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PlanksVariableon 'The old order is not coming back,' Carney says in speech at Davos

“He led an insurrection against our Constitution” is extremely hyperbolic.

PlanksVariableon 'The old order is not coming back,' Carney says in speech at Davos

The American people had two options in November:

- Kamala Harris, a terribly unqualified candidate who was appointed by the Democratic Party without a primary vote, who couldn’t clearly communicate basic policy positions, and who served as “the border czar” while the Biden administration dismantled the border protection agency and ushered in almost four years of a de facto open Southern border, which was very unpopular with most voters.

- Donald Trump, who was a known quantity, who riled people up and said things that were offensive, but didn’t actually do anything catastrophic in his first term and was mostly harmless by virtue of being ineffective.

These were far and away the worst two candidates of my lifetime. But among the Americans who voted for Trump, I doubt many expected the administration to simultaneously be this much more unhinged and impactful a second time around.

PlanksVariableon The Nobel Prize and the Laureate Are Inseparable

Often in life the extreme ends of a spectrum are not “good” and “bad” but varying degrees of suboptimal.

PlanksVariableon Scott Adams has died

American political parties have revolved around platforming persecution fetishes for decades now. Real struggles are inevitably exploited by individuals who leverage identity politics for their personal gain. This has played out in every group who currently or historically suffered some injustice, I don’t need to list them all, and now we can include whites on that list.

But it’s not up for debate that white college applicants, particularly from poor and middle-class backgrounds, were discriminated against by top universities who implemented race-based admissions policies. The numbers are public. There’s simply no question.

PlanksVariableon Canada's deal with China signals it is serious about shift from US

The percentage of Canadians of Asian descent shifted from 1.4% to 23% in the past fifty years. While Trump’s policies are a factor here, there’s a demographic factor as well. Many Canadians, especially younger Canadians, have stronger cultural and familial ties to Asia than America or Europe, and this trend will continue to play out in the years ahead.

PlanksVariableon Scott Adams has died

What book was that? All his books published prior to the 2000s were Dilbert compilations, so you might have the wrong date or the wrong person.

PlanksVariableon Scott Adams has died

That doesn’t follow.

PlanksVariableon Scott Adams has died

No, no. It’s more nuanced than that. They were opinions that were different from my own.

PlanksVariableon Scott Adams has died

I started paying attention to him when he got sick. He seemed very reasonable about most things, and extremely insightful about many things. I certainly don’t think he deserved the posthumous label “crazy person.”

PlanksVariableon Scott Adams has died

> think that white people are under attack

Yes, they think that.

> and that white people need to re-establish dominance. To them, equality is a threat

No. When a specific group is singled out and attacked, whether they’re white, black, or brown, man or woman, that can not be a basis for equality.

PlanksVariableon Scott Adams has died

Diversity initiatives are often racist or regressive, in which case they should be mocked, and he wasn’t in the wrong for doing so.

PlanksVariableon Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11

Why can’t Microsoft employees learn on the job? When I joined a (non-Microsoft) BigTech company, I was expected to learn C++ and internal libraries and tools within a couple months while working on newbie projects. The company recouped that investment many times over.

PlanksVariableon Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes

Claiming we must honor the autonomy of people who have had their autonomy stripped away by a dictator is just as silly as saying we need to respect the sovereignty of the dictator himself.

PlanksVariableon It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

Tahoe broke trackpad scrolling in Safari on my 2023 MBP. Other users have been experiencing and reporting the issue for months. Apple still hasn’t fixed it in any of its updates or addressed it. Pretty bad.

PlanksVariableon Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes

Everyone wants to live in the most powerful nation of the globe. Nobody wants to acknowledge what it takes to be the most powerful nation in the world.

PlanksVariableon Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes

Thanks, this is a more convincing argument than insisting that we must respect the sovereignty of a unelected dictator.

PlanksVariableon Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes

> The USA could instead choose not to provide asylum to these people in the future, and accept the reality that for the millions it already has, it has made its bed so to speak

And who decided that? American citizens certainly did not. Biden’s de facto open border policy was very unpopular with most American citizens, and all but guaranteed the reelection of Donald Trump. Besides that, only 60% of the Venezuelans who fled into the United States did so as asylum seekers. It’s estimated there are another ~500,000 here illegally. Who made that bed?

And this ignores the 7+ million people that other countries had to absorb. So even if the US secured its border and stopped providing asylum, we’re ignoring the actual human suffering of the millions of people who were compelled to flee from their lives and homes and families.

So it’s better to ignore the cause and let the problem continue indefinitely out of deference to international bureaucracy? Sorry, we are not Europe.

PlanksVariableon Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes

It’s not a complicated answer, it’s just an arbitrary answer.

Did the citizens of those countries agree to take in the asylum seekers? What alternative would you suggest when 8 million people flee across the border? In the U.S., there are an estimated 600,000 Venezuelan asylum seekers, and another 400,000 to 500,000 undocumented immigrants. Who in America decided that was good? Was it Americans citizens? No, the Biden administration decided that unilaterally when they stripped the border patrol of the power to do its job. But he’s gone, his disastrous policies led to Trump regaining power, and who gets to decide what’s good now? And weren’t Maduro’s actions, which led 8 million Venezuelans to flee to neighboring countries, not directly impacting those other countries (if not encroaching on their own sovereignty)? If so, how did you get to decide that “sovereignty” gives a dictator impunity to act free of consequences?

PlanksVariableon Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes

I do not acknowledge that. If you want to make an argument that overthrowing a dictator is always wrong on principle, go ahead. But I will not accept this as axiomatic.

Claiming this could “destabilize” the country suggests that the country is stable. It’s not.

You mention the 30+ million people who live there, under the dictatorship, but ignore the 8+ million who have fled the country in recent years and the instability that has unleashed on country and the entire region.

PlanksVariableon Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes

It’s estimated there are over a million Venezuelans in the U.S. who fled the country. Over 600,000 are currently under temporary protected status with asylum claims. 7 million in neighboring countries.

Who gets to decide that this is good, but removing the dictator behind this is bad? Who gets to decide that we must live with this chaos because taking action might not reduce the chaos.

> Today it is 'overthrowing a dictator'; tomorrow it will be 'correcting an election'

Why? Those are two completely different things. We have the capacity to evaluate whether overthrowing a dictator is good or bad on its own terms.

PlanksVariableon BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal

It's a car and battery company, isn't it? Framing it as a tech company is a bit weird, but I guess Tesla did the same.

Buffett didn't love automobile stocks either, but Berkshire Hathaway held General Motors from 2012 to 2023.

PlanksVariableon Google Opal

Perhaps we should look to Europe for inspiration on how to govern tech companies.

PlanksVariableon Google Opal

Funny, I remember the Internet from over a decade (or two) ago and it was a mess of full-screen ads, seizure-inducing animations, infinite popups, etc. that Google helped eliminate.

PlanksVariableon AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos

My search results were the opposite: 1. an AI summary 2. a link to the documentation 3. 4 videos that seem legit 4. a bunch more web links

PlanksVariableon Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

You certainly seem to be arguing just to argue. You’re comparing Valve to the companies you choose to work for or the median German company, but those are irrelevant. You’re using the wrong reference set.

Valve is a global, revenue-dominant, platform-level technology company. In its category, 300 employees is extremely small.

Valve is not a German company, so that’s an odd context, but if you want to use Germany for reference, here are the five German companies with the closest revenue to Valve’s:

- Infineon Technologies, $16.4B revenue, 57,000 employees

- Evonik Industries, $16B, 31,930 employees

- Covestro, $15.2B, 17,520 employees

- Commerzbank, $14.6B, 39,000 employees

- Zalando, $12.9B, 15,793 employees

PlanksVariableon Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]

> These people were rendered to a prison where they're meant to spend the rest of their lives

These men were never intended to spend the rest of their lives at CECOT, nor did they. All were released in July 2025 to their home country of Venezuela, and they were in El Salvador for a total of 125 days.

PlanksVariableon Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]

That seems like the least disgraceful part of the whole thing.

Wherever they go, the U.S. taxpayers are stuck footing the bill for their prison stay, food, medical treatment, etc., but why would it need to be in the United States? They have no claim to stay there.

The disgraceful part is sending illegal immigrants without criminal history to maximum-security prisons, sending asylum seekers to prison, or sending anybody to prisons that torture the inmates.

PlanksVariableon Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers

Of course smaller companies exist — there are 1 person companies! But in a world where many tech companies have 50,000+ employees, 300 is much closer to 100 or 10 and they can all be considered small.

And then you consider it in context: a company with huge impact, brand recognition, and revenue (about $50M/employee in 2025). They’ve remained extremely small compared to how big they could grow.

PlanksVariableon Broccoli Man, Remastered

Have you ever watched the original? It most certainly did not involve real people talking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI).

In fact, the overtly robotic voices added to the humor of the original, IMO. It was lost in this translation.

PlanksVariableon Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

At the big tech company I work for, it’s been at least 5 years since I was asked to interview a US citizen. And I have younger relatives and family friends who are recent CS grads that are smart and desperate for jobs. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.