Beaver [he/him]

Trump should draw little devil horns on Obama with a sharpie.

No religious exemptions, and very strict medical exemptions for children going into any school receiving state funding. It’s atypically strict by US standards, and so has some of the highest vaccination rates. Not sure why it ended up that way, must be a historical fluke from a time when vaccines were not a controversial political issue.

Yeah, they have a mechanical arm that holds a pen and duplicate the motions of a signature. And then has a feeding mechanism so that you can sign a whole gaggle of documents automatically.

They used to be a contraption that with linkages that held a bunch of pens. More of a “multi-pen”. It’s funny that signing papers got to be labor intensive enough of a problem that they had to invent productivity devices in the 1800s. I could imagine that if Trump had to manually sign every Jan 6 pardon, he probably would have just let them rot in prison instead.

What makes it extra funny is that nobody gives a single fuck about autopens except Trump. I’m sure he walks past this every day thinking “hehehe, got 'em”

Here’s another visualization of basically the same data, but as a stacked bar chart instead of using the triangular shape. In both charts: Left is the population, Right is the wealth, and the segments show which slices of the population own which slices of the wealth.

This triangle setup is deceptive, the slices seem to be proportional to height, not area. That 1.6% slice on the top of the left triangle is definitely not 1.6% of the total area of the triangle.

Obligatory Truanon Link

I think what struck me the most was that Brace’s parents still haven’t really come to terms with what they did to them. It’s insidious how they infect the entire familial dynamic.

I’m not expecting it, since casualty avoidance is a fundamental part of modern US military doctrine. The US Empire understands that it’s very important that their military be viewed as invincible and able to act with impunity.

That’s a good thing, in a way; it means that Venezuela “merely” has to be a prickly enough target that there is some danger that an F-35 gets shot down. IMO, that’s why the US will probably do a combination of cruise missiles at hard central targets, and then F-35 strikes on less defended periphery targets. It’s way of calibrating your attack so that it looks big and tough (you get one of those night-time videos of an explosion in Caracas), while avoiding risk.

(An actual ground invasion would be a gigantic shitshow, of course)

You gotta hand it to him.

Sometimes

Going into the readings of Capital last year, one of my major misconceptions about Marx’s work was that the falling rate of profit was one of the “disproven” predictions… when in fact, it’s a fact of life that the capitalists spend a supermajority of their effort trying to overcome.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the “job” of a lot of people in powerful positions is to generate text in response to prompts. Their entire world has changed… therefor, the entire world must be changing in the same way they’ve experienced! AI does everything for me, so it must be able to do everything for everyone! We have to go all-in!

Fishers of Tuna

My money is on a neighbor he has somehow annoyed. Nobody cares enough about Tim Pool’s opinions to shoot him.

For me, the Year of Linux on the Desktop was 2021. There’s literally only one computer in the house running Windows anymore, and that’s simply to run some of the pro-level software I use for gig work (and so I’ll never be entirely rid of it).

Proton’s improvements were a big step in transitioning my PC gaming to Linux. There are still a lot of games that won’t run on Linux, but… there are so many that do, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out.