It’s definitely going to put sci-fi authors who write about A.G.I. out of work or at least make them add 1,000 years to their timeline.

Historically, the Senate has a tradition where the Senators from the state submit a “blue slip” with their opinions on it. If they don’t submit one, it can delay a hearing or kill the nomination. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_slip_(U.S._Senate)

Whether it matters changes all the time — see the history part of the Wikipedia article’s History section — but other Senators want theirs respected so sometimes it does. If nothing else, it can give a Senator who doesn’t want the nominee cover from bucking party leadership.

At this point, I don’t think Russia could win a conventional war with France, much less one they attack France first and it triggers Article 5. I might not have thought that before Ukraine but once you start relying on North Korea for bullets and personnel, you’re down bad.

Toyota had small, fuel efficient cars and that’s what people wanted during the oil crisis.

No. Katrina was a colossal fuck-up for Bush. His aides had to make a DVD of the news coverage to get him to realize the severity of the situation and that he needed to deploy significant resources. It was a huge embarrassment for the administration.

And then several Republicans in Congress were questioning whether the city should be rebuilt at all. People had to sit them down and explain that it’s important to have a port that basically every navigable river east of the Rocky Mountains is a tributary and the Port of New Orleans is critical national infrastructure. A lot of agricultural exports go through it. It was so stupid.

There were mistakes by the mayor and governor but a lot of the federal government was just oblivious (aside from the Coast Guard, who saved hundreds, if not thousands of stranded people.) And that’s just New Orleans. Katrina was massively wide and Mississippi and Alabama were having issues too.

Probably more like “Elon Musk tells some manager to tell an engineer to delete the posts and then gives hazy, contradictory instructions while in a K-hole.” It’s not like he does stuff besides raise money and be a mascot.

I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.

And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.

You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)

If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.

We did that in New Orleans for confederate traitors and everyone under 60 adjusted within a few weeks. Older people still fuck it up but whatever. You forgive grandparents for calling street names by the wrong name. They call half the buildings in the city some name I never even heard of because it changed before I was born. And the building names aren’t even offensive. It’s just whatever company owned it in 1970 to them.

I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.

It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)

Super Soakers were invented there.

The Blackberry era was my favorite. You could do all the important stuff and even check sports scores or breaking news or whatever. You couldn’t really doomscroll because no one had done that yet. Even Facebook — which was just for college students at that point and was legit useful. You could find people in a class you were taking and lived in your dorm and get notes from them if you missed class. And you could just download any song you wanted on Kazaa or whatever. No one’s boss emailed them outside of work hours and expected a response.

Probably 2003ish? I don’t know what year it all went to shit. But the Internet seemed like a world of possibilities then.

I’d have also advocated to heavily restrict tlds. Like .org only for real, recognized non-profit organizations.

There should probably be a tax on anything that can be described as “ultra-orthodox” of any kind. I’m not a theologian but I’m pretty sure the concept of “plastic” isn’t banned in any faith tradition’s holy book.

Even while embracing cryptocurrencies?

Tariffs basically never help except in a few select situations. For instance, “infant industry” situations where a country needs time to scale up some industry and there’s real promise that once they do, it’ll be competitive. If a country is trying to corner some critical market by dumping, targeted tariffs can be smart. But mostly, tariffs are stupid.

There’s a legit national security argument for steel and probably aluminum but a better solution for materials used to make things would be to just subsidize those companies for domestic sales so you don’t screw over every industry that uses them. Steel definitely isn’t an infant industry. We have the technology.

An even better solution is to not piss off all your most reliable allies and trading partners. But I guess that cat’s out the bag.

I’m not saying they’re not an annoyance sometimes. But they’ve been in Louisiana (possibly a different species as ours are fully black in color with the same big orange noses). But we have termites, mosquitos, and probably everything else. And the birds, lizards, frogs, etc. have learned to eat them so they probably keep the population in better balance than if they were new to town.

They’re pollinators that don’t sting, bite, or eat your house. They’re not locusts that ruin the harvest or whatever. And in Spring/Summer, it rains basically every day here around 4pm. That probably mostly cleans them off cars and stuff. They’re just part of the ecosystem. If you want birds, you need bugs.

For real. Love bugs are harmless and kind of cute. The main problem is that if you drove anywhere when it was mating season, you had to get a car wash. As bugs go, they were amongst the least annoying. I don’t want to call them “the best” bugs because some butterflies and lightning bugs are pretty cool but love bugs don’t care about us and we don’t care about them. They don’t bite or try to get in your house and birds and other animals have a feast.

They might be the best behaved bugs. They’re just trying to get their freak on.

I think it requires 60 votes to overrule the parliamentarian. They just want to make a show of it.

Not anywhere close, in my opinion. People have these ideas that only right wingers have guns and red state vs. blue state but my conservative relatives who live in the country and hunt are afraid to go to cities. They ask me all the time if I’m nervous living in one and there’s a school bus stop by my house where kids get dropped off.

A related point is that in the last Civil War, there was a somewhat blurry but pretty clear regional divide. Now, it’s an urban vs. rural divide. I live in Orleans Parish (aka county) in Louisiana and we went 82% for Harris/Waltz, roughly the same as Manhattan. I’m pretty sure California had more Trump voters than Texas. If a gun brawl breaks out, it’s going be local and contained.

Also, what’s Meal Team Six gonna do in a real battle? Most Trump voters are like 60+ years old and watch Fox News all day. Nobody wants the smoke.

The sterilization part is what I was concerned about. People who make jam the first time don’t necessarily know how critical that is. You really cannot take shortcuts and be like, “I just washed it. It’s fine.”