The “junk drawer” is supposed to have old receipts, loose batteries, the toy(s) you took from your kid when they threw it at your head, some vaguely kitchen-esque looking tool you got as a wedding gift but don’t know what it is…crap like that.

That’s just a normal large/specialty utensil drawer.

Starting with games like Rad Racer and RC Pro Am on the NES, I must have put 10s of thousands of hours into hundreds of different racing games over the years. But try to talk to anyone about it, and it’s all gatekeeping all the time.

“Your favorite is too arcade-y for a real fan, noob.” “You turn on anti-lock braking? You aren’t sophisticated enough to join my clan, peasant.” Shit like that. I’m sure lots of other genres have similar fuckwads that think they are the gods of the gaming world.

And the “gh” are all different in “cough,” “ghost,” and “thought.”

All the pressure to be thoughtful and social hits all my anxiety buttons. How much longer until I get to be a hermit again?

Regardless of ideology, there are just some people with whom you will never be able to have a rational discussion.

Tankie authoritarians…maga incels…the block button works on them all.

Best - find a new job and quit when the new one is all lined up.
Next - get laid off and collect any severance and unemployment benefits while you search.
Worst - quit with nothing else lined up, struggle while you get back on your feet.

Bob Barker only died a year ago. I thought for a long time he had gone in, like, 2010 or so.

Born and raised in WW and I thought I had heard them all…

That graph plots gross pay (x-axis) against take-home cash (y-axis). The far left of the graph (in green) shows people making under 20k taking home more than their “earned” pay. At the extreme bottom is somebody making 1,000/year taking home 10,000. The progressive income tax starts at 20,000.

Not labeling the axises does make it hard to read.

The US doesn’t technically have a negative tax, but the EITC accomplishes the same basic thing. Whether it’s efficient enough, or needs expansion is another story.

Shit

Or, you know, decided not to judge the entire human experience by the actions of a handful of individuals.

What Musk did is roughly the Reddit-equivalent of reinstating t_d and auto-subscribing everybody.

If that happened, yeah, folks would leave in rather large numbers.

From one of my favorite college professors: apparently in the Chevy Chase days of Saturday Night Live he would do the Weekend Update and had a recurring bit that went like this.

And now it’s time for the basketball scores. 98-82; 102-99; 95-76.

That’s data. Without context there’s no useful information.

One’s “own best interest” can take a lot of different forms. Especially when the number and variety of plausible candidates are finite. Your preferred candidate for a given office will rarely line up perfectly with your own values. There’s a compromise there.

If I vote for my own finances, it may come at the cost of my morals. It I vote for my own moral interest, it may cost me more. If I vote for my own power, it may cost someone else their freedoms. How heavily do I weight my own interests against those of a wider society? Political identities and philosophies are complicated, and can’t necessarily be reduced to a single binary choice that is “best” in every scenario.

(not a tech expert, but I’ve been following it for a while, so I hope this is mostly correct)

Bluesky the app is currently the only (major) app running on the ATProtocol. The protocol itself is open source, and it is technically possible to run your own “federated” version (it’s not called that in the ATProto ecosystem, but that’s the rough equivalent in activitypub-speak). The protocol is still being developed, so it’s not as feature-complete as some people are hoping for, but it’s getting there.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/29/some-slightly-biased-thoughts-on-the-state-of-decentralized-social-media/ for a more professional write-up on the differences, similarities, and criticisms of the major twitter alternatives.

I’m looking forward to a few negative moochies as his picks get dumped even before the confirmation hearings.

Left of global center? No. Left of USA center? Probably.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-steady-conservatives-moderates-tie.aspx

More Americans identify as conservative than liberal. It’s not something we have to like, and certain policies may be quite different individually, but in order to win nationally, Democrats have to defeat voters’ own self-identification. Obviously it happens, so this isn’t some insurmountable challenge, but the deck is stacked.

I call them “my people.”

2. if he ran as VP for another person, which is constitutionally allowed, he could be elected as VP

This is an interesting, but untested, legal theory. When Al Gore ran in 2000, there were murmurings of whether he should try to get Bill Clinton on the ticket as VP. Ultimately, there was some consensus that this part of 12th Amendment wasn’t superseded by any others: “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”

It’s a bit of an open question whether that means only those parts of the eligibility requirements in place at the time (35 years old, natural born citizen, etc), or whether new requirements are also included, such as already serving two full terms as President. Clinton/Gore didn’t want to push those boundaries, but Trump certainly could try.

Edit: The 2012 book Constitutional Cliffhangers has a whole chapter dedicated to this and similar scenarios. It became a must-read in Trump’s first term, and is even more of one now.