Happy Thursday. It’s Spring Training season and that means the Yankees are playing home games where the Rays will play during the season. Guess who sells more tickets each game. I’m deep in the bowels of data migration. I’ve been off 1 day in the last 17, and I expect this weekend to also suck. How are y’all?
Who’s laughing about “hand-egg” now, fuckers?
Heroic Mulatto has a theory that every science article you read about human studies fall into either “huh” or “duh”. I’ve been complaining about this since last century.
This out of Japan, so I think we all know where that third set of teeth will grow.
This ear-wormed me earlier this week and now you can have listen, too.
I’ve seen this movie.
I’m thinking this isn’t a serious news/science site.
So you don’t believe in carcinisation?
(Sorry, you set up the crab joke, otherwise I could have gone with the beetle joke.)
UCS needs to be less crabby.
Don’t say “beetle joke” three times in succession.
Crab people? Look like crabs? Talk like people?
Buster. Or maybe Jeroen.
carcinisation? I thought it was Turtles….or ants….or monkeys….(generalized body forms)
Was expecting This.
I enjoy exceeding expectations.
I enjoy exceeding my own expectations, but it has to be a surprise.
Well I do hope the teeth tech comes in by the time I need it
It cost me something like $2,500 to have superfluous “wisdom” teeth removed, and that was 8 years ago. I wonder how much it’ll cost putting them back.
I’m deep in the bowels of data migration.
Miles O’Brien can’t help?
Rum, Data Migration, and the Lash?
Run would help. I am already under the lash. Although my manager did send me a nice gift basket of meat and cheese for working the weekends. Which is basically the most she can do. She’s awesomely cynical so the subtext is “you deserve a bonus but this is what I can do”
Would DMC help too?
DMT would.
DMC
I wouldn’t exactly call it a productivity hangover, but I can tell you that you get a lot more work to rule when you have meetings announcing a huge financial win for the year and pair it with a meeting saying there would be no raises this year for most of the staff.
The non-manager meetings have been getting a bit… heated.
Lol, we had that last year. “Record breaking revenue! Well over target!” But we missed our true annual target by a smidge, so it was a 2% raise and below target bonus year along with the continuation of an on again, off again promotion freeze that started during covid.
Thankfully the promotion freeze went back to “off again” this week and I was on the list that got bumped up, but there’s no real incentive to work hard since they don’t bother to reward individual performance. Raises are 2-3% annually based on company performance, bonuses are wildly variable bases solely on company performance, and promotions happen when there’s money (3 senior folks in my dept left, freeing up the cash) not when deserved. There’s zero point in aiming for anything better than above average. Also, they are cagey about how they actually measure performance, so it’s always a guessing game as to how we actually did.
OTOH, I get to close my laptop at 5 or 5:15 most days, I haven’t worked a weekend in years, I work from home, and we’d be able to make it if I never got a raise or a bonus ever again, so I can’t complain too much about the standard corporate nonsense.
It’s my fourth time seeing the exact same pattern play out in the past five years (two different companies). The only raise I’ve gotten in that time is when I switched companies. The raises also aren’t blocked across the company, just for the support staff. The part that’s upsetting a lot of the people on my team is that we’re dedicated to specific customers. The customers pay a premium for this, which funds our roles.
Hmm, sounds like corporate bureaucracy is barely distinguishable from government bureaucracy. Imagine that!
juris imprudent:
Well, with the exception that government workers (based on everything I’ve read) get automatic COLA adjustments at a minimum. Those have not been the case in the private sector (which, to be fair, both companies did have sizeable government contracts), which has caused the people in the more progressive states to get more angry about than the fly over states.
Yikes, so no raises and if the customers leave you’ll get laid off.
J. Frank Parnell:
Not exactly. Our team is currently understaffed, so they’re trying to bring more headcount in and some of the customers don’t have an assigned resource. So, if a customer leaves, they rebalance and reassign the accounts among the headcount they’ve got. Based on feedback from the people who have recommended former coworkers for open positions, our HR is lowballing them on offers. Between that and the lack of raises, it causes the knock on effect of people not being willing to recommend the role to their acquaintances. I expect quite a bit of turnover in the team in the next couple of months (I was already planning on looking for a new role soon).
Rule for good meetings:
No agenda, ruins creativity
At least 7 people, better 10+
Preferably no less than 2h
Never answer responses for feedback, allow dead silence
“We’re just going to give everyone a couple more minutes to join.”
We’ve got an executive position at my company for you, boy. You’re a natural!
Can he apply for a visa, or do we have to chip in to get him a gold card?
TOK:
Well, there is the H1-B program, but we’d have to argue that there’s no one in ‘Merica who could run a meeting like that, which would unfortunately be a difficult side to take.
Vampire meetings!
It is the hot, new thing, and, obviously, needs someone from Transylvania, er, Wallachia, er, what is the other part of Romania?
Bring management to a tech meeting.
You forgot mandatory powerpoint
Wow, looks like Canada already successfully implemented two tier sentencing. A suspended sentence for stabbing a 72 year old man to death because of his ‘experience of being an indigenous person’
What is going on with the anglosphere
https://x.com/G0ADM/status/1897405504269525386
What is going on with the anglosphere
Cultural suicide.
^^
I’ll take “Rose Bird” for a thousand, Pie.
Isn’t that the truth. There’s a reason California voters went into open revolt.
Then what is the reason for the last two decades of California voting?
70% of voters everywhere vote D or R purely based on the D or R, in California that 70% is unevenly divided, with the D having the lion’s share. Of the remaining 30% of the voters the majority (probably all of them but I am willing to pretend to believe some actually understand issues and policies) are blindly trying to select the candidate they think will do more that they like than dislike. The blindly part is not necessarily a failing of the voter, politicians and media lie. By the way, this is not me claiming that we are anything but a tiny minority here, it is me claiming that even widely held viewpoints are only loosely represented in the halls of power, because candidate selection is in the hands of the two machines.
Could see that playing out in NYC too.
So, we know who to hire to take out the judge?
Apparently the UK is explicitly codifying that too:
The way to undo unjust things in the past is to do unjust things in the other direction today. That balances everything out.
I wish I was kidding.
Been asking myself that for decades.
The Althouse Rule: All scientific results in the media will indicate that women are either equal to or superior to men.
Which is weird, what with there being no biological differences between men and women. It makes you wonder how the patriarchy managed to erect itself and enslave the stronk wamen for centuries when the whole time women were more intelligent, and physically equal.
Things I have seen written in apparent seriousness:
1. Svelteness as a beauty standard is a trick to starve girl children to make them physically weaker.
2. Encouraging girl children to be indoors and do housework rather than roughhouse outside is a trick to induce muscle atrophy.
3. Patting girl children on the head stunts their growth.
It’s Tricknology, the same way whitey managed to enslave superior black folx.
This plan for male domination must have been going on for a long time, and must also happen in virtually every other animal species on the planet.
I mean, surely cavemen were sitting around cultivating body standards so that they had to go out and hunt mammoths, while the women stayed home.
And that the people who say stupid shit like this often hold positions of power and/or influence is frightening. It’s at least as dogmatic as any religious belief.
Are you suggesting that professional academic feminist theorists might not have a completely sound grasp of science?
Althouse didn’t account for climate change!
A Christian teacher is suing a county council after she was sacked for refusing to use male pronouns to refer to an eight-year-old female pupil who wanted to “socially transition”.
The teacher claimed that the school has put the child “on a path to self-destruction” after expressing concern of the school’s safeguarding of the girl.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/gender-row-christian-teacher-sacked-male-pronouns-school
I find it disappointing that sacked does not actually mean being stuffed in the sack and carried outside the building then dumped on the sidewalk.
You have to pay extra for that
A New Generation Is Here. Its Name Is Already an Insult.
Parents of the newly minted Beta babies are navigating an awkward association; brushing off a ‘placeholder’ name
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/a-new-generation-is-here-its-name-is-already-an-insult-23e18a2e?st=75YcsN&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
They should just name them like hurricanes, for as mindless as the practice of designating particular “generations” outside of a familial context is.
It is a requirement of the advertising era that every demographic be identified, and exploited.
That made sense in the print, radio, and TV era, where similarly-aged people would be likely to consume similar content and be receptive to similar advertising messages, but now that we live an a privacy-free panopticon where advertising is hyper-individualized based on per-user data, it doesn’t even have much value in that context anymore.
The BBC has now written THIRTEEN (13) articles, mostly tributes, about a drag queen almost no-one had heard of who died two months ago. They’ve been written by at least ten different reporters
https://x.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1897592338454565267
Fucking Trump wants to cut USAID support to the BBC budget to prevent such important reporting. Horrible.
I am a damn traitorous colonial but let’s see if I get this right. (clears throat)
“The drag queeeeen is dead! Long live the drag king!”
I watched Drag Race in the early years for the campy fun. RuPaul is a smart businessman and wasn’t having any of the woke shit that started to infect the country a few years later. Until then he did.
But yeah, no idea who that person is.
I hope he has Carlos Ghosn on speed dial. Given the position 7-Eleven plays in day to day life in Japan I hope he took notes exactly how 3rd world Japan’s legal system is.
7-Eleven to Split U.S. Stores and Buy Back Shares to Prevent Takeover
https://www.wsj.com/business/7-eleven-new-ceo-stock-buyback-split-bc92c5dd?st=spxBfD&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
how is the 7-Eleven sushi in japan? Any good bento boxes? do they have beer? whisky?
I don’t believe they have sushi, but I could be wrong. I’m not a sushi eater.
They have all kinds of alcohol. I can’t remember about distilled spirits as again I’m not a drinker.
Plenty of good bento type lunches.
I’m not a sushi eater … I’m not a drinker. – lame
I drink, just no interest in distilled spirits.
a fermented mare’s milk kind of man…,
Better than a stallion’s.
I mean, its not like they were even trying to hide it:
“During the final months of the Biden administration, the National Institutes of Health awarded $28 million to a mysterious venture-backed company called Vaccine Company Inc., a biomedical firm founded in 2022 whose chief financial officer happens to be one of former president Joe Biden’s top COVID advisers.”
https://freebeacon.com/biden-harris-administration/biden-awarded-28-million-to-mysterious-vaccine-company-run-by-his-covid-adviser-and-based-out-of-a-maryland-po-box/
Vaccine Company, Inc.? Seriously?
The Human Fund: Money for people.
They must have been in a big hurry. How hard is it to come up with “The Council for Childhood Disease Prevention?”
CCDP? Already taken.
Yes, but stopping things like this won’t meaningfully do anything to reduce spending.
/s Typical Prog
OK, fine.
It should still be stopped.
Also progs: “OMG, Musk is a Trump adviser and his companies are getting paid lots by the government! Conflict of interest! Corruption!”
I’ve seen this one recently: “DOGE isn’t finding any real government fraud; DOGE *is* the fraud!”
“It’s different when we do it.” /mostly progs but sometimes conservatives
Trump halting the EV mandates and subsidies will hurt Tesla and cost Elon billions.
@WTF
Elon is known to want the end of the subsidies. He may be a benefactor, but he doesn’t need them.
Every other EV manufacturer needs them, and he knows ending the subsidies will put them out of business, which is a net positive for him (and all of us).
All the other ‘sciency’ names had been used.
/Watches old people TV and the commercials. I’m calling my doctor now to see if I need anything from Vaccine Co.com
MAJOR – #Azerbaijan authorities now closing the @ICRC
office stating “no further need for its current activities.” Additionally, Baku has proposed closing the following United Nations offices : @UNDP
, @UNFPA
, @Refugees
and @UNICEF
offices.
These developments follow Baku ordering the closure of BBC’s Azerbaijan office and Sputnik Azerbaijan in late February.
https://x.com/NKobserver/status/1897293786968961271
I say the US needs to send military aid to Armenia.
Mozilla deletes promise not to sell Firefox users’ data
Still mostly mitigable until they finally kill off the user.js system, but it looks like the only non-commercial web engine is cooked.
I stopped updating [gasp—shocking, I know] Firefox at v52 or something because of bloatware. MANY years later, changed to Brave because I was going to be forced to update Firefox. This was unacceptable. Went back to Firefox for a minute. Went back to Brave. Made it work until it didn’t. Went to Chrome for one thing and Edge for another, which I had to because of work. I just switched out Firefox for my Android phone for Opera, and did the same for my mother’s tablet. So far, so good.
What I really mourn is the loss of Thunderbird, which I hadn’t updated since v42 or something. That started a shitstorm because Spectrum wasn’t supporting old Roadrunner addies anymore PLUS they weren’t supporting POP3. Then Tbird fundamentally changed its architecture or something, meaning a beloved add-on wasn’t supported and and and and
So I got eMClient 6 months ago, which I’m still not sure about.
Mozilla only nominally owns Thunderbird anymore. They spun it out under another non-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation called MZLA, and have been trying to offload it ever since. It may eventually end up under The Document Foundation, which publishes LibreOffice, which honestly would be a better place for it.
I use claws-mail for email, which is a great option if you don’t need a full PIM, and don’t need to send HTML emails (you could still send them as attachments or inline HTML, I suppose, but it very deliberately only supports composing in plain text).
Don’t need HTML. What I need is a bulk email exporter to .eml format. I store all my emails on my hard drive. I don’t keep them in my profile.
Claws uses MH format for storage, which is plain-text searchable like .eml. I know you can export/save individual emails to .eml, but I’m not sure about batch conversion. Could probably write a script for it, if nothing else.
Mojeaux, fighting against the Committee Updating New Technology for as long as she can remember.
Thunderbird had/has a plugin that I lived and died by. Sometime while I was fighting for POP3, it broke or I was being forced to upgrade to a new version of Thunderbird whose base architecture had changed, and it wouldn’t work on the “improved” Tbird. Well, today when I was googling for the plugin to write my bitching post, I see that the plugin lives on for the “improved” Tbird.
I’m not sure I want to switch back now because of my tenuous hold on POP3 and I’m skeerted the “improved” Tbird will not accommodate it. I had to change over most of my Roadrunner logins (>25 years’ worth) to my business email to get POP3. I will not be able to deal if POP3 goes away.
@ZWAK Truer words were (almost) never spoken.
Oh, one thing I don’t like about eM Client is that it doesn’t have color-coded inboxes and folders. I didn’t know how much I rely on those until I didn’t have them anymore.
Not sure your exact use case, but you can approximate a POP3 style system with IMAP fairly trivially. That’s how I have my email arranged. I have my client set up with filters to poll the IMAP server, then automatically download the messages to my local machine and my preferred directory structure (I have multiple accounts with the same email host all sharing one IMAP inbox, so on my local machine they filter into their respective per-account inboxes, with some additional sorting per sender and so forth), and finally purge the message from the IMAP server after it’s downloaded. Fewer and fewer email providers support POP3, as it doesn’t allow for more secure/modern authentication. The protocol will probably exist in perpetuity, but it’s aging out of practical usage.
You can roll your own email server with POP3 as well, of course.
I’m willing to go to great lengths to do things that are important to me, but there comes a time when I have to throw in the towel and go with the flow. My business’s webhost uses POP3, so as long as they do, I can keep on truckin’.
Fukuyama says “America is undergoing a process of repatrimonialization” under Trump.
This is a theme from his books on the history of government. Efficient regimes often slide back into a “patrimonialism”: patronage, favoritism, rewarding cronies and sycophants. It’s a good way to understand the history of government.
Today, the automakers secured an exception in tariffs. A good example of it.
Often goes with court rivalries, conflicts of interest, sucking up to the leader by echoing especially the dumb things he says.
This is a much better way of understanding Trump’s style than calling it fascism (as the left loves to do) or autocracy.
But, the DEI and NGO-blob regime is also a kind of patrimonalism: using control of the government to dole out public resources to favored clients. Fukuyama is silent on this.
Trump and DOGE are attacking that kind of patrimonalism, while Trump erects his own kind.
https://x.com/whyvert/status/1897491977874080081
Imagine thinking there is a modern country on earth who does not engage in “patronage, favoritism, rewarding cronies and sycophants”
Yeah, kinda of. Just a little bit though.
ends … means
Who is wrong more often, Fukuyama or Krugman? Please discuss.
Excellent pairing, and sure to devolve into a medieval theology level debate.
How many economists can dance on the head of a pin?
How many economists can dance?
I thought history ended.
Trump and DOGE are attacking that kind of patrimonalism, while Trump erects his own kind.
Trump’s erection is going to be YUGE!
So, how are we doing with the tariffs? Anybody notice anything yet?
Well I am hoping high end bourbon ends up in Europe on the cheap but no luck yet
See, Pie keeps his eyes on the prize!
I’m mostly certainly noticing the chaos in the financial markets.
The avocados I bought yesterday were 2 cents more than the last time I bought them. But then, they were 8 cents more than the current price about a month ago.
So basically, it’s a literal hellscape.
Avocados are part of the hellscape, it is known.
BODIES IN THE STREETS!!! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!111!!!
Daffodils are blooming.
/looks at the fresh dusting of snow
Not around here. I have started seeing fresh growth on the trees though.
I haven’t noticed anything, although eggs are $6 a dozen right now (separate issue). I expect we’ll all die a third time from this (after net neutrality and the last government shutdown).
We’re getting as many orders for eggs as we can fulfill right now. We sell at $4 and $5/dozen depending on when the customer started with us, and we have requests for roughly 5-6 dozen/week. Zero marketing, zero attempts to formalize anything, just friends willing to pay for high quality eggs. We eventually want to supply our church’s food pantry and have enough left over to sell to the neighbor that runs a farm stand, so we’re expanding the operation.
Baby chicks and ducks round 1 are in the garage growing out. Round 2 is scheduled for mid-June. Round 3 (meat chickens and turkeys) is late-June.
Not the kind of chick magnet you expected to be, eh?
Piss all over brooding chicks. I’ll never do it again short of the apocalypse.
Broody hens are the best. Zero work involved. No mess. Mama takes care of everything. We just supply food and water.
Dear Penthouse, I never thought it would happen to me, but I had a chick on each arm and my wife gave me an approving look…
We’re still a few weeks away from them getting big enough to be annoying. The ducks grow disturbingly fast, though. They’re 5x the size of the chicks after almost 2 weeks.
We got a 150g stock tank, a 3g nipple waterer and pulled an old feeder from the coop. Much easier than the 25g Rubbermaid totes and pint sized feeders and waterers. At this stage, I just check the feed and water levels daily and replace some litter once a week to keep it fresh. Upkeep will, of course, go up as they grow.
We haven’t had anybody go broody yet, but I’ll opportunistically shove extra eggs under her if she does. We can always sell the extra pullets and eat the cockerels.
The ducks got to splash around in the sink the other day
Adorbs.
An Afghani asylum seeker followed a schoolgirl and subjected her to a rape attack after spotting the lone victim in a town centre despite the victim repeatedly telling him she was only 15.
https://www.falkirkherald.co.uk/news/crime/asylum-seeker-found-guilty-of-rape-of-teen-in-falkirk-town-centre-5019803
repeatedly telling him she was only 15. – Some Afghani like older women…
Found guilty? His Majesty’s government better investigate how such a racist jury was empaneled.
The jurors will be charged and convicted of a hate crime.
“subjected her to a rape attack” is a strange way to say he raped her.
Was that wrong? Was I not supposed to do that?
EU holds emergency summit to discuss Ukraine, plan to rearm continent
Trump: “You should pay for your own goddamn defense and stop suckling at America’s teat. Also, meet your NATO signatory obligations for defense spending.”
Europe: “Oh yeah? We’ll show you! We’re going to spend a trillion dollars on our own defense and raise our defense budgets to NATO signatory levels!”
I hope they keep sticking it to the bad orange man this way. If they REALLY want to pwn The Donald they should consider dissolving NATO altogether and booting US troops out of Europe for the first time in 80 fucking years.
Europe can’t depend on the US any more. We need to get serious. We need to get tough. We need op-eds. We need speeches. We need conferences. And we need them now.
https://x.com/BDSixsmith/status/1897568327276401122
Speeches and conferences are about all Euro pols can muster.
“Some banks and industry groups have pushed back on that proposal, saying it encroaches on their right to decide with whom they do business.”
So if my bank doesn’t want to do business with women and minorities that’s OK too? Right?
New GOP Bill Aims to End ‘Debanking’ of Crypto Companies and Conservatives
https://www.wsj.com/finance/regulation/new-gop-bill-aims-to-end-debanking-of-crypto-companies-and-conservatives-a4834721?st=FhADuM&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Operation Chokepoint looms large.
Like every other fascistically-regulated industry, banks are in a quantum state of private and public, usually depending on the P&L at the time of observation.
They didn’t have a problem with government doing it and calling it Operation Chokepoint.
Off topic – My brain has gone crosseyed staring at This. It’s supposed to be a 0.9Hz clock circuit with a RC delayed start and an on-off switch.
The eight pin header with only three connected pins is the result of it being built to interface with someone else’s design I can’t change.
I provided three views of the circuit board diagram because traces hid behind other traces, all three panels show the same device.
Looks like a Megaman level.
Who would be the boss?
Circuitman
While the Eurotrash leaders work themselves up to stealing $300 billion in Russian deposits, other countries are noticing.
https://x.com/KingKong9888/status/1897202565051506760
China is preparing to withdraw $62 trillion worth of its securities from the European market.
They’ve been concerned about this for more than the past news cycle.
I’m doing pretty well. I took a sick day yesterday to work at the gym. We had a day full of meetings and about 5 hours of cleaning. We’ve been renting out space in our gym to someone who runs cardio classes, and this pays most of our rent. This month she decided to call it quits. So we’re working on absorbing her business by the end of the month. In talking to her coaches and clients, we found she’s charging anywhere from $85 to $149 per month for the same classes, and she pays some trainers $18 and some $24. It’s a mess. But if we clean it up it should work out.
One of my non-cunty aunts (Mom has 4 living sisters) (this one is Team Phyllis) teaches cardio classes. I don’t know what she makes; that’s irrelevant.
What’s relevant is they go for HER, not the class per se. When I was in college I was in martial arts. There was an aerobics class right after our classes. She was TREMENDOUSLY popular. If she’s charging that much, her patrons may be there for HER.
It will be important to find people who are popular AND good to teach the class(es).
They have 4 coaches, and we will probably keep 3 or 4 of them. The clients hate the owner but they love the coaches, the class format, and the community. We can keep all of that.
Sounds like you’re well-positioned to keep things going, possibly even improve customer satisfaction when they hear the hated old owner is gone.
Unciv, I think so. The way things are now, she is operating at a loss and we might lose money for a little bit as well.
Good luck.
Hope cleaning up her mess sorts the financials.
Just don’t do shit that will make you become the new hated owner and you should be pretty good.
The Arab League’s plan for Gaza:
-want a government of technocrats,
-but they aren’t going to disarm Hamas,
-and they won’t send troops, instead want UN peacekeepers.
So Hamas remains.
This Arab plan only becomes feasible if Israel destroys Hamas after resuming the war.
https://x.com/whyvert/status/1897074053867036769
The only effective plan for peace in the area would be the Roman one – Kill every goddamn thing in it, demolish every structure, burn every plant, and sow the earth with salt.
You will never have trouble from there again.
In other words, the rest of the Arab world wants Israel to do its dirty work.
DistroWatch reviews the Orbitiny desktop
I linked this project a few weeks ago. DW has done a review of the first release. Expected rough edges for an alpha release, but it’s an intriguing desktop.
Tell us the important details. Does the project have a coder code of conduct to keep the unwoke from contributing?
Where does it stand on the Gamer Gate issue?
Anyone have any insight on what the trade/tariff war with Canada is supposed to accomplish? I used to work for a company that had manufacturing plants in Calgary and Montreal and the bulk of the finished goods made there were shipped to the US. I might call a old co-worker and ask if there has been any impact. The products made at these plants are food ingredients that are used food staples we all consume. My go to version of that song is from Crow soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails….
https://youtu.be/8eptioPpo4w?si=YiIYgfrHBYsw3xYV
Have you asked why a large agricultural nation should need to import foreign foodstuffs instead of burning local regulations and handling that within its borders?
Why should Arkansas import its pineapples from Hawaii?
(To use an old example)
The climate difference between the farming areas of canada and those of the northern US is Nil. They are not producting anything we cannot.
I don’t know the history of why these two Canadian mfg sites were chosen but I believe it had to do with being in proximity to the where the primary raw ingredient is sourced. These two plants were built in the 1920’s so there were likely other factors.
Well, the stated goals are to move production back to the US and reduce the flow of opioids and illegal immigrants. The purported goals are to force fair trade by mirroring tariffs imposed, and because Trump thinks tariffs are good. The revealed goals (so far) appear to be for more cronyism (automotive part exemption) and as threats for negotiating other items.
Of course, I’m a lowly commenter who works in IT and reads a lot, so all of that could be pulled directly out of my ass.
Protectionism is cronyism.
It’s giving government favored companies a advantage, at the expense of consumers and small competitors.
I don’t know what Canadian tariff policy is on US goods, I need to research that. So Trump is reciprocating what Canada does?
CatchTheCarp:
I’ve seen the reciprocation of tariffs being the final end state of the Trump plan. But things are pretty much constantly in flux with the flurry of EO’s, court decisions, announcements, and the like.
Really, all the tariff announcements and changes should be getting Congress to start pulling back some of their delegated authority, but the odds of that happening are low.
This after having negotiated his BEST TRADE DEAL ever with Mexico and Canada to supersede NAFTA. Trump just jerks people around because he can.
getting Congress to start pulling back some of their delegated authority
But then they will have to delegate again once someone they like is president.
No. And apparently neither do Trump’s negotiators.
How Talks to Avert Tariffs on Mexico and Canada Fell Apart
https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/trump-tariff-negotiations-canada-mexico-0933a272?st=oaEg9X&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Headline: States push fight against mRNA vaccines
Interesting.
First sentence:
The mRNA vaccines that helped to end the COVID pandemic
cavalier out.
I’m pretty sure I’m far more enraged by reading that sentence than I should be.
That shit makes me want to choke a bitch.
The only sentence that would make me angrier is something, like, “wearing face masks, which reduced the spread of the ‘Rona, in accordance with sound science…”
I’m sure Ive said this before, but “vaccines”* aren’t medicine. They aren’t like antibiotics or some other pharmaceutical that will help your body fight off sickness.
They are a form of medical treatment, but that’s because the shot gives you a weakened or dead form of the virus, so that your immune system can recognize the virus and learn to fight it. That way, you are at most knocked out for a couple of days, instead of a couple of weeks (or worse).
It’s generally an effective form of medical care, as long as they don’t mess up the “vaccine” recipe.
In addition, if you have already caught the virus, the “vaccine” is unnecessary.
The mRNA shots are something different, though. They teach your body to produce the virus proteins, which your immune system is then supposed to recognize as something bad, and fight it off. Questions are unanswered (in my opinion) about how effective this tactic really is. When does the body stop producing the proteins? Is it for sure that your immune system, because your body is producing these proteins itself, will not accept the proteins as “normal”?
*there is only one “vaccine”, and that’s to give some one straight up cow pox so that he can build immunity to small pox. Anything else labeled “vaccine” is really inoculation.
Words; how do they work?
When does the body stop producing the proteins?
How about 700 days and counting?
Combined with the biodistribution (no, it doesn’t just stay at the injections site), potential for transcription, not a good recipe. To say nothing of potential toxicity from the LNPs themselves outside of their impact on biodistribution.
Is it for sure that your immune system, because your body is producing these proteins itself, will not accept the proteins as “normal”?
Maybe not normal, but as an alergen with the concurrent down-regulation of the immune response.
Perhaps another “epidemic” will tease out some answers.
Again…a cabin in the woods. I want one.
Think back to militarized goons pointing machine guns at people because they got together to have a beer. Triaging the elderly who were left to die. Of govt agents shutting off people’s utilities for having guests at their homes. Of church goers being threatened with violence and arrest. Of people’s careers being destroyed for not taking what is clearly a very dangerous and ineffective medical procedure. I could go on. Of frightened nitwits with clown masks on everywhere you looked.
We aren’t even the worst of it. Other countries had martial law and imprisoned their entire populations. All the while the people in power ignored all of that even to the point of attending orgies.
It is like some kind of bad LSD trip. A circus of the insane. The evil and lunacy of it is hard to get your head around.
I will say it again – monkeys.
It was a bad idea in the first place:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/politics/trump-education-department-shut-down-order/index.html
Not if you ran the teachers’ union.
Social media is drenched in teachers sharing the same messaging, that the DOE has 10 important functions that nobody else can do. And cutting funding of the DOE will prevent your child from learning.
Was it created by an EO or by congress?
I know it was Carter’s payoff to the teacher unions for supporting his election, but I don’t know if congress actually authorized it.
It’s by a federal law, so Trump can’t kill it on his own, but he can reduce it to a single employee and starve it.
Simple empirical test – was education better in this country pre Dept of Education?
We put a man in the moon, pre-Dept of Ed*, and haven’t done it since the DoE was founded.
Case closed.
*sure, sure; Congress created a Department of Education back in 1867, but that isn’t the current organization. Change my mind.
I would not expect any honest answers to that question from the crowd who supports the bureaucracy.
Before DOE – America #1 in academic achievement
Now – America #24 in academic achievement (last I checked)
Today in cats
https://x.com/Babygravy9/status/1897624796055097599
The Surly Cats is the name of my new golden oldies cover band.
Looking for a veterinarian.
Long been wondering why the pro-Hamas college terrorist set seems largely female and now they’re trying to take over a women’s college even.
Is there something about this ideology that is especially attractive to females?!
That’s why Dershowitz was on a tear about Barnard college today.
Barnard is a college in Columbia University, so it makes some sense given that Columbia is the epicenter of the poisonous garbage that turns its victims into annoying little shits like this but… I wonder why they’re specifically targeting the women’s college now.
Oh boy. :-p
This is why there are no female libertarians….
Oppressor/oppressed dynamics seem to hold sway with the fairer sex moreso than with men, although the boys certainly aren’t immune, and, in point of fact, all of the progenitors of that toxic shit were male.
They like the bad boys.
And maybe females are more likely to be in majors that have more spare time.
Sure BI. MSFT is in no way bound by COBRA. It’s unique in Corporate America. That’s some quality journalism.
Country club no more: Inside Microsoft’s move to cull staff on performance
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-performance-management-low-performers-country-club-2025-2
They meant that the company would stop PAYING for his health insurance, and he sure didn’t want to have to pay that amount (I remember the sticker shock the first time I was offered COBRA).
I paid for COBRA twice. It was worth it both times because I had the time to chase down my (serious) medical problems.
Yeah. It is amazing how much it costs. You are better off taking a silver plan from Obumblescare in the short term.
It’s just another way the government hides how much it has fucked up our economy with mandates. Market Distortions R Us.
I get what was meant and they mention that MSFT said he was eligible for COBRA like four paragraphs down.
But his insurance didn’t “expire” that night. He simply had to pay for it.
Obamacare would not have gotten me the level of care I needed at that time.
Did they fire him on the 31st? Because usually the premiums are already paid for the full month during your last month of employment, and COBRA would kick in on the first of the next month.
I’m on COBRA now. Totally worth it.
Business Insider is trash and I wouldn’t believe a word of it.
“The employee’s wife had to skip chemotherapy treatments for a month after.”
Yeah… I’m calling bullshit.
They are a gossip rag for business. They occasionally break real news, but they frequently put out this kind of junk.
Their better pieces are usually things they republish from other sources. I tend to use them as a news aggregator.
Well, I’ve scheduled my appointment to turn in my pistol permit application.
Sadly, it means breaking the cardinal rule of Never talk to the Cops.
It’s this coming Tuesday.
I wish you luck.
I wish you luck.
Thanks, I doubly appreciate it.
Again with this shit! What is going on?
🤷♂️
You are two faced?
Good luck; we’re all counting on you.
I’m not qualified to fly, I’m too white and male.
I am going to see if I can find out what the processing times look like these days given the… varied estimates I’ve had so far.
Be sure to make sudden and furtive movements when talking to him or her.
The DMV was positively a picnic compared to dealing with my county’s deputy for my concealed carry permit.
I’ve never really had any trouble with the DMV.
I intend to avoid letting on that I regard the conversation as an adversarial process wherein they try to find some reason to say no. Try my darnest to maintain a neutral facade of “this is just a formality”.
Otherwise I might get angry.
What state are you in again? NY?
Hoping to regain some of their power of the purse, senators asked Musk at a private lunch to have the White House submit a rescissions package for congressional approval for any funding it deems fraudulent or wasteful. Congress would then have 45 days to approve the request, or else the money must be spent as appropriated once the clock runs out.
A vision for rescission.
https://rollcall.com/2025/03/05/gop-senators-pitch-musk-on-using-1974-budget-law-to-cut-spending/
Definitely needs to be done. Johnson is not going to help unless he gets it on a silver platter.
I read that as Congress being able to run the clock out.
Running the clock out is definitely an option, if Congress chooses that course.
I think the argument for rescission is that the courts wouldn’t be able to intervene.
So, then, Team Trump has an option to lean on Congress (by appealing to the electorate, if nothing else, to “call your congresscritters”) to pass the rescissions, instead of waiting for a hostile SCOTUS to change its mind, or for one or more of them to leave and be replaced.
Same. I trust the GOP congressional majority no farther than I could throw them.
I trust them even less. They make the Dallas Cowboys look like winners.
Pie re: Fukuyama
One cannot run a group of any kind by sheer force of will. Co-operation by others is required. This requires incentives – “patronage, favoritism, rewarding cronies and sycophants”.
It is the nature of the beast. You cannot get around it.
Just the kind of reformed and disciplined guy RFK Jr is.
https://nypost.com/2025/03/05/us-news/cheryl-hines-gives-rfk-jr-ultimatum-after-sexting-scandal-with-olivia-nuzzi-report/
Hey, he’s still a Kennedy. She knew that when she married him.
Advice to her: don’t get in the car with him if the drive includes crossing any bridges.
I just drove by the gas station, and prices have gone up 50 cents overnight. What the hell is going on now?
Dang. They were a palatable $2.35 a gallon last week.
Last week our low was about 2.70, today we’re up to 3.19.
Quick search: tariffs. Guess there’s your answer RC.
Seeing the Europe stealing Russian money/chinese bankrupting Europe story….Jesus.
Hide your children. Are we going to be looking at bringing back the draft?
I really, really, really want a cabin in the middle of nowhere. More nowhere than I am now.
It is not looking good. Can it really be true that peace in Europe only existed as long as we threw massive amounts of money at it?
Might not want to hear Macron beat the war drums like it’s 1939. They seem to be out of their minds.and want a hot war with Russia – which they are completely unprepared to fight.
https://x.com/PolymarketIntel/status/1897368742293901374
My current theory is that the Victoria Newland types always wanted to knock down Russia and even force regime change. (Never let a crisis go to waste again). That’s why they all escalated the situation at the beginning instead of sitting down to resolve things before any shooting started. And that’s why they are pushing against a cease fire now. If they just throw enough money and lives down the drain, they can get their color revolution in Russia. It’s sick.
Nuland and Blinken are 3rd generation Trotskyists still working on the old grudges.
The EU madness has some of that but is also their way of trying to hold on to power despite the terrible state of their countries.
They think Russian tanks are going to roll across NATO.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Look, if we don’t stop Russia from defeating the Ukraine, we’ll have Russian troops here in the US in short order.
I’m sure Putin is quaking in his boots at the thought of a European army (that doesn’t exist and won’t for a decade or more).
That Putin can’t even definitively defeat an army of conscripts at the edge of his own territory should be a sign for them. But it isn’t.
In 2022 the Ukraine had 360,000 active duty and 900,000 reservists. At some of them trained and equipped to NATO standards. No other European army (other than Russia) comes close to that size.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/how-ukraines-armed-forces-shape-up-against-russias-2022-02-01/
Suthen, the good news is I’m putting a cabin on the market in a few days. The bad news is you’d have me for a neighbor. It’s on the edge of somewhere.
“What you do want is an educated electorate,” Dean told CNN. “Not if you’re Donald Trump and his cult-like members. They want citizens who are not educated.”
That’s so precious.
I want uneducated children so badly that I spent money far above and beyond the taxes I pay in order to have my children educated privately.
One person’s “education” is another person’s “brainwashed by MAGA”.
They hate you for that too, BTW.
No one was educated in the country prior to the establishment of the Department of Education. NO ONE AT ALL.
He spelled “indoctrinated” incorrectly.
Is that in regards to the DOE?
If so: 😂🤣
Insert that Bastiat quote about socialism.
“By breaking out of one customer’s isolated VM environment, a threat actor could take control of the hypervisor that apportions each VM. From there, the attacker could access the VMs of multiple customers, who often use these carefully controlled environments to host their internal networks.”
That seems problematic.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/03/vmware-patches-3-critical-vulnerabilities-in-multiple-product-lines/
Yeah, that’s why you pay extra for dedicated hosts (the physical machine your VMs run on).
Not that the big hyperscalers are running VMWare, but same principle.
If there’s an attacker running wild on internal VMs you have larger problems already.
Yeah, if it was my business of any size that’s exactly what I’d do too.
OTH, small businesses generally lack that kind of luxury.
Trump will be the death of science
“I thought that he came across as very reasonable,” said Carole LaBonne, a stem cell biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The exception, she said, was Bhattacharya’s discussion of COVID-19 ― a topic that has divided him from many scientists because of his views on lockdowns and COVID-19 vaccines.
——-
Bhattacharya gained public prominence after co-authoring an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration. Published in October of 2020, it argued against COVID-19 lockdowns and in favour of normalcy to allow ‘herd immunity’ to take hold ― a proposal that was knocked down by numerous scientists and NIH officials. Francis Collins, head of the NIH at the time, told Fox News that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy”.
At his confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya laid out his five priorities for the NIH: chronic disease research, reproducibility, encouraging a culture of “scientific dissent”, funding cutting-edge research and regulating “risky research that has the possibility of causing a pandemic”.
Scientific dissent? That’s crazy. Millions will die.
I wonder if there will ever be an honest reckoning of the plague years.
Nope.
Just kidding!
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/economy/tariffs-delay-mexico-canada/index.html
“Never let the media write about the same story two days in a row.”
While I like most of what Trump’s doing, I have two disagreements so far.
1. The EO against pro-Palestine protesters on campus. Threats, intimidation, trespassing, and vandalism are already illegal. Writing an EO singling out people who protest certain things you don’t like is no bueno.
2. The whole tariff thing is kind of all over the place. As I said earlier, gas prices jumped apparently because there’s now a 10% tariff on energy from Canada and Mexico. If we have an “energy emergency”, don’t do things that increase the price of energy. Now the tariffs will be suspended a month?
My opinion:
The EO was simply to try and force the campuses to enforce the laws already on the books.
Fuel prices jumped mostly due to speculation. We’ve seen this rodeo before, and not just with fuel.
From Jeff Childers:
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/little-red-hens-thursday-march-6?r=d0r3d&utm_medium=ios
The news was that, on procedural grounds, in a brief (one page) 5-4 split decision, the Court denied President Trump’s request to stay Judge Ali’s bizarre TRO ordering the Administration to pay out $2 billion in totally wasteful (or worse) USAID money. The four justices in the minority signed a scathing seven-page dissent, which fueled even more conservative angst. Conservative commenters eagerly discarded stare decisis in favor of reams of posts analyzing Justice Coney Barret’s stares of death at Tuesday night’s presidential address.
Maybe. I have no idea what anti-Trump motives may lurk in Justice Coney Barrett’s mind, or whether she was just thinking about how, if her husband asks her one more time to find the spicy pickles when they were literally right there on the top shelf, that’s it, she’s getting a divorce. Same face.
She is catholic. She cant get divorced.