My god, what is it like to go through life this stupid? Are you aware of it, or blissfully ignorant? Do you sometimes get a glimpse and wonder what's wrong, like a parrot occasionally seeing themselves in a mirror and being unsure if it's another bird or not?

I imagine being the putty in the soft, warm, sweaty hands of conservative pundits must be comforting though. Any time you start to become unsure of what to think, you can rely on being told exactly what to believe, even if it's directly contradictory to what you were told the night before.

Ignorance truly is strength.

What is it with that? I thought I was just unlucky when the two different physical therapy offices around here I've been to were both showing Fox news constantly on ceiling-mounted TVs. I've never had to bite my tongue harder than when the staff or therapist starts talking about culture war bullshit or asking me "So are you doing okay in this terrible Biden economy?"

Also, jesus, Fox News daytime ads are really something else. It (almost) makes me pity the poor fucks stuck home watching that shit every day.

I've used Firefox Beta exclusively on my Android phone for several years and just don't see this. Yes, there's the rare occasion that a site doesn't work correctly because, as you say, it was created with only Chrome in mind, but that's hardly Firefox's fault.

There's room for improvement and change seems to come slower to Firefox on mobile, but I think it does a very good job. And the fact that you can use addons with it, including ad-blockers, is a huge boon.

You're being snarky (I think) but that's actually worryingly accurate.

Before WW2, there was a general understanding that war was a good way to deal with excess or unwanted population - especially from the lower economic class - as well as the mounting social malaise caused by inequality, poverty, and internal sectarianism. After total war and atomic bombs scared us straight, the last 80 years or so of unprecedented peacetime are something of an experiment to see if we can come up with alternative ways of dealing with these problems.

Finding something meaningful for people to do with their lives (especially younger men) is a genuine challenge. College used to be an easy early option for large numbers of them, while (I think) also smoothing some of the edges off and preparing both men and women for adulthood, but that option has become less alluring due to the increasingly obscene money required and distrust in higher education as a reliable means to a reliable future. Something else will need to take its place.

Personally I think it's tragic that the US didn't see this coming almost 20 years ago after the 2008 meltdown and start programs for creating new non-profit community vocational schools across the country. The rewards of government investments in such publicly-supported schools would vastly outstrip the costs -- the country will *always* need mechanics, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc, and these should be reliable, financially stable jobs -- supporting new adults as well as being a potential social safety net for older people who find themselves out of work and without other options.

When people vote for and elect an incompetent narcissist with delusions of despotic authoritarianism, they don't get to be surprised by anything on your list. You might argue that you didn't expect those things, but if you put a stupid person who intentionally surrounds themselves with other stupid people into power, any expectations you had are invalidated. Unless you expected "stupid things", in which case I guess you got exactly what you were looking for.

Hah! Won't lie - hearing "The thing happened two score and seven years ago" on the news would be pretty great. Certainly better than "almost five decades".

lol, well for what it's worth I thought your original post was great. No mod points today though, so it was taking the AC bait instead.

Are you really this dense? Let's work together and see if we can figure it out.

First, Trump tanks the market by putting intentionally stupid tariffs in place.
Second, they wait a few days for stocks to sink 10% or so - hoping for enough to make a bunch of money but not enough to really break things (see the bond market).
Finally, Trump insiders and rich buddies get told that the tariffs will be lifted at date and time X, so they can buy beforehand.

For fucks sake, Trump literally posted it on his shitty Twitter clone a few hours beforehand, I guess to throw a bone to his "orange man god" rubes.

Sure, but guess who is responsible for finding these people? The SEC. Who gutted the staff and authority of the SEC? Trump and Musk. And who is running the castrated SEC? Oh yeah, the inmates. And who is responsible for prosecuting them? The AG and judiciary. And who's running that? The same group of fucks.

God, I love when Trumpers use this and think it's a witty jab. Like Big Lead saying "Just raging because 'lead in brain bad'" or Big Tobacco saying "Just raging because 'lung cancer bad'" and thought it was a real burn. Yes, the "orange man" is bad, and stating it like it's an absurdity doesn't actually invalidate it.

Trump really does has a lock on the bottom half of the IQ distribution.

While we're on this tangent, the current trend to always use "decades" in news and media when "years" is both more clear and more accurate has become a real pet peeve. I can only imagine that the writer thinks it makes them sound smarter or their data point more impressive, but to me it's clunky and kinda crass.

FFS, just say "The thing happened forty-seven years ago." It reads better, is more informative, and actually sounds more impressive.

Great post. I've never understood why some conservatives seem to think the "but the Dems used to be Southern Slavers!" is such a slam-dunk gotchya. The idea that groups of people and ideologies have never or should never change over time has real "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" vibes and simply isn't how humans work over time periods measured in generations.

The political shifts in US history are really interesting and important if you want to have any idea how to understand the current state.

I bought some Flavacol a few years ago based on some comments I read saying how great it was. Really, it's pretty meh - mildly buttery flavored yellow salt - but I didn't think it replicated movie theater popcorn flavor very well. Maybe it did in the 70's? Also it comes in a huge container. Mine is still like 95% full and is free to anyone who wants to come pick it up.

If you really want to have movie theater popcorn at home, it's about buttery-flavored oil. Cook your corn in coil, top it off with more salty butter flavor goop, maybe throw on some MSG. Then "enjoy" it, I guess?

Directions unclear, accidentally banged the couch instead.

-JDV

Impossible to over-state this. I get so frustrated when people talk about sunk costs as if they are lost forever and can provide no value. That's only true if you ignore them and continue to carry on as you did in the same way that let you into the previous disaster, having learned nothing.

If an organization learns from a failed or disastrously over-budget project so that they don't repeat the same mistakes, those sunk costs actually start to pay for themselves. The project may have gone 400% over-budget, but if you learn how to avoid doing that again, you might actually come out ahead over the next 10 years of projects.

Sadly, it seems like no big orgs are capable of learning. "We don't want to look backwards" is code for "we are too stupid to learn".

This has nothing to do with enshitification. So many people throw this word around to mean "anything I don't like" just because it's fun to say, but it has a specific meaning:

Using it wrong makes you look kinda clueless and/or trying to be trendy. Plex is just raising prices on their product, probably because the price of every goddamn thing has gone up, but they are still offering and honoring lifetime subscriptions. It has nothing to do with what Doctorow described.

I don't know if that's really fair. The Mozilla Foundation scores pretty well overall as a non-profit (though admittedly they don't get credit for the program expense ratio). However it's true that they have been spending more each of the last few years on administrative expenses, and their executive salaries are more than double the average for non-profits based on what I can find.

I think the real problem is scope creep. Mozilla wanted to be involved in all sorts of programs and projects when most of their users really only care about a few things - Firefox, Thunderbird, probably a couple others I'm forgetting. Those, plus advocacy of an open web are the things probably 90% of people who donate want their money to go to. Personally I don't think they should be spending money on scholarships, fellowships or "community outreach", or buying things like Pocket (supposedly that was done via the commercial arm of Mozilla, but I wouldn't be surprised if some Mozilla Foundation money finds its way to Mozilla Corporation).

I know I've wanted to donate to support Firefox, but that's impossible (though you can donate specifically to Thunderbird, for some reason). You can only give money to Mozilla as a whole, leaving it to their discretion where it's spent. For me that's a deal-breaker, so I've simply never supported Firefox, but I really wish I could. I would even be completely fine with Firefox asking for a donation every time it installs a major update. I'd happily give them $5 or whatever for each new version, because I care deeply about a successful competitor to the army of Chrome Clones (chlones?) and want to support an open web.

Mozilla should refocus around their core goals and products and make it as easy as possible for their community of users to support them. It became too easy for users to forget that building complex software like a modern web browser is a huge, difficult effort, and nothing is really free. That's why Mozilla has become completely dependent on the Google teat.