The sources said the president was upset with a particular moment during the hearing when Republican Sen. John Kennedy questioned Noem about a taxpayer-funded $220 million ad campaign. Noem repeatedly suggested the president was aware of the campaign and signed off on it.

And there it is. Killing Americans, violating the Constitution, lying, stealing, being a literal Nazi, none of that matters. To Trump, the only thing you can do wrong is prioritize anything over him.

Noem should be in jail and Mullin is just a PR switch, but I find this detail most telling about where the lines remain for Trump.

Yep, this is the best thing that could’ve happened to Noem. In a healthy government, that alone would start an investigation and no doubt uncover criminal self-dealing.

I used to spend a lot of time on tech sites, but tech in general has all become such an evil enterprise. I remember back in the '00s looking forward to the next Android update or even back when a new Windows was going to bring improvements (even if just to fix the bugs). Now every update to every service or hardware is enshittification and SaaS.

Yeah, my opinion is rule-breaking should be reported. I’ll correct myself: The phrase I should have used is “bad-faith conduct.” Sealioning, LLM-likely text, propaganda posts, troll comments. Things that may not break rules but still are outside the bounds of respectful or legitimate effort.

If people want to use it to express general disapproval, the result will be a reddit-like leveling of commentary and opinion, because the bell curve of opinion will keep narrowing to just the most statistically acceptable content.

But if you insist on using downvotes for just “disapproval,” I’d at least suggest doing it asymmetrically: upvote if you liked a thing at all; downvote only if you absolutely hate it.

He’s mentally impaired. A malignant and grandiose narcissist wants more money, attention, fame, and so on for themselves no matter what they have.

I believe that was the rationale for disabling downvotes. Honestly, it was pretty nice. Really, only rule-breaking content should be downvoted in my opinion. But everyone just uses it as a “don’t like” signal, which further marginalizes small/niche posters and communities that aren’t breaking any rules, by suppressing their posts with negative ratios.

Yeah, it’s such a simple psychological judo move to force them not to wear masks. I really think it would be extremely effective in preventing a lot of violence.

I’m sorry. Recently laid off myself and management avoided directly saying AI was the reason, but other statements (C-suite talking about whether AI can do other work months before the layoffs, in front of me) convince me that was the reasoning.

The alternative prediction is that this is in fact sustainable and AI companies will in fact have revenue to keep the bubble inflated for a lot longer, just in the worst way - by extracting the value of human-created reliability and trust from the market:

CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can’t do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.

The CEO is happy because his company saved $5 and he’s met his stock option incentive target, the AI companies are happy to pocket that $5 instead of the employee getting $10. Maybe they even raise the customer’s price to $12 as AI rent-seeking starts rising, and both companies get $6 each. Win-win, life will go on, just worse for everyone else.

Per the local government’s ordinance summary, this is a criminal ordinance and it’s effective 30 days after passage, signature by mayor and publication in the City’s newspaper. So soonest will be late March.

I agree the question is whether the cops will enforce, but regardless, it should be done. And it gives a clear tool to local leaders to (hopefully, finally) flip the switch and start arresting ICE for criminal acts, since whatever Stephen Miller says, ICE does not have “absolute immunity” to break the law, much less violate the Constitution.

Yes, that’s the biggest hypocrisy that can’t really be explained without partisan intent. Talk radio is almost entirely right-wing and always has been. AM signals - too low quality for profitable music stations, but far-reaching and the natural home of low-cost talk networks - have always been heavily weighted to right-wing content.

That wide reach is the chief reason why, despite the GOP always favoring the rich in their actual politics, they started heavily gaining support in all rural areas around the country from the 90s onward. In many rural areas, the AM station with Rush Limbaugh was the only - or one of only a few - they could tune into.