smithtodda

These kids, they're all TV babies.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Richard Gere: “USAID was probably the most pure thing America did up to that moment. It was a giveaway program to needy people. He stopped that day one. It was insane. He wouldn’t even know what it stands for, USAID. He has idiots around him who have the same ignorance about it”

[Jeffrey Goldberg @JeffreyGoldberg]

"Here are some things that Mark Kelly has survived: a turbulent and sometimes violent childhood, 39 combat missions in Desert Storm, a missile blowing up just above his plane, and four space-shuttle voyages (two as mission commander). He has also braved the near-murder of the person he loves most and watched her get deluged with death threats for years afterward.

It is fair to observe that Pete Hegseth cannot scare him."
-- @MarkLeibovich:
https://t.co/HRCShWA2Qs

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

"Russia hoax" is as strong an indicator of a being gullible idiot or partisan propagandist as "vaccines are bad", and both ignore overwhelming evidence.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

BROWDER: If we'd been tougher on Putin after he went in and took Crimea, if we'd imposed devastating sanctions, he might not have done full-scale invasion.

He thought he could get away with it. He thought we were all so weak and cowardly that he could roll in there.

He thought Ukrainians wouldn't put up a fight, we wouldn't help Ukrainians, and that would be the end of the story.

Sanctions serve two purposes. They can either serve as a deterrent, or they can be used as a punishment.

The problem is that we didn't use them as a deterrent, and so now we have to use them as a punishment.

But when you punish people, you've got to punish them a hundred times harder than you have to deter them. And so, it's kind of too late.

Too late in the sense that there are hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians who didn't have to be dead if we had been more robust, if we hadn't been concierges to Russian oligarchs.

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Liz Oyer: “I was shocked to hear Mr Blanche’s testimony about this yesterday. What he said about my firing is provably false. His claim that it had nothing to do with the concerns I raised is contradicted by documents and evidence. His claim that he tried to call me before sending marshals to my home is flat out false. His claim that it is normal for DOJ to use armed law enforcement officers to deliver mail to the homes of its former employees is preposterous. The casual lies that Mr Blanche tells, even while sitting in this chair testifying to this committee, are emblematic of a much larger problem. To the American public, it looks like Mr Blanche is running DOJ as Donald Trump’s personal law firm. Americans across the political spectrum rely on DOJ to keep us safe and free. Mr Blanche has shown that he is willing to put all of that at risk to serve a political agenda. I beg the members of this committee to think about what this is costing our country. Please do not degrade our justice system further by promoting Mr Blanche.” 😳

[John Harwood @JohnJHarwood]

Pete Hegseth's mother on Pete Hegseth:

"I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.

"You are that man and have been for years.

"As your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that."

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

Statement from Annie Farmer on meeting with Todd Blanche:

"After meeting with Todd Blanche, I feel even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States' Attorney General.

"I found him abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors — a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing.

"While quick to point to the failures of previous administrations, he refused to take accountability for mistakes made under his own leadership. Specifically, he would not commit to an inquiry into why my sister Maria Farmer's 1996 report went uninvestigated; he refused to release documents related to internal discussions about charging Epstein that would provide important clarification about previous errors, and his explanations for his nine-hour interview with Ghislaine Maxwell and her subsequent transfer to a less secure facility were wholly dissatisfactory and contrived.

"His evasiveness felt like a deliberate attempt to claim the Attorney General's office is powerless in this matter. By passing the buck once again, he is leaving survivors trapped in the same endless loop of searching for answers and receiving none."

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

Epstein survivor Dani Bensky: "Todd Blanche spent approximately nine hours meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, he did not even spend nine minutes meeting with a survivor…We need an AG committed to ensuring that everyone who facilitated Epstein's crimes is held accountable."

[smithtodda @smithtodda]

@Dallasqg2p @John_F_kJr Impeaching does fuck all. We need impeachment, removal, trial, imprisonment. Nothing less.

[smithtodda @smithtodda]

@Dkelly4congress @John_F_kJr @ChrisWo293 Uh, no.

[smithtodda @smithtodda]

@BeefAnnbr549 @virginia_a39350 @John_F_kJr You dipshit. They found the plane AND the bodies. Christ, they had the whole goddamned Navy out there performing the search. Quit spreading lies.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Ossoff: "Here's what's going to happen tonight: the world's most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour grapes address to pursue his 6-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country. I expect the president to reheat debunked conspiracy theories about the repeatedly litigated and audited and confirmed 2020 presidential election in Georgia, an election that Donald Trump lost. And let me be very clear about this: if the President declares Georgia's election illegitimate, or if the President declares Georgia's sitting United States Senators illegitimate, he is declaring Georgia voters illegitimate. It's Donald Trump who tried to defraud Georgia voters in that election, Donald Trump who tried to commit election fraud when he called Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger -- and it was caught on tape, and you should play the tape to your viewers today -- and badgered and bullied Georgia's top election official to 'find him' the votes that he needed to win in a state where he had lost."

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese engineer invented the QR code for one job, tracking car parts on a Toyota line, then his company chose to give the patent away for free, which is the only reason it ended up on every restaurant table on Earth.

His name is Masahiro Hara. The company was Denso Wave, a parts supplier owned by Toyota.

In 1992 the problem landed on his desk, and it was not glamorous. Workers on the factory floor were drowning.

Every car part had a barcode, but a barcode can only hold about twenty characters, so to track one component they had to stick five or ten barcodes on it.

A worker would stand there scanning a single part ten times in a row. Some of them were scanning close to a thousand barcodes a day. The job had stopped being about building cars and turned into pointing a scanner at stickers all day long.

And there was a second problem nobody upstairs cared about. This was a factory. Oil got on everything. A smudge of grease across a barcode and the whole thing became unreadable, and the line stopped.

Hara was asked to make the scanner faster. He looked at it for a while and realized the scanner was not the problem. The barcode itself was the ceiling. A line of black bars can only hold information going one direction, left to right.

He decided to build something that held information in two directions, up and down as well as across, so it could store hundreds of times more in the same little square.

Then came the part that sounds made up but is not.

Hara played Go on his lunch breaks, the old board game with black and white stones sitting on a grid. He was staring at the board one day and it clicked.

The grid of black and white stones was already a way to store information in two directions. That was the shape of his code.

But building the code was the easy half. The hard problem was speed, because the whole point was to be fast, and a scanner wastes most of its time just trying to figure out where the code is and which way it is turned.

The fix came to him on a train. He was looking out the window at buildings, and one building stood out from all the others because of its shape against the sky. That was the idea.

He put three little square targets in three corners of the code. The moment a scanner sees those three squares, it knows instantly where the code is and how it is rotated, even upside down, even at an angle.

Now here is the detail that shows how far he was willing to go. Those three corner squares only work if nothing else on the page looks like them.

If a magazine ad or a cardboard box happened to have the same black and white pattern nearby, the scanner would get confused and grab the wrong thing.

So Hara and his tiny two-person team went and surveyed printed material. Magazines. Flyers. Cardboard boxes. Piles of it, for days, reducing every picture down to its ratio of black to white area, hunting for the one ratio that almost never shows up in print anywhere. They found it. One to one to three to one to one.

That exact rhythm of black and white is baked into every corner square of every QR code on Earth, and it is there because it is the pattern the printed world almost never produces by accident.

Then he solved the oil.

He built the code so it carries a backup of its own information, spread mathematically across the whole square. You can tear off, smudge, or scratch out up to thirty percent of a QR code and it still scans perfectly, because the code rebuilds the missing piece from the copy it kept of itself.

A worker could get grease on a third of the label and the line would keep moving. This is the same math that lets a scratched CD still play and lets a spacecraft send data back across the solar system without asking to repeat itself.

He finished in 1994. He named it Quick Response, after what it does for the person using it, not after what it is.

And then Denso made the decision that actually mattered.

They held the patent. They could have charged a fee on every single scan, and given how many billions happen now, that would have made someone unimaginably rich.

Instead they announced they would not enforce their rights to collect royalties, and they published the specification openly so anyone could use it. Hara later said it was not even a big argument inside the company.

That one choice is the whole story. A code that costs nothing to use is a code everyone builds on. Airlines put it on tickets. Phone makers built readers into cameras.

Then a pandemic hit and the world needed a way to hand someone information without touching anything, and the free little square that a Toyota engineer built for greasy factory workers was suddenly on every menu, every payment, every door.

Hara still works there. He has said, more than once, that he never imagined it would spread this far, and that the part he is proudest of is that it got used to keep people safe.

The man built it to survive oil on a factory floor. It ended up surviving everything else too.

You have scanned his work a hundred times this year. Now you know whose it was.

[The Halfway Post @HalfwayPost]

BREAKING: Donald Trump is reportedly furious the Reflecting Pool contractors drained it during the day so everyone can see the tire tracks from when his motorcade drove over it before the sealant was totally cured, and now everyone knows he's been lying for weeks about vandals.

[Jen @JenResistedAGN]

Trump gave the ugliest Americans permission to bask in their racism, ignorance, and cruelty. They voted for him because of this, not in spite of it.

[Pisco @PiscoLitty]

@CENTCOM @PeteHegseth You mean the fake and illegitimate alleged president is illegally conducting a stupid war we’ve already lost when he and his campaign promised no new wars? Thanks for the update.

[smithtodda @smithtodda]

@myownop69643227 @TrumpsPortfolio Well, when you’re ready for the big grifts, let us know.

[smithtodda @smithtodda]

@Sunriselaq @TrumpsPortfolio You don’t know what you’re talking about.

[smithtodda @smithtodda]

@voicereason11 @TrumpsPortfolio Huh, weird how he so often talks publicly about a company he doesn’t know he’s buying. What a coincidence!

[smithtodda @smithtodda]

@JujuKaChow @TrumpsPortfolio Yeah, millions with an M, not a B.