@ADavis4me@EricBoehm87@scottlincicome Yup. There were healthy debates in the 1990s and the 2000s just for that.
IMHO. We wouldn’t have had the profligate government borrowing if those funds could have gone to instruments other than federal bonds.
“It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people did for another.”
-#DDay veteran Andy Rooney on the young 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy 82 years ago.
Required watching for every young person today!
@_TraderLarry@PunkyCovfefe@SteveOnSpeed All of it. The younger generation is native to it and it’s “bare metal” for them - not an add on.
True story. Doing an instructional video for work and someone wanted a voiceover. I didn’t know where I’d find a good voice: our AV person just used AI.
Didn’t even occur to me.
Co-sign @realEstateTrent’w observation
I make a yearly trek to @Frankenmuth and there’s recollection of Wally Bronner (the founder of @BronnersXmas) stopping his car to pick up trash on the road downtown.
That 1% of people acting like that makes life better for the rest of us.
I went to grab coffee this morning in nyc and, as usual, there was trash all over the sidewalk.
Then I saw a man in a suit, probably in his 50s, stop to pick some of it up.
I was sort of shocked, and he was right in front of me, so I told him it was incredible that he was doing this.
He looked up:
“I live in this neighborhood. I don’t want to walk by it again on my way home.”
It was the first time I’ve ever seen anybody do this.
This is a great reminder that when you deal with ANY press: you’re dealing with people who are only motivated to tell stories to sell ads and/or subscriptions.
Any outlet will play to its audience to those commercial ends, primarily. A search for “the truth “ is secondary.
I bucked all advice from my friends (and resisted my conservative bias) and decided to fully trust the Times journalists.
As they left my home they asked that I not talk to any other outlets and I insisted then and repeatedly over the following weeks that I would keep my word and only share this story with them.
But then the weeks dragged on. They kept coming back to us saying the editors needed more. I needed to go on the record (okay). We need more screenshots (okay). I met every bench mark they set, eager to provide more sources or evidence as needed.
After the story went up I began to ask them … wait, where are the stories from the other women? Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus? Why are there 11 paragraphs dedicated to detailing my work history (more than has been published about Graham’s by far)?
Why does it say “nobody could corroborate” when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?
Why did they include an out of context quote from a friend joking “do not call Graham” after I called off my wedding? (Because she knew I would never).
Where were the screenshots they’d said they would use? Or the mention that I’d supported local democrats and that most of my family (and husband) are liberal?
The editors said it was too much, they explained.
The Times also failed to include any mention that I DID confide in multiple friends through the years that Graham had been abusive — long before he was running for office. Those friends confirm they told the Times so.
It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign. Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life.
And at the end of my call with them I reluctantly accepted their insistence that this was still a powerful story and that I had done a brave thing. And I thanked them for all the hard work they had put into it.
Still fawning after all these years.
The US has one of the largest rail networks on Earth. We just use it for the part that still makes economic sense here: freight.
Passenger rail stopped being viable as a private business shortly after WWII.
Cars took short and medium trips. Airlines took long trips. Highways and airports got massive public investment.
By the 1960s, private railroads were losing money on passenger service, which is why Amtrak was created in 1970 (and it's been losing money ever since)
The US has tons of rail routes, and trains.
They’re just hauling cargo.
It’s wild how Meta - a company going all-in on AI - somehow missed the memo on how AI can generate images and videos that renders “take a selfie of yourself” verifications utterly useless
So now Instagram accounts hacked at scale. 2FA also fully bypassed - by Meta’s own design
Everyone's reacting to the wrong number here.
32 million sounds like a biblical swarm. Every one of them is male, and male mosquitoes don't bite. The bite, the disease, the whine in your ear at 3am, all of that is the females. This release adds zero bites to the world.
What's actually happening is older than the headline suggests. Alphabet's life sciences arm, Verily, has run the Debug Project for nearly a decade. They did it in Fresno back in 2017, releasing a million sterile males a week for 20 weeks. The Florida Keys are already two years into their own version of this.
The target is one species: Aedes aegypti. It's a sliver of the total mosquito population but it carries dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya, which sicken hundreds of millions a year. The CDC calls the mosquito the deadliest animal on earth, and this is the one doing most of the killing.
No genetic modification involved. They infect males with Wolbachia, a bacterium already living in more than half of all insect species. A Wolbachia male mates with a wild female and her eggs never hatch. The population collapses from the inside.
The reason a tech company is running this instead of a county sprayer: Aedes aegypti has gone resistant to the pesticides we've thrown at it for decades. Chemistry stopped working, so the play is to breed the species into a dead end.
This is the Sterile Insect Technique that wiped out the screwworm in the 1950s, now run with Google's sensors and automation against a mosquito pesticides can no longer touch.
Hey, western commie!
Nothing makes me laugh harder than a guy or a girl tweeting about "great communism" from a $1,400 phone, in a 3-bedroom suburban house, with a fridge full of food.
Comrade.
You would not survive week one.
And here is why.
In the USSR you couldn't just quit your job to "find yourself." Not working was a crime. Literally. They called it "social parasitism." They put the future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky on trial for it. Your podcast about late-stage capitalism would've gotten you five years.
You picture yourself as a commissar. You'd be in a queue. Three hours. For maybe bread. The commissars were a tiny elite with their own shops, their own hospitals, their own everything. You weren't invited. You'd be the guy informing on his neighbor for an extra ration.
That brave political take you posted today? In 1949 USSR deported 20,000+ people to Siberia in three days for a lot less - for just being LOCALS. Whole families. Children. Cattle cars. You'd have lasted until your first "actually Stalin was misunderstood" reply landed in front of the wrong person.
The gulag wasn't an edgy metaphor. Roughly 18 million people passed through it. Unpaid labor, -40°C, digging canals nobody needed. But please, tell me more about how you'd "organize the workers" from the group chat.
Things get bad and you want to leave? You can't. There's a wall. There are dogs. There are guards who shoot. The whole design was that you couldn't go.
The people romanticizing it from a comfortable suburb can always book a flight home. People in the USSR couldn't even move to the neighbouring city without permission.
So wear the Che shirt. Read rge Red Book by Mao. Enjoy the iPhone he'd have confiscated, the internet he'd have banned, and the free speech that lets you praise the exact system that would have shot you for using it.
Some of us actually remember how it went.
America's postal system is a sort of negative lootbox where 99.9% of items are trash but the other 0.1% are special quest items that if not promptly handled result in crippling debts or your arrest.
@staysaasy The first 5 years of my career were fixing old software written in “bubba code”: VBA, C, Borland C++, you name it.
I’m certain that whatever GitHub Copilot is generating is far and beyond more comprehensible than the dumpster fires I put out in the 2000s
The law prohibiting any living person from appearing on US currency should be expanded to bar the federal government from naming anything after a living person.
Today is the last bell in Ukrainian schools. According to custom, girls who finish school dance a waltz behind their parents. Those whose parents were killed by Russia dance in their parents' jackets by themselves. This is just one school and how many of them...