RichC: what the hell is going on ??

Probably also helps to be the Party Of Not Demolishing The White House During Your Long Government Shutdown ?

I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats did not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn.

And the pile of rubble and hole in the ground will all be the Democrats' fault. He's going to keep knocking down historic government buildings until they agree to vote for a CR.

[Bulldozer busts through wall behind Miller's head]

Seeing the East Wing torn down. Trump's all about loot and pillage.

It takes some fucking brass neck for the political right to implement ruinous austerity for 14 years and then turn around and say "the reason public services are shite is because there are too many immigrants using them." Fuck off into the sun.

Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment Foxes bred for tamability in a 40-year experiment exhibit remarkable transformations that suggest an interplay between behavioral genetics and development

I think you should spend 40+ years selectively breeding belly-rub-positive canids and see what happens.

www.americanscientist.org/article/earl...

Every photo I take is done practically with very little digital work, using household items to create special effects like cotton wool for fire & foil for water. Each set is meticulously set up for just the one scene then dismantled so I can set up another scene.

Thanks for helping me keep going.

They spent months complaining about high cpu usage when they used our in-memory database. Dudes, of course it is, we're not waiting for the fricking disk.

The #1 biggest idiot I ever encountered in tech had a fancy-ass job title in the Oracle E-Business Suite org, so I am not surprised their security is Emmental.

In other news, I'm preparing to use AI coding assistance for a new job related to running LLM inference efficiently. The vibe seems to be, give very detailed prompts. And code isn't scholarship.

I've been hearing recently about a pithy well-written grant proposal that was fed through AI and genericized and mushified to statistical mediocrity.

K-pop, K-drama, K-nights, the future is K-razy

CHOTINER: Record shows you didn’t post a Chotiner meme until Thursday?

ME: That’s correct.

CHOTINER: That seems unusual. Wouldn’t you say you usually jump on all the viral ‘bits?’

ME: I’d say so, but I had lots of work to do yesterday.

CHOTINER: So, that work is done now?

The B-21s

The Confessions of a 'Premature Anti-Fascist' I first heard the remarkable phrase "premature anti-Fascist" in 1946 when, fresh out of the U.S.

You're tapping into an old American elite tradition here. Fuck those people who got it right *too soon*. Solid.

www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

Way to go with throwing minorities under the bus. Can you speed this up by just making a list of *all* the minorities you're prepared to throw under buses ? Then we'll check how many buses we have. I suppose it's an argument for better public transportation at least.

Of course all of Trump's policies will make it worse. But the media don't do economic analysis, the voters don't understand policy, and it's just lashing out at incumbents even if the other team is much much worse.

Inflation in Biden's term compounded to about +20% in all.
The basic necessities genuinely became more expensive, and people were stretched.

I think his economic policy was about as good as you could hope for. But sometimes shit happens and you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As a progressive and a data nerd, I hold these two beliefs:

1. Biden's Gaza policy was illegal, immoral, and weak.

2. It didn't make significant difference to the election result, which was largely a vote against the (probably inevitable) bad economic consequences of COVID.

At Current Rate, Russia’s Entire Oil Refining Industry Faces Collapse Within a Year Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign against Russian oil infrastructure has shifted from symbolic raids to a systematic dismantling of one of the Kremlin’s most important industries. In just the past 45 day...

This makes it sound bad, but it's worse. Ukraine is increasing production of current drones, and ramping up new designs. The rate of successful strikes will surely increase, and the next 3-5 months will be terrible for Russia.

kyivinsider.com/at-current-r...

And that's 2012-era gear, way behind what the latest cameras do. But I'm fine with what I've got, the rapid progress is why the older stuff is so damn cheap.

Modern camera gear is absolutely amazing. I'm getting started with Micro 4/3, picked up a used Lumix G5 w/ 14-42mm zoom for $200, just scored a 45-150mm zoom for $90, and with auto-focus and in-lens image stabilization it's doing all the hard work for me.

Really the same problem as with senators, when they leave office they usually get a ton of money for cushy do-nothing directorships in companies that profited from their votes on policy. There's no perfect system.

The Biden proposal was crafted to conform to the constitutional requirements, that SC justices have lifetime tenure and rule on cases of original jurisdiction, while using well-established powers of congress to regulate all the other aspects of the judiciary.

Biden put forward a decent plan, which was largely ignored: as required by the Constitution, they would have lifetime tenure, but really only for cases of "original jurisdiction" - on the 99% that is appeals, only the most recent 9 would get a vote, with 2 new appointees each 4 years.

I checked this out with my Veil of Omniscience and you nailed it.

Entrails, in particular.

In its modern form the British Constitution has two components, the Undignified and the Ineffective.

Ever since Magna Charta and Runnymede, Britain has guaranteed rights to everyone (Except the Common People), or at least everyone with a big enough army to force whoever's in charge to sign an appropriate piece of paper (until such time as that Person points out they had their fingers crossed).