falsely erases power imbalances. But regional organizational forms ALSO suffer from this (soft paywall) www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

They do note hiring gyrations leading to lay offs and also RTO yes but they are primarily quant so don't have a lot of detail. Personally, I see this part of a larger trend of withdrawal from everything "out there"

Why Are Managers So Miserable at Work? Only 27% of managers globally say they feel involved and enthusiastic about their work, a recent Gallup study finds. A researcher explains why.

Unprecedented drop in manager engagement, according to Gallup. Why? Lack of training may be it but it's in line with other forms of disengagement www.wsj.com/lifestyle/ca...

Diamond continues to shine: new properties discovered in diamond semiconductors Diamond continues to shine: new properties discovered in diamond semiconductors

TIL blue diamonds are blue because they have Boron in them, which makes them conductive to electricity. They call them Boron-doped diamonds. They also plasmonic, meaning they are chemically inert superconductors that could power quantum computers. Wild. grainger.illinois.edu/news/stories...

I read the entire article and it’s alarming. Straight up lies leading to false charges.

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

Amy Sherald Cancels Her Smithsonian Show, Citing Censorship

Portrait artist famous for her Michelle Obama portrait cancelled her exhibit at the Smithsonian because the museum would not hang her Trans Forming Liberty portrait. She says it's because the conditions "no longer support the integrity of the work." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/a...

Trump supporters report higher levels of psychopathy, manipulativeness, callousness, and narcissism Support for Donald Trump is linked to darker personality traits, including increased psychopathy and decreased empathy, new research finds. The study also connects conservative political beliefs to lo...

Here’s your latest insight on “Why don’t they swipe left on me?” “In other words, malevolent traits were more predictive of conservative ideology among men than among women.”
www.psypost.org/trump-suppor...

Must read. This is criminal conduct, full stop.

Elizabeth Peace, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Park Service, said the Trump administration’s move “is not about rewriting the past.”

So, what you're saying is "it's about rewriting the past." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/c...

Reminder of this insightful post. There’s never just one category of anti social behaviour.

Opinion | We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse.

I read pretty much everything David Autor writes. This one is a doozy. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/o...

I’m anxiously waiting for the Big Beautiful Obituary!
It can’t come soon enough!

Epstein. That’s it. That’s the skeet.

Great read

Agree. We are all in a toxic soup of Nowness. The stupefaction of constant notifications freezes us all.

This is not only a great piece, but I love the idea of using Jess's structure -- unpacking the sociological significance of a famous person's quote -- as a window into sociological analysis.

Taxes may also be therapy, turns out

Alberta premier demands apology from fire-stricken town of Jasper | CBC News Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is demanding the fire-stricken town of Jasper apologize and retract a report criticizing her government for its role in last summer's devastating blaze.

The beautiful town of Jasper burned in the latest climate fire this summer. Premier Danielle Smith is demanding the people of Jasper apologize to her for criticizing her government's handling of the fire.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Getting fired or losing a client is often a wake up call for people to correct their own self-defeating behaviors. What happens when that wake up call no longer has any financial impact?

Alberta premier demands apology from fire-stricken town of Jasper | CBC News Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is demanding the fire-stricken town of Jasper apologize and retract a report criticizing her government for its role in last summer's devastating blaze.

Dysfunctional leadership is when you interfere, demand information, delay decisions, and THEN complain when you're called out for your lack of leadership. YUCK. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

A chart indicating that internship jobs are declining

I am also doubtful that AI is already causing entry-level unemployment. This Bloomberg article suggests it’s just low hiring, in general, like this chart suggests. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

You're unlikely to find much for R as that will be mostly quant and lots of finagling to work on visualizing qual data. But there are some interesting visualizations built into MaxQDA (my fav ir code matrix browser). Also recommend this book collegepublishing.sagepub.com/products/qua...

A mark's participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the de­‐ fenses and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only an­other easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miser­ ably lacking in them. This is a process of self‑destruction of the self. It is no won­der that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss.

"When the blowoff comes, the mark finds he has no defense for not being a shrewd man." <-- Every QAnon adherent today, realizing they'll never see the Epstein Files