alabastervlog

It's a (I agree somewhat silly) rejection of labelling people "illegals".

I assure you that very few of the people with those signs want open borders. That's a position held by almost nobody.

Back to the point: when did the democrats shift to any of these alleged positions? They didn't. It's what the opposition says they did, but they in-fact didn't.

This is pretzel-logic to justify the original absurd claim. No, it’s not reasonable at all.

Income tax. So the actually-rich would continue to pay rates on par with all but the very poorest wage earners (but actually even lower than that—no FICA)

> "No human is illegal" can be reasonably interpreted to imply "denying the basic right for country to have an immigration policy."

Reasonably? No.

Where’d you get the idea they shifted to any of that whatsoever? Right wing talking heads claim those things, but democrats don’t govern as if it’s true and those aren’t positions espoused by the vast majority of the party, including all the ones with notable power.

Or certain pagers.

> Recently I also got "rate limited" after opening about three web pages.

People who haven’t used it logged out recently may be surprised to find that they have, for some time, made the site effectively unusable without an account. Doing one search and clicking a couple results gets you temporarily blocked. It’s effectively an account-required website now.

The stuff that really matters is mostly on microcontrollers.

The few industries that push computing out of need would suffer. Certain kinds of research, 3D modeling.

But most of what we use computers for in offices and our day-to-day should work about as well on slightly beefed up (say, dual or quad CPU) typical early ‘90s gear.

We’re using 30 years of hardware advancements to run JavaScript instead of doing new, helpful stuff. 30 years of hardware development to let businesses save a little on software development while pushing a significant multiple larger than that cost onto users.

The important chips aren’t the ones on our desks and in our hands. I think all that shit’s of dubious value to begin with.

It’s the ones in factories, power systems, and transportation equipment, among other things.

First one I remember it in was X-Wing (1993), five years before Rogue Squadron. Looks like Monkey Island 2 (1991) was the first to use the system. Dark Forces used it, too.

> If you're talking about major city-to-city high speed rail an LA-to-NYC rail system would be like putting in rail from Paris to northern Kazakhstan. San Diego to Chicago would be like London to Kazan (845km east of Moscow). Iowa is a medium-sized state most in the US never visit and never think about, and it's almost twice the size of Austria. Europeans who rail (pun intended) about how it's so dumb the US doesn't have high speed rail haven't taken the requisite 5 minutes to understand the difference in scale when you're talking about connecting the east and west coasts of the US.

I find these "but it's so big!" excuses really lame when the crown jewel of our rail transit network, the Acela, in a large and very dense region... still kinda sucks.

Who cares about coast-to-coast when we can't even get Boston-DC to reach the lower edge of the same category as what's considered good developed-world passenger rail? This is clearly an area we could improve on significantly, and the excuse of "it's not dense enough" doesn't apply there.

I would be shocked it they’re not taking money to let US TLAs back-door them.

I both agree that $300k household income is roughly the bottom edge to support a Fussellian upper-middle lifestyle these days (and that edge is retreating upwards fast…), but also notice that it’s about 94th percentile for US household income.

Household. A married couple both making that are 98th percentile.

What’s the DNS equivalent of using Yandex for search?

Martin Gardner wrote introductions for editions of several of Chesterton’s books, which is a nice bonus if you’re the kind of dork who likes a good introduction (guilty). They’re on some of the Dover thrift editions, I think, and probably some others.

Maybe my single least favorite thing about modern cinema is that movies across the cost spectrum have stopped giving a shit about original soundtracks. That’s how we can have 30+ damn Marvel movies and nobody remembers anything about the original music except one run of like seven or eight notes. It’s why the ones with the most style and most-effective soundtracks just used existing friggin’ pop rock songs.

It has to do with modern very-flexible digital editing (don’t want to lock in a Final Cut early enough to allow for production of a quality score timed to the edit) and editors/directors extensively using placeholder music, editing to that exactly, then just asking for a clone of whatever lame tune that was, as I understand it. Basically, having a shitty soundtrack just lets them get done with post-production faster, and keeps them more flexible until closer to release

Middling 90s movies like Twister and The Ghost and the Darkness punch way above their weight thanks to the soundtrack. You almost never see that any more.

And the phone’s what I’d be using to exfiltrate anyway. I’d only screenshot on the work device for work purposes.

Or: stable and finished.

If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.

When by far the most generous reading of a post is that it’s a low-effort troll, I’d recommend ignoring the poster entirely.

> By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.

I would love to know how much money Google makes just from this extortion.

… which is enabled by their intentionally-misleading search ads, which also enable scams. I’d further love to know how much money they make promoting scams.

More than 50 years behind. We shifted policy to barely enforcing anti-trust in the ‘70s, under growing Chicago school (spits) influence among elected officials, “think tanks” (lobbying groups), and courts.

That’s why everything’s so insanely consolidated now. Practically every market has a handful of massive players all of which would currently be under serious threat of break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It’s all monopoly.

> All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.

It’d be wild if they had. It’s a harder read than lots of books that the median reader struggles to understand, let alone enjoy enough to actually make it through. Most folks lack basically all historical context for the tales in it, and the book itself, so it reads as this unmoored set of confusingly-arranged-and-selected stories that have no hope of really making sense to them without a pile of reference books open alongside (what proportion of people are comfortable with and willing to engage in that style of reading?)

On the other hand, it’s also wild that more haven’t—one would think it’d be way up their list of life priorities. I take it as a sign they’re not really, under the veneer and trappings, convinced about the eternal (!!!) ramifications of the whole deal. “Well sure my eternal soul is on the line and I ‘believe’ I’m holding the literal word of the creator of the universe… but it’s haaaard and boring.” LOL.

The entire broad genre of self-help + business has a reputation for being scam-adjacent for a reason. It’s pretty much all junk. Even the ones people say are “good” (people keep writing them because they can sell, which means some become popular, which are the “good” ones, but usually they aren’t good)

Quite a few pop-non-fic books, especially business, self-help (tons of overlap in form and technique there), and both business and non-business (these latter usually get adopted by the business-side anyway) “big idea” books, not only cite studies of dubious value, but cite sources that don’t include their claim at all, or contradict it.

We were probably doomed to see a major public debt crisis eventually when we cut taxes going into two extremely-expensive long wars under W Bush, the “probably” was upgraded to an “almost certainly” when we cut taxes again under Trump, then Covid happening removed the “almost” from that.

Now we appear to be trying to move the timing of the crisis from 20+ years out, to less than a decade out.

Fewer than 50% of people who voted, voted for him. He won a plurality, not a majority. (Of course fewer than 50% of eligible voters voted for him, but I’m assuming that’s not what you intended)

2030: “Well a loaf of bread is $50 but a loaf of mostly-sawdust is $10 so we’ll sub that in the basket of goods as equivalent; the median house is $2m but girlfriend chatbots are too cheap to meter. Looks like yet another year of low consumer price inflation!”

Red wings and Rancourt & Company, here, plus Mexican and Spanish manufacturers (most search engines are terrible at surfacing these, you need to specify the country to find them) when I can’t find what I want in my price bracket in the US. Alden’s a bit rich for my blood.

Frankly, sneaker prices are getting so damn high that for the last couple years “expensive” leather shoes and boots from manufacturers that have resisted big price hikes have been looking more and more like a bargain…

If anyone's wondering whether this list of news companies is larger than the list of owners of those outlets: yes.