Thanks. Those are the “different historical reasons” I was alluding to but I couldn’t remember many details. Thank you for adding them.

Hard pass. Maybe the hardest pass of anyone considering running. He was a shitty chief of staff and a shitty mayor of Chicago. One of Biden’s smartest moves was to make him ambassador to Japan to keep him about as far away from the White House as you can get.

You should read about Louisiana (and especially New Orleans, then the largest city in the South) and how ridiculous the whole thing was. Basically, New Orleans didn’t want to secede but the state governor rigged the vote. So, the city surrendered without a shot fired. No casualties on either side. It was even admitted back into the Union and had congressional representation.

But the Union sent down a general from Massachusetts to run the city. He did some good things (like upgrade the sewer system) but women, especially, didn’t like the occupation and Union troops so he issued an edict:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

He basically called New Orleans women prostitutes. And it was a PR disaster so bad that even European newspapers condemned him in editorials. One British newspaper wrote:

If he had possessed any of the honourable feeling which is usually associated with a soldier’s profession, he would not have made war on women. If he had even been endowed with the ordinary magnanimity of a Red Indian, his revenge would have been satiated before now. It required not only the nature of a savage, but of a very mean and pitiful kind of savage, to be induced by indignation at a woman’s smile to inflict an imprisonment so degrading in its character as that which seems to constitute his favourite punishment, and accompanied by privations so cruel… It is only a pity that so unadulterated a barbarian should have got hold of an Anglo-Saxon name.

He was popular with free black and poor white residents and not a bad administrator. But he was an incompetent general and politician so he was replaced and sent to take Texas, where he promptly lost.

New Orleans had no major economic or cultural ties to the Confederacy and lots of free black residents so it was just a bizarre occupation where women poured chamber pots on Union soldiers for treating them like whores and he got all pissed off. But he was also good at city management, I guess? I don’t know what to make of his legacy. He probably would have been an amazing mayor of a city in New England but instead got piss and shit thrown on him in a city that is still basically ungovernable.

In port cities that had lots of similar immigrants during the 1800’s, you can often tell what neighborhood someone is from by their accent. NYC (and other East Coast cities to a lesser extent) and New Orleans have some overlap because they happened to be the biggest port cities at the time and some neighborhoods had similar demographics. (Obviously, both cities have unique accents where demographics were different but there’s a lot of overlap due to that time period.)

The “neutral American accent” is supposedly originally from the Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa part of the Midwest, apparently by an accident of history. Walter Cronkite (a popular news reader as national TV broadcasts became ubiquitous) was from Kansas. Other national TV personalities happened to be from the area and it basically became the “TV” accent.

There were different historical reasons for it but it’s sort of like how “BBC English” became the accent people consider the default in England and Beijing Mandarin became “standard” Mandarin instead of Shanghainese. It’s just who was on TV/radio when media went national.

Curiosity definitely. I love to travel and I’ve gone to places that were fairly dangerous. No active war zones, thankfully, or places with incurable disease outbreaks or anything like that. But I’m less bothered by risk than almost anyone I know.

The reason he thinks it’ll help him is because the furloughed employees are called “non-essential” but in the context of a shutdown, it means “non-essential because all unfunded work has to stop” rather than “non-essential and so their positions can be eliminated.” And not every agency relies on Congress for funding so they just stay open. (Like if you pay a fee for something, there’s a good chance it’s self-funding and stays open during the shutdown.)

This is one of the things Elon Musk apparently doesn’t understand about government.

I blame the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I’m glad my old, non-smart one still works fine. It slams into things and says, “Roomba needs help” or something when it eats a sock or wire I missed. But at least it will outlast the company’s servers.

I get where you’re coming from but that’s only even possible with publicly traded companies and even then, it’s got issues.

Some private companies have valuations — like if you raise a round, you set a valuation and hope people invest at that valuation — but the initial investors can’t sell their shares to pay the tax on unrealized gains.

But that’s only with startups, the best case scenario. Small businesses might have investors that are friends and family. Like, say you help a friend open a restaurant with a $10,000 investment. The restaurant becomes popular. Maybe your chef friend even wins prestigious awards. Now, it’s April 15th and you’re supposed to know what the restaurant is worth? It’d just be a wild guess. The IRS would have no idea either.

If you just did that with publicly traded companies, there’d be a market crash every April as everyone sells their shares to pay their taxes. Whoever filed their taxes last would have less unrealized capital gains compared to those who did their taxes early before all the selling.

So, anyway, to my mind, the concept is morally fair but unworkable and we’re stuck taxing realized gains.

Yale just put a scholar on paid leave because an article by an A.I. powered, pro-Israel site claimed she was a member of a sanctioned group that she apparently isn’t actually a member of. Assuming all that’s true — it was in The NY Times — the investigation should take 5 minutes, max. It was an A.I. hallucination on a fake news site. Case closed.

Plus, Yale has endowment worth over $40 billion and the scholar was part of a project that was 100% privately funded by donors. I’m somewhat sympathetic to schools with limited resources caving to pressure from politicians and major donors but Yale could absolutely take a stand. They could probably just threaten to get rid of legacy admissions and have most of Congress, SCOTUS, and political donors in a tizzy over having to send their idiot failsons to a state school.

Thanks. Fixed it. I guess it’s pretty obvious I don’t have kids.

I don’t use the A.I. features on iOS or Android — I have both for developer reasons — but I do like the new Siri animation better than the old one. So, not a total waste of time and money. More of a 99.999% waste of time and money.

Maybe it’s useful for people who work in marketing or whatever. Like you write some copy and you ask it to rewrite it in different tones and send them all to your client to see what vibe they want. But I already include the exact right amount of condescension expected in an email from a developer.

I would use a Fisher-Price Powerwheels logo. No one is going to be fooled either way but Powerwheels were making electric vehicles for people without fully developed brains before Elon Musk even bought Tesla from the real founders. Gotta pay homage to the innovators in the field.

Plus, maybe some would-be vandals will get nostalgia for their childhood toys and decide not to piss on my theoretical cybertruck’s door handles. (Assuming it has door handles. For all I know, you have to pay $1.99/month for an in-app subscription to open the doors.)

To: All Staff

From: Erica Carr (Definitely not DOGE)

Subject: Do crimes

Body: You are ordered to violate the Federal Records Act. Obviously, it’s punishable by 3 years in jail but it’s a federal crime so the president can pardon you. He’s golfing today but I assure you, I’ll put in the good word for you and you won’t serve a full sentence. Failure to commit this federal crime will be interpreted as a resignation.

P.S. I asked Elon if you could just list one bulletpoint for accomplishments this week as I am well aware how paper shredders jam if you try to destroy too many government documents at once. He said, “Sure, whatever.” and put his gaming headset back on.

It’s partially because the ICC doesn’t usually get involved if there’s a domestic prosecution. A lot of war criminal heads of state are put on trial locally after being deposed and the ICC doesn’t get involved in those situations unless there’s a request from the new government.

So, take heart. Lots of world leaders have faced consequences for atrocities. Just not at The Hague. Plus, the Rome Statute that setup the ICC was only signed in 1996 and they only have jurisdiction in the green parts of the map on that page.

Others have pointed out plausible reasons specific to Google but they also laid off a fuckton of people and that never really works out long term unless the company has a good reason to lay people off (like if they lose a huge client or find one or a product line fails).

But the recent tech company layoffs seemed pretty arbitrary, especially the stealth layoffs (like the “return to office” demands that just made people with options go elsewhere). I wouldn’t be shocked if the Google Assistant team lost some talented people who either left, were foolishly laid off, or were shifted to Gemini (which, like all consumer generative A.I., is still in beta and hemorrhaging money).

I just say “consumer” there because it seems like highly focused A.I. projects could be legit businesses. Like the protein folding project at Google and things like that. But the chatbots and image generators might never be useful and profitable.

I’ll go by (very broad) regions:

The United States experiences a brain drain and Trump’s death (all but inevitable in 10 years, whether by natural causes or other means), will cause a major rift in the Republican Party. Democrats will somehow fail to capitalize on it and then blame online leftists, famously the kingmakers of American politics.

Canada will become a de facto part of Europe. Bike lanes will be added.

Europe will experience an economic boom as it’s basically forced to develop new industries, becomes the default destination for scientific research, and the Euro begins to replace the dollar as the currency of choice for international trade contracts. France, especially, will benefit as it isn’t reliant on the U.S. for military support, space launch capabilities, etc. and will become the default NATO weapons supplier.

Russia will have a deep post-war depression even if it takes Kyiv due to brain drain and sending so many young men into a meat grinder.

China will have a medium-sized economic crisis but ultimately (after Xi) enact long needed reforms (kind of like when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping enacted reforms).

India will have a major crisis as Hindu Nationalism goes too far and people begin to revolt.

Central Asia will keep on keeping on. (I don’t know a lot about Central Asia.)

Latin America will increase trade with China and Europe at the expense of the United States. Bolsonaro will go to the hospital 50 more times and be bit by an even more exotic bird. Argentina will benefit most from the decline of the U.S. as a reliable trading partner.

Israel will annex the West Bank and Arab countries will isolate it. Saudi Arabia’s line city will still be in the planning stages. Iran will develop a nuclear deterrent but the power of the Supreme Leader will be weakened and shift to the elected officials because of economic problems.

The Maghreb will benefit from Europe’s rise and increased trade. West Africa will experience an economic and population boom and become an inexpensive manufacturing hub. The Horn of Africa will probably remain a shitshow (but hopefully I’m wrong about that). Central and Southern Africa will also experience significant growth but at a slower pace than West Africa.

Australia will lose another war with emus as New Zealand wisely allies with the Emus. They will force Australia into a humiliating peace deal that ultimately leads to a third Emu War, much like WWI’s onerous peace terms led to WWII.

Ocean acidification and rising sea levels will begin to fuck everyone and scientists will scream about it but it’ll be the following decades when that sort of thing really wrecks the world economy.

Nintendo will somehow sell me the same games for the 5th time.

I actually emailed my local National Weather Service station awhile back asking if they’d post on Mastodon and even offered them a BlueSky invite and they wrote back saying only Twitter and Facebook were allowed and they’d be everywhere if it was approved by higher ups.

Someone made a BlueSky bot a few months ago for NWS notices and I’m pretty sure they covered every local one. I remember the person who made it asking people to request any missing stations. Not sure if there’s a Mastodon equivalent but you could use a bridge. It won’t help with transit delays or other local government announcements but the weather service stuff is available (via an AtProto <-> ActivityPub bridge if nothing else; it’s not like you interact with the posts so it’d be ideal for a bridge).

There’s always PiHole to block ads at the network level. It takes some setup and a raspberry pi but it can be one of the cheaper ones. And I’m pretty sure the sites aren’t going to do much more than check the User Agent to get the browser so User Agent Switcher will get around 99% of that.

You could, I suppose, block Firefox in other ways (like maybe checking for some random Chromium feature not yet supported in Firefox) but Firefox isn’t usually far behind Chrome so it would almost take an entire new developer to be effective. And there’s probably ways around that too. (I’m a web developer but have never worked on an ad-supported project and never will so I’m not sure but life finds a way.)

Switzerland might really be one of the few countries no one can ever take over. Even if no one else cared — they will — sending troops running up a mountain where everyone has rifle skills and hidden bunkers is definitely not a military strategy I ever heard of.