Ryan Buck

[Conor Sen @conorsen]

If this is an inevitable world-dominating technology it shouldn’t matter who the CEO of any individual company is.

[teen vampire, aged 40 @witchesflight]

Reminder to parents that u may think dressing ur tiny baby as a pumpkin for Halloween is predictable or whatever… I promise it is not and that nothing is cuter than a pumpkin baby

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@trumwill @cybelethebest In most contexts, B is the obvious right answer.
Promoting A into a management role is a clear error - a position where their weaknesses are magnified and they get to do less with their strengths?
If B is leaving because we promoted A, they’re probably cancerous.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died.

Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today.

His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing.

He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it.

He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages.

In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted.

As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan.

His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century.

After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless.

Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23.

The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president.

Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸

[signüll @signulll]

america is one of very few countries that has even tried to build a multiethnic democracy at scale, & the fact that it has a visible, loud, ongoing discourse about racism is actually evidence of relatively low tolerance for it compared to countries where racial hierarchy is just... ambient & unremarked upon.

japan (lol very obvious now), korea, much of europe, india's caste system, han chauvinism in china, ethnic dynamics across the gulf states.. most of these societies don't even have the vocabulary for the conversation america tortures itself over daily.

america is quite literally is one of the least if not the least racist countries on the planet, & it's not even close.

[Rushi @rushicrypto]

A reminder that it took $2.5T and 20 years to replace to Taliban with the Taliban.

[Jonathan Allen @jonallendc]

Kavanaugh’s logic on repayment of tariffs is like saying that a bank robbery ring should be allowed to keep robbing banks because it would be too hard to figure out how to return the stolen money to the rightful owners.

[Ramez Naam @ramez]

I will refuse to believe that America is doomed until my dying breath. If you tell me it's hopeless, I'll just work harder. I hope that's true of most of you as well.

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@lacyave I never really got into AIM, I was more of an ICQ guy back then

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@lacyave Twitter is for olds yk

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@FiresideCasts How am I only just learning this now

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@FiresideCasts This resin BM must not stand

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@trumwill I was trained exactly with basically that exact standard to work the floor at Target in like 1993. I hated it then and hate it now but apparently there is no middle ground between impossible to get help from store employees and pester everyone you can.

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@trumwill Yes/never

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@wild_rumpus_ Don’t worry, it’s still early.

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

Normalize saying, "I'm not informed enough to have an opinion on the matter."

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@FiresideCasts There are at least three of us lol

[Ryan Buck @plinkotvb]

@wild_rumpus_ Evergreen tweet

[PC Gamer @pcgamer]

After almost 18 years, Team Fortress 2 just had its toughest tournament ever, and there could be more to come https://t.co/fLav3kbuv8