The big question for the Dems seems to be whether they can produce a new candidate that won't be another Dukakis. Really, what I don't understand is how low the Dems have to be in the polls and how bad their demographic outlook has to become for them for them to wake up and change course.

It's interesting, isn't it? I mean obviously it sucks balls. Lives are being destroyed. Livelihoods are in the shitter. Global geopolitics is being rocked to its core and wealth is being destroyed at a rate not seen since 2008. But once you get over the "front seat at the apocalypse" nature of it all, it remains... interesting.

I think the Democrats had a duty to warn about all the heinous bullshit the Trump administration would try to pull. it didn't work? But "no, you don't understand, all this stuff is holy-shit bad" was an electoral strategy that should have worked. They could have taken the tack of "do you realize how incompetent they were last time" as well as "and all the clever people who signed on last time are farts in the wind" but not after getting caught pretending Biden was more competent than he was.

I also think the Democrats are leaning too heavily into Napoleon's maxim "Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake." But I can see the thinking - if "these guys would burn the Reichstag" doesn't work, and you have a good guess they will fucking suck at everything they do, standing back and letting the populism dissolve in the face of pure criminal incompetence is a strategy. It's certainly the lowest effort. I'm halfway convinced the Dems are hammering everyone's emails and phones so they can see just how small their base truly is; I know I'm in no mood to give them any money and i broached some "oh you're a REAL sucker" giving level last year. They're historically unpopular and that's saying something, considering the environment.

One of my favorite morning rituals is opening up Yahoo! Finance and comparing the articles written three hours before the market opens with the tickers after the market opens. They rarely align anymore. Futures kinda went "lol tariffs" and then retail went "oh noes tariffs" and every talking head and substack analyst shows their ass about the fact that all their models and prognostications date to a world that makes sense. Broadly? The markets have stopped taking Trump seriously.

And has been pointed out about that whole Signal shitshow, the only evidence that Trump had any involvement whatsoever was Stephen Miller going "daddy Trump told me" at which point it isn't even the populists in charge. '87-'88 were rough for Reagan, even after this:

Because Iran-Contra made it really clear that homeboy was not in charge. Bush won in '88 anyway? But a lot of that was Dukakis had the charisma of a wet paper towel and a lot of that was ample evidence that Bush was a competent bureaucrat (new taxes notwithstanding).

I think it ends in ignominy. I think it's gonna suck to get there but I think the fever dies back. I mean, the Trump administration hasn't even been able to do shit about egg prices, despite this:

What have they done recently for the people who voted for them? Because what minuscule fraction of the electorate gives a shit about stuff like this?

I'm not new to the game, but recently began to find deeper levels of appreciation of the character creation system in Traveller. It's not like D&D or any other RPG (that I know of/didn't steal it wholesale), where you decide "I want to be X" and then play as X with whatever class/gear/stats/skills/feats of your choice. No. Here you start wanting to become something, assign attributes and skills learned from your homeworld... and then life happens.

You start wanting to become a space frontier doctor like Julian Bashir, life happens, and you're playing an '80s vision of a netrunner - with chip sockets behind high-collared hobojacket and cyberdecks and communicating with excerpts from Gibson - that's been in and out of prison for the last 40 years.

You start without much of an idea for life, enlist in the navy, life happens, you earn a field commission and live your life as some larger-than-life overdecorated mix of James Bond and Horatio Hornblower, hitting Admiral before turning 40.

You are born into wealth and nobility, spend 20 years of your adult life as a blasé socialite with one of those administration 'jobs' the rich save for their spare heirs, life puts on its asskicking boots, and without other options you become a middling novelist more famous than Coca-Cola with contacts rivalling the FBI.

There's three more people with equally subverted ideas for their character's life, ones above need the least explanation ("what's a Bwap?"). It was awesome to sit and make those characters together, weaving a common story. More games should offer something like that, but I'm afraid it's too much work for most designers and too not-what-I-want-waaaah! for most players. Still, it'd be bitchin' to have it in Call of Cthulhu as a better background generator than GM's default "so you all know this professor/are related to that so-and-so to inherit X."

Update on the apartment. We go to auction on Saturday morning (barring a last minute generous offer). It's been an experience. Juggling visits by potential buyers, building inspections and meetings with real estate agents, at the same time as wrangling a home loan and a very busy work schedule, is not something I would care to do regularly.

there’s definitely no, NO, possible way that tariffs announced on vehicles produced outside the United States is a way to obscure the Atlantic posting the entirety, unredacted, of the war plans they were texted.

no way.

how does this shit end for trump and the rest of these assholes

This just sounds like bad or missing management. Do what you can, and keep looking for a better work environment for yourself.

The cabin sounds great! Cabin's even on a rainy day are hard to beat. We have a slight, I think 2% to 4% last I looked, chance of tornado later today here which is...not normal.

It's honestly embarrassing for me because I spend time organizing then they just don't show up.

It's embarassing, but you certainly aren't the one to feel embarassed by that situation.

But UBL got what he wanted right? The goal was the decline of the American Empire, and he managed it?

The goal was a Sunni Islamist caliphate stretching from Libya to Turkey. UBL wanted the decadent influence of the west to decline to the point where the teachings of Hassan Al Banna and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab could establish a durable nation where the correct practice of Islam could flourish.

The lesson Islamists took from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is that plucky freedom fighters can vanquish immoral foreign empires if they believe it hard enough. UBL in particular saw the lack of appetite the Soviets had for a protracted war while also lacking the perspective to regard the role of greater geopolitics - he saw the helicopters go down and he saw the Stingers but didn't see the half billion dollar a year budget or Pentagon-level planning and logistical support. He saw the dispirited Soviet troops but he didn't see Chernobyl or the black marketization of Peristroika.

Osama bin Laden took the milquetoast American responses to the Khobar Towers and USS Cole as a green light for a large scale domestic attack within US borders. it was the dumbest fucking move in terrorism since the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. It led to the perpetual occupation of Iraq, it led to twenty years of occupation in Afghanistan, it led to a changed dynamic with the Saudi royal family, it led to Houthi uprisings. It's fair to say that ISIS was UBL's goal but "NO NOT THAT WAY!!!!" in that ISIS was primarily decadent Europeans LARPing in the desert rather than enlightened Islamic scholars assembling an enlightened nation-state. ISIS also managed to rally the entire goddamn world against them by leaning on the piracy rather than the religious teachings. You wanna know what happened to ISIS between 2004 and 2011? It was UBL's missives-from-the-cave that kept 'em down. Everything UBL mumbled into a camcorder was anti-ISIS. Fast forward a few months past Abbotabad and we're breaking walls.

It's fair to say that the one single event that allowed the rise of MBS was the death of Osama bin Laden. Prior to UBL's death, American foreign policy required a nominally agnostic, nominally tame power structure within Saudi Arabia. After UBL's death American Foreign policy was able to adapt to a nominally fundamentalist, nominally disruptive power structure within Saudi Arabia. It was Osama bin Laden, after all, who objected to American bases in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War... and it was MBS who allowed direct El Al flights between Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

Osama bin Laden wanted the whole of South Asia to look like Talib Afghanistan. That's why al Qaeda capped Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before the twin towers. Fast forward twenty five years and the ruler of Saudi Arabia is WhatsApp buddies with Jared Kushner. Women can nominally drive. They're building ski resorts and billions have been spent importing European culture.

We all lost on September 11? But Osama bin Laden lost big. Things went exactly the opposite of how he thought they would. He was able staunch the bleeding while he was alive? But the minute he could no longer control the narrative, all hope of a Caliphate was fucking gone.

As far as "decline of the American Empire" I don't know if you've noticed but the only credible militaries in the world anymore are Ukraine and the Americans. Yeah Trump is a dumb fuck arranging Yemeni strikes over Signal but in Civ VI this is what you call "total cultural victory." That's an American jet, with an American soundtrack, aping an American cultural reference while saber-rattling against Americans. The co-opting is complete.

Gotta love when no one in your department is able to attend meetings on time so you're the dependable one who has to let the chief of health into the office in the morning. Head of my team routinely is late it misses meetings. It's honestly embarrassing for me because I spend time organizing then they just don't show up. On the bright side, I've got a fancy shiny new updated resume with help from career services and have started the great cold emailing game. No bites yet since the job market is hot garbage but I'm going for it!

Union negotiated a long weekend for Cesar Chavez day so I'm excited and beyond ready for a three day weekend. Going off the grid to my partner's family's cabin. It's quiet and peaceful and such a great place for relaxation. Going to be rainy there probably which means we get to just hang out and cook and read and play games instead of hike or swim or explore. It's fabulous I'm so ready.

His persistence landed him an assistant manager role with another local five-and-dime chain, TG&Y, when McClellan’s shuttered its doors.

By the '60s there were over a hundred TG&Y's. By the '80s I was buying my school supplies and clothes there.

TG&Y wasn’t a perfect operation by any means, but it was something akin to Walmart – the sort of place where you could get just about anything you needed.

You might be An Old if the stores of your youth are explained in terms of Walmart

The operation expanded, leading Green to set up a small factory. There, he staffed “cerebral palsy patients” to chop, glue, and bag frames for $.10 per piece.

This was hardly novel. Crap manufacturing has been done by the disabled at ruinous rates the country over since the WPA.

Expanding the Hobby Lobby proved easy because Hobby Lobby was unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

What a bunch of abject bullshit. Hobby Lobby is TG&Y (or Woolworth's, or any other five and dime) without the guns, ammo and ready-to-wear clothing. Take a five and dime and get rid of everything that might come with a warranty? And you have a dollar store. Take a five and dime and get rid of everything that comes without a warranty? And you have a Target. In an era where clothing was largely American-made, lasted a while and was more economically repaired than replaced, a five and dime was a place with notions, dry goods and things kids wanted. Hobby Lobby is that without the dry goods.

The term “arts and crafts” conjures humble images of primary school children gluing together popsicle sticks, of grannies weaving needles through embroidery hoops.

The term "arts and crafts" now means "doing the shit your grandparents did for kicks rather than out of necessity."

While not quite a monopoly,

bitch please

And so, the Green Collection was born in 2009

Fuckin' no less than NPR called out the Greens for raiding the Museum of Baghdad in 2003. Of course Google sucks now, thanks AI, so all that data has been lost in time like tears in rain. There's ample evidence that the Greens washed their existing holdings through their foundation in 2009 but most of it was them selling to themselves.

Perhaps the Greens, in their inexperience, did not understand the magnitude of their actions. Perhaps the Greens just didn’t care.

Perhaps the author should go to the library. Fuckin' libs have been losing their minds over Hobby Lobby since Randi Rhodes was on the air.

There was a hell of a Frontline backintheday that they've never released for streaming, maybe because it essentially concluded that gender politics in general were essentially how repressed people expressed their self-control. They listed a bunch of studies in which those found guilty of hate crimes against homosexuals tended to score higher on clinical evaluations of homosexuality than violent criminals in general, and ploughed through interview after interview about how the perpetrators committed their violence because their gender identity was threatened by witnessing homosexuals enjoying their homosexuality. A number of them were big fans of gay porn... but they weren't gay because they were in prison for beating gay men to death so how on earth could they be homosexual?

It would not surprise me at all if a study were to find that all this LGBTQ backlash was a bunch of closeted, repressed conservatives who need external reinforcement to keep from enjoying themselves. Because a whole bunch of people started to have fun for the first time in a long time? And we can't have THAT

And I think it would be less of a problem if we weren't so busy being siloed with our clones by social media. If the only people you ever interact with are the 3Pers who are also secretly watching futanari you're never going to have a reason to re-evaluate your shit. But then, would there be safe spaces where people could explore gender without judgment and reprisal? I dunno.

But also maybe people feel more impetus to do it because we're getting stuck.

this is insightful. the pandemic was the "egg cracker" for a lot of trans people - lots of time alone with yourself, having to deal with being in your own skin without distractions, not having the daily pressure to keep up appearances - i think in our "atomized world" or whatever people call it, this is common. it goes for more gays in general too: if you're a prospective lesbian and you don't get instalocked by Some Guy because you got teen pregnant and you can't open a bank account by yourself, you actually have the chance to develop your own identity instead of just repressing all your life

Back in the '00s, in the midst of the Defense of Marriage Act, the line not even the Democrats would cross was "civil unions." The reasonable thing would be to ban legal recognition of religious marriage at all and just create a civil construct that serves the same legal purpose. That was howling-at-the-moon territory. So while I'm a fan of the idea? And have been for 20 years? It ain't gonna happen in the US at least.

I have seen exactly zero evidence to back this up but I'll hypothesize it anyway - in addition to greater cultural acceptance for transgender youth, it would not surprise me to learn that an increase in dissatisfaction with gender roles and gender identity was playing a part in the increase in gender dysphoria. It's an incredible challenge to jump out of society's expectations and take on an entirely new identity. Maybe people just feel freer to do it now than they did 30 years ago? But also maybe people feel more impetus to do it because we're getting stuck.

Pardon my poor attempt at being snarky about marriage. I also write that legally it's legally extremely helpful. My comment is about partnership. The views and expectations of modern women have evolved and as you note, most men continue acting from the same frame of view. That's fundamental to whether or not a successful partnership can be made. It's not very surprising that both men and women are struggling to deal with this.

As an aside, because as you point out this discussion is not about "marriage is dumb", one interesting thing that's taken some getting used to in the Nordics is that it's very common to never get married. Couples will live together, have children together, and somewhere in there _maybe_ get married (maybe half of them or so?). There is a legal framework that works for this and it differs a bit whether or not children of come about in the partnership.

I think everyone should give up on marriage. It's a silly tradition with legal implications that can range from extremely helpful to financially catastrophic.

It's also a deeply-ingrained legal construct that serves a number of vital purposes within most societies worldwide. At a base level it's a civil contract allowing for partnership benefits and legal shelter for raising children, AKA 'future taxpayers', that has no easy replacement. You can think "everyone should" but nobody will. The discussion here is not "marriage is dumb" the discussion here is "partnership is faltering."

I don't really know what being "grown up" as a man means today or in the past, but a lot of the men I know have never done it. I know guys in their mid 30s who don't think twice about skipping showers for a week, who get in brawls with the homeless after leaving the bar, who are visited by the police a few times a year for getting wasted and causing a domestic disturbance while living in their mother's home, who think cooking on things that aren't a barbecue "is gay".

Right but that's no different than it's ever been. I grew up with "real men don't eat quiche" and ten years before that we had "The Lumberjack Song." That's not about partnership, that's about gender identity. This is about partnership:

This is about partnership:

This is about partnership:

Let's look at that, though -

with a degree - there's been less and less of that lately. For whatever reason (and I've seen "autonomy" suggested a lot, as a consequence of rising tuition) the male fraction at colleges has dropped an easy ten percent. If you are male and have no degree, there are a lot of "laborer" positions open to you. If you are female and have no degree, the gender-normative world says you need to get married. Sure, there's retail etc but there's retail etc. for men. There's more incentive for women to at least invest in enough debt to get a leg up.

or a good job - if you grabbed the bottom rung out of high school your opportunities for career advancement are slim. The job you got five years ago is the job you have now and likely the job you'll have five years from now. If you got a degree in dental hygiene you're in the same spot but you're also making $80k a year - a friend's daughter scored a slot in a dental hygienist program with an 80 percent rejection rate, zero men in the program.

that is capable of empathizing with others - if you look online for dating advice you're going to find Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate, all of whom will tell you that if you man up and start treating women like shit they'll fall at your feet. You can be empathetic but to profess empathy requires a counter-cultural belief that women are humans.

and not totally strange - If you're twenty two right now you (A) graduated during COVID (B) playing first-person shooters with 99% dudes (C) and watching pornography that heavily favors the humiliation and degradation of women (D) having experienced nowhere NEAR a reasonable amount of unmediated, spontaneous interaction with the opposite sex.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen? I'm saying that over the past fifteen-twenty years the lake is bigger, the lily pads are fewer between and there's less time spent learning how to jump. And the statistics are now bearing out what was predicted ten years ago. Now here's the problem:

the soldiers never left and they're not getting laid.

I think everyone should give up on marriage. It's a silly tradition with legal implications that can range from extremely helpful to financially catastrophic.

I don't really know what being "grown up" as a man means today or in the past, but a lot of the men I know have never done it. I know guys in their mid 30s who don't think twice about skipping showers for a week, who get in brawls with the homeless after leaving the bar, who are visited by the police a few times a year for getting wasted and causing a domestic disturbance while living in their mother's home, who think cooking on things that aren't a barbecue "is gay". There's a whole separate world of gaming and Discord communities as a lifestyle with totally different perceptions of women as well.

Maybe men aren't naturally "wired" to be office wage slaves or whatever. But there's no reasonable bridge between "screaming at my mother because she's mad I'm unemployed and smoking weed and doing shrooms in her home at age 38 rather than looking for a job" to being a life partner to a woman who feels she's been breaking glass ceilings for 15 years to own her own home.

Yann LeCun offers a grounded perspective on AI – instead of fearing future systems, we should focus on building responsible ones. At TOUCHED By AI, we believe in using AI to simplify lives and empower businesses, not replace them.

Explore how we’re shaping the future:

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“If I had a helmet of cell phones strapped around my head, and around my nuts, I wouldn’t be worried."

-Elon Musk

If you are a man with a degree or a good job that is capable of empathizing with others and not totally strange than you are in a buyers market.

My grandpa was deaf in one ear and in his early twenties during WWII, best Years of his life until the soldiers came back.

The thing is? Mother Earth News is half hippies, half preppers. There's a big contingent that gives no fux about the oil industry. They like that Henry Ford distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

What I think is important to note here is that it's the cults of personality, not the underlying belief system. And the one thing you can say about the past few months is that both Trump and Vance have been demonstrating their incompetence to the people who were only conditionally in the cult in the first place.

My dislike of Tesla has been consistent since reading Ashlee Vance's book, but if you'd told me two years ago that even electric cars can become a MAGA shibboleth I would've been very surprised.

Maybe some people would really enjoy your pod cast

I would say "tesla contrarian" has been a lonely place for a long time.

would you say you’re…bull-ish?

THANKS OBAMA

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1902993602227167489.html

They introduce the text by asking the reader to imagine the year 2050—the same year Schwartzman envisioned for solar communism—replete with desalinated ocean water flowing from the taps, skyscraper farms growing our food indoors, and “star pills” manufactured in space. Clean air and super-fast planes. Lest we confuse this scenario with science fiction, Klein and Thompson remind us what it was like to live in New York City between 1875 and 1905, when the streets filled with novelty: “automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations.” The world has changed very fast before. Why not now?

Hey I read that book. Bastani is never going to be confused with Ezra Klein, but at least he acknowledges that major public works projects do not happen from private investment.

Once these clogs are cleared, there’s no reason to believe we won’t supply ourselves with the high-pressure spray of ever-improving goods and services that is the American birthright. If there appears to be a problem regarding scarce resources or conflicting values, we should just innovate our way out. Lab-grown meat means we get to have our animals and eat them too. This isn’t the focused solar-communist prediction about the increasing efficiency of photovoltaic modules, it’s an all-purpose ideological faith in novelty.

Bastani's work, on the other hand, argues that innovation is the cause, not the effect - he points out that the advent of cheap solar power and cell phones has done more for African independence than anything else because for a thousand bucks you can turn a hut in the Congo into a no-grid modern bastion and that price is only coming down. Both Bastani and Hinkel point out that it isn't the abundance, it's the choke points and Klein wants rich people to control them.

Klein and Thompson are skilled presenters, and Abundance is hardly the worst thing for sale at the airport.

ice burn

If anyone can persuade America’s selfish liberal homeowners to stop thinking of every new housing development within their real estate market as a personal attack, it might be these two.

And nobody talks about this enough:

“Wealth - any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.” - H. L. Mencken

Society is striation and striation is driven by resources. If you would like to increase striation, increase resources. If you would like to decrease striation, decrease resources - you can do this by ensuring everyone is poor, or you can do this by ensuring that excess wealth is distributed into the common good via taxes, much like they were during the era of American prosperity. The basic problem is that we all keep up with the Joneses, I don't care where your civilization is, and if the Joneses are taxed so poorly that they can start rival space launch companies nobody is going to sit around thinking "well, my commute is shit and there's nowhere to park in my neighborhood but at least all these young immigrant families from Honduras have a roof over their heads." Bastani misses it, Klein misses it. Hinkel doesn't; his whole point is that global trade is a mechanism by which rich nations make poor nations poorer. McKibben gets it; his whole point is that the more we focus on keeping things local and within our own communities the less the global competition matters.

The state’s voters approved startup funding for the train plan in the fall of 2008. It should have been a gimme; but almost twenty years later, we’re still flying between LA and San Francisco, at an absurd cost to the climate.

Klein is being disingenuous if he actually pretends that California high speed rail was ever anything other than a long shot. It was always a "if we build it they will hand over their property rights" project in one of the most corrupt states in the nation. You know what Klein doesn't believe in? Corruption.

Clearly, something is sabotaging society’s rational development. We should have those trains, and some big solar-powered apartment buildings near the stations.

Whatever could that something be

For example: capital is reluctant to enter industries that are easy to enter, for fear competition will drive out the profit.

Uhhhmmmm capital is reluctant to enter industries it won't make money from. This is why there's no malaria vaccine. Until the Gates foundation stepped in because there were no capitalist or communist economies big enough to fund the development of a malaria vaccine.

The abundant solution to a lack of housing is to make it easier for developers to build for increased density: the more units that come onto the market, the less landlords will be able to charge.

The abundant solution to a lack of housing is to stop treating housing like a profit center and start treating housing like a human right. Let's take the "deregulate it" argument and apply it to medicine. How we all feelin' now?

Permitting single-stair apartment buildings, ending single-family zoning, and eliminating parking requirements are all strong housing reform ideas, but no one seriously believes such an updated regulatory program will yield abundant housing for America’s poor

fucking YIMBY dipshits

The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep and concerted public support, by adding the necessary state capacity to build and maintain a home for everyone who needs one. Something analogous goes for health care and food—not to mention clean air and water, parks, schools, transportation, news reporting, universities, scientific research, museums, and worthwhile artistic production in general.

Bastani would like a word

The authors acknowledge, but decline to unravel, the ways that private demand for profit itself is a fetter on production, leading to a confused moment in the conclusion where they cite Karl Marx in their argument for unleashing the capitalist forces of production from government standards.

Yeah sounds about right

But why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget?

Why doesn't anyone read Wallerstein

Would you rather have abundance or scarcity? Easy: more is better than less.

This is such a stupid way to look at it. Most people would rather have abundance in comparison to the relative scarcity of those around them. Given a choice between living in a trailer in Alabama in 2025 or being Henry VIII, most people would choose the Tudor even though that dude never got to see a single episode of Bake-off, taste a twinkie or be a Walmart shopper.

Ultimately, the Abundance authors ask too little of themselves and their readers. In adapting their short-form work, Klein and Thompson haven’t challenged themselves to go deeper or contend with their strongest critics.

bad ideas writ large are still bad, film at 11

Imagine the Middle East at peace, with popular governments devoted to using their national fossil fuel reserves to transition their societies to solar utopia, rather than on American-made weapons or weapons to shoot back at American-made weapons.

Haha the Middle East was under relative peace while completely under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire. People like to pretend it's always about oil without noticing that Israel doesn't sport a whole lotta wells.

Let us instead embrace the Schwartzmans’ solar utopian credo:

Yup, let's just wish things were different and then complain when they're not.

It's the green space literally next to the ferry, you gotta work hard not to get a ferry in the shot LOL

No idea. I actually can’t remember how I stumbled across this track. Every time I hear something I like I add it to an iTunes playlist. The list this one landed on I titled, “vibing.” Seems to fit. Glad you dig it! Cheers