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Trump replaces 50 year old ivy on mantle with gold tchotkes
Small potatoes compared to all the other shit, but so fucking onbrand for this tasteless moron (Sort of like how FIFA President Infantino distracted him with a big shiny gold moving trophy)
I remember a circa-2015 or earlier era John Stewart line about how if Trump got the white house he'd paint in gold to "class up the joint" and god damn if it that isn't spot on.

WaPo(sigh) gift link with more info https://wapo.st/4huEdeE

But no matter how skilled you are and how good you are with a knife fight the No. 1 rule of knife fighting is don't be in a knife fight.

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I switched to Mac about a decade ago. For a while I thought Windows' "one task bar item per window" was smarter than Mac's "one Dock item per application". Now I'm not sure (and I noticed Windows has drifted to Mac's approach) but I do know I tend to have too many windows open.

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So, if it's not "just" tax breaks for billionaires, this probably explains Musk's real goals: to remold the USA as an authoritarian state w/ tech bros at the top, akin to a model Singapore is following....

Dark Enlightenment Rising: The Billionaire Experiment to Kill Democracy

MAGA=>MAS (Make America Singapore)

See also: Tech bro fascism looks like a lot like old-fashioned fascism

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I'm not sure if this is the map I was thinking of that showed how you could get across a surprising amount of the country on trolleys/light railway, but here is some information on the NE interurbans

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I used to do the MIT Mystery Hunt, but realized that the toughest puzzle hunt designed for placing no resource restrictions on the puzzle loving subset of some of the cleverest folk in the world is not the place for a guy who low key hates puzzles...

Every year the Hunt is set up by the team that won the previous year... Years ago I would be on Team LAAEFTR (Left As an Exercise For The Reader) a little team that punched above its weight (the competition is dominated by these MASSIVE teams spanning the globe)

We used to joke about the teams humble-ish ambitions "the only thing worse than coming in last is coming in first" (where we'd be on the hook to construct next years puzzle) but sometime in the COVID/quarantine era Sarah, the team's stalwart leader, starting working with a larger team that won! She talks about her time building puzzles here

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RIP George Foreman! I was just thinking if I should get a Lean Mean Grilling Machine....

Take nobody's word for it.

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A society that could mobilize for total war was defined as one that could mobilize for social welfare. Thus it was the actual performance of the central government during the war that was crucial in the thrust toward a welfare state. In essence, the political elites gained the knowledge and the confidence that they could manage the welfare state.

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The first problem with liberalism is that it wrongly assumes that humans are fundamentally solitary individuals, when in fact they are social beings at their core. This commitment to far-reaching individualism leads political liberals to downplay nationalism, which is an especially powerful political ideology with profound influence inside every country in the world. Liberalism's fate is therefore bound up with nationalism.

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[For liberals] war is either a crime or a crusade. There is no half-way house.

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No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

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Worst of all, these interventions were unnecessary. The domino theory did not describe any serious threat: it assumed that universalist ideologies like Marxism would dominate local identities and desire for self-determination. They do not. Proponents of the domino theory failed to understand that nationalism is a far more powerful ideology than communism, just as it is far more powerful than liberalism.

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To make their case, restrainers should emphasize three points. First, the United States is the most secure great power in recorded history and thus does not need to interfere in the politics of every country on the planet. It is a hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, and it is separated from East Asia and Europe--the regions where other great powers have historically been located--by two giant moats, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It has thousands of nuclear weapons, and in the scenario we are considering here, it is the only great power in the international system.

Second, liberal hegemony simply does not work. It was tried for twenty-five years and left a legacy of futile wars, failed diplomacy, and diminished prestige.

Finally, liberal hegemony involves significant costs for the American people, in both lives and money.

At work, Corey G mentioned how sometimes he'll do a demo for a client and make sure EVERYTHING is a single file (like include Base64'ig images if need be) That vibe reminded me of how I like "everything in one file" for p5.js, and how it harkens back to the old days of computer magazine type-in programs, and this comic.

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LOL on TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome)

JSON is just 3D text

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Xitter bands Dropkick Murphys account.

LOLOLOLOL at my friends who tried to convince me Musk buying Twitter was "good for free speech"
Yeah, the world's richest man worming his way into government to dismantle it for tax breaks after buy the previous most important town square and now banning critical voices of him in music... totally normal stuff.

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Oops, spoke to soon. let this me a lesson to me

I just mistyped console.log to console.lol and now I wish console.log was a thing.

Heh - Corey came up with an implementation and I put it online.

I'm not saying it's appropriate for all or even many organizations, but damn: buildless/evergreen/"throw crap on your VPS" is a helluva drug.

(For better or worse it reminds me of the trojan horse mentioned in I'm harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here's how.)