Serge Boucher

Computer Scientist, Musician, Photographer. Working on the future of mobility at @Easy_Mile

[Mads @europemaxxed]

I was promised a burning Paris.
What is this disgusting relatively civilized behavior?

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

again, big picture, donald trump won an election about affordability and then he

- passed tariffs (which raise consumer prices)
- expanded the deficit w a ginormous corporate tax cut (raises interest rates)
- waged a stupid war (raises gas prices)
- and now refuses to sign a bipartisan bill to reduce housing costs bc he's protesting senate republicans for failing to pass voting restrictions

... while making $2 billion from crypto rug pulls that transferred income from his supporters to his bank account

americans hate the president for very good reasons

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

Postliberals will really be like “you believe in GDP growth? that pales in comparison to my strategy, robust communities with real human flourishing” and then not create robust communities but everyone gets poorer thanks to bad economic policy.

[Gaily Bedight - The Ograbme endurer @marwood_lennox]

Yes but in one you live in PARIS and the other you live in DALLAS. This is not remotely difficult.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

It would stand to reason that a man who harbored deep hatred for Italians — and Italian beauty and culture, as Rufo says — would not choose a detail that sprang out of Italian tailoring traditions. Thus, we can only conclude that Rufo is mistaken.

[trash jones @jzux]

if I landed a plane on my own after my teacher killed himself in front of me and they used HIS photo in the news I would find his body and throw it out another plane

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The Curious American Habit of Invading Every Conversation With World War II

It is one of life’s great mysteries.

Mention football. Mention beer. Mention bicycles. Mention the correct way to cook chips.

Sooner or later an American will appear, clear his throat, and announce:

“Belgium wouldn’t exist without the United States.”

Imagine that level of confidence.

It’s like turning up to Wimbledon and claiming you deserve the trophy because your grandfather once helped rebuild Centre Court.

The historical irony, of course, is delicious.

The United States exists because Europeans crossed an ocean, founded colonies, financed revolutions and, in the case of France, emptied vast amounts of treasure into helping the Americans defeat Britain.

Without Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands, there is no United States.

Without Europe, America is still a very interesting collection of forests.

As for Belgium specifically, the story is even less convenient. Large parts of Belgium were liberated by British, Canadian and Polish forces. American troops fought bravely as well, particularly during the Battle of the Bulge, but the idea that Belgium owes its entire existence to Washington belongs somewhere between Hollywood and fan fiction.

The more interesting question is this:

Why does every discussion with certain Americans eventually become a military history lecture?

A refereeing decision in football somehow ends with aircraft carriers.

A debate about healthcare becomes aircraft carriers.

Public transport? Aircraft carriers.

Cheese? Believe it or not, aircraft carriers.

It’s as if the national emergency exit for losing an argument is simply shouting “World War II” until everyone goes home.

Which is rather odd.

Because genuinely confident countries don’t constantly remind strangers how powerful they are.

They simply get on with life.

Perhaps that’s why Europeans can argue passionately about football for hours without feeling the need to deploy the 82nd Airborne.

Although, judging by recent online debates, some Americans appear convinced they should.

[Andrew—#IAmTheResistance @AmoneyResists]

This woman is reciting Trump’s words exactly as he said them during the NATO summit.

We have become so inured to Trump’s incoherence that is sanewashed by the media 24/7 that we fail to recognize just how much he’s declined.

Reading a transcript of his words makes it SO CLEAR.

[IT Unprofessional @it_unprofession]

The executive team decided we needed to prioritize endpoint security this quarter.

They mandated a company-wide phishing simulation.

I fully supported this initiative.

I sent out an email offering a free $50 Starbucks gift card to anyone who clicked a highly suspicious link.

Exactly 47 people clicked it within the first 10 minutes.

I didn't report them to HR.

I sent them a follow-up email informing them they'd failed a critical compliance audit.

I told them their workstations were now classified as compromised tactical vulnerabilities.

I explained that to mitigate the lateral movement of potential malware, they had to surrender their secondary monitors.

I cited a non-existent federal guideline about visual data transmission.

By 3 PM, I had a stack of 47 high-definition Dell monitors sitting in my office.

I didn't return them to inventory.

I transported 12 of them to the abandoned storage closet behind the breakroom.

I spent the entire weekend building a 360-degree immersive flight simulator pod.

I wired the monitors together using a proprietary daisy-chain method I learned from a Reddit thread in 2014.

I bolted a high-end HOTAS joystick to a discarded ergonomic desk.

Now I spend 4 hours a day flying a virtual Cessna across the digital Alps.

Whenever someone asks where I am, my automated Slack integration says I'm conducting deep-level packet inspection.

Technically, I'm inspecting packets of data that render the Swiss countryside.

[inhuman resources @inhumandept_vp]

A candidate had a two-year gap on his resume.

I asked him about it.

He said he'd taken time off to care for a terminally ill parent.

I smiled and told him that shows incredible empathy, resilience, and dedication. I assured him those are exactly the soft skills we value in our leadership track.

He looked visibly relieved and thanked me for being so understanding.

I nodded and concluded the interview on a warm note.

Then I opened our applicant tracking system and selected "Reject" from the dropdown.

People who've dealt with real life-and-death stakes rarely panic over a missed deliverable.

We can't have that in the company.

[IT Unprofessional @it_unprofession]

We hired a new VP of Engineering who is obsessed with agile methodology.

He called a meeting on his first day and said we need to transition to 2-week development sprints.

He wanted daily stand-ups, retrospective boards, and continuous deployment pipelines.

He wanted us to actually write new code.

I realized immediately that he was an existential threat to my lifestyle.

I let him finish his impassioned speech about workflow velocity.

Then I stood up, walked to the whiteboard, and drew a single horizontal line.

I told him agile sprints are a localized solution for a localized mindset.

I said our infrastructure operates on a Zenith Release Cycle.

He asked what a Zenith Release Cycle was.

I told him it's a holistic, macro-stabilization framework where we observe the system in a state of prolonged stasis.

By not touching the code for 18 months, we allow the legacy dependencies to organically settle.

I told him that deploying bi-weekly updates creates micro-abrasions in our database architecture.

I used the phrase chronological data scarring.

The CEO was in the room and audibly gasped.

He told the new VP that we can't risk chronological data scarring just to satisfy a trendy tech buzzword.

The VP looked at me like I'd just invented a new color.

He was completely paralyzed by the sheer density of my fabricated jargon.

He quietly agreed to adopt the Zenith Release Cycle.

We're officially scheduled to deploy our next update in the third quarter of 2027.

I spent the rest of the afternoon buying things I don't need on Amazon.

Agile is a disease invented by people who want to be punished for their salary.

I refuse to participate in my own suffering.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

Government-run gas stations is somehow a stupider idea than government-run grocery stores.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

-Realizes there's no realistic path to make buses free
-Instead will focus resources on making the buses run faster
-This is what transit knowers have been saying was a better idea the entire time

Hey, I'm not gonna complain if he's doing the thing I said he should do

[Brent Hodgson @BrentHodgson]

If Kobie could read the signs, she'd see:

- A Cantonese butcher
- A Taiwanese restaurant
- A Tianjin restaurant
- A Nepali restaurant (with Nepalese making 15.8% of the suburb's population)
- Dishes from Jiangsu, Teochew and Beijing - three separate cultural/language groups in Mainland China
- A shipping business whose model depends on customers proudly sending Australian-made gifts (of high quality milk formula, Merino bedding, and high-quality vitamins) to loved ones across Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the US
- A yoga studio run by a trilingual Hong Konger, with trainers from Beijing, New Zealand, Sydney
- A supermarket with traditional characters on one side (海龍) and simplified on the other (海龙) showing the Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong migration wave being replaced by a Mainland Chinese wave

And if she panned her camera over the road, we'd be seeing Singaporean, Malaysian and Vietnamese restaurants too.

To be describing this as a "monoculture" is a thinly veiled dog-whistle to: "all Asians are the same".

If Kobie cared to look, she'd be describing this as a melting pot - diversity in practice, coming together as a shared community - not a monoculture.

Anyone with an atlas or a recipe book could tell you that's not a monoculture.

It's Dal Bhat Tarkari next door to Pho, next door to Boba, next door to Nasi Lemak, opposite Nanjing Duck, next door to Yum Cha.

If Kobie cared to look, she also wouldn't be using this video to try to tell a story of "suburbs full of people who have refused to assimilate for decades".

The changing signs (already visible in the video) show it's just the latest chapter in an ever-changing story of a suburb where SEVERAL generations of new Australians - from MANY different cultures - have got a start: first Italian and Greek Australians, then Hong Kong born Australians, then Mainland Chinese Australians, and now increasingly Nepalese Australians.

To those who don't see it yet, ask:
- Where did the Greeks, Italians, and Cantonese Hong Kong shop owners who used to be there go?
- Where did their families go?
- What happens to the people behind the windows when the shop signs fade and change?

Those Australians deserve better than dog-whistling and divisiveness.

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

It's kind of ironic that Beavis & Butthead here said that voters don't want candidates "grown in vats," but their entire process of recruiting Platner was a sort of mad science experimenet/talent search based solely on outward appearances with no vetting whatsoever.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward admitting that "free bus" critics were right and quality of service is more important than fares!

[Pullupasandbag @Pullupasan36266]

@RasmusJarlov It seems the vast majority of Americans don't even know where Belgium is. Let me help you. Belgium is in the Quarter Finals of the FIFA World Cup.

[John Maynard James Keynesan @jjl8813]

@Noahpinion I can’t tell if this is Trump trying his best to boost Platner so Collins can win or if he just has an honest connection with rapists.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

This is the way

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

The middle class actually isn't falling behind, they're getting ahead. But everyone thinks they're falling behind because they're constantly interacting with super-rich people online, and seeing rich people's lifestyles on Instagram.