Just before the pandemic I was at a bus stop on a cold morning and cars kept getting stuck on the hill leading up to the traffic lights. A few of us looked at each other and walked out to push the cars stuck at the lights.

When the pandemic hit I really missed random social interactions like that.

If you’re looking for a little respite from the insanity and depravity of the news, I really enjoyed this #WITHPod convo on the philosophy of games with @add-hawk.bsky.social

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

I think we're going to soon be in a world where lots of pieces of short writing would be improved, often greatly improved, by AI editing. But everyone doing this would make the system they're embedded in worse.

(In related news, I'm reading a lot of reference letters right now.)

But...

Comments sections need a little bit of friction, or they can spiral out of control. And making people writing out things longhand might be just the friction that's needed.

Wasn't it 30 million he was attributing to Rep Omar a few days ago?

That looks pretty close to the slope for the six months before that, at least eyeballing it.

So it clearly didn't help, but it looks from the numbers like one bad event among many all through 2005, not the single big popularity crisis it felt like (and still feels like).

In real time Bush seemed less popular after Katrina, but the numbers don't agree. Without dates, you wouldn't spot Katrina here.

I think, as you say later, the second-order effects were bigger. Post-Katrina, conservatives didn't reflexively back him in a crisis.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_...

Totally agree. The successful 20th century right-authoritarians used carrots for the biggest businesses and churches.

These guys have bullied businesses and alienated the biggest churches.

The carrots are, at most, for startup evangelical churches, and that’s not enough people for what they need.

We could have an American style continental league with 32 teams in two conferences. We'd just have to have UK and EU conferences, rather than split the teams based on which owners liked which other ones generations ago.

Shouldn't they have updated their watermark in the lower left?

If you get down to precinct level, anywhere large enough to have a hotel will likely be blue.

At least in Michigan (I'm sure other states are different), even inside the reddest counties, the precincts with the smallest geographic area were almost always blue.

Places that have always been in the CBD, like RMIT, seem to do fine. It’s the ‘campus’ that’s really a handful of offices in a generic building that seems scammy.