Is it really? I think it's more personal than political, though in general it gets really fuzzy when political views take aim at individual identity.

His ammunition had obscure internet meme references that are used more by the alt-right than the left, though it's really hard to tell because Internet extremists apply many layers of irony, making it really hard to tell.

No, his political motivations are not very clear.

Except that Crooks was also tracking events of the Democratic candidates. He wanted to shoot a prominent figure, it didn't matter which side. Ryan Routh was definitely political, but he wasn't any sort of left-winger. He voted for Trump, then supported Bernie, then Tulsi Gabbard, then Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.

I think it's highly likely that Robinson was similarly all over the place, but likely less clear since he was young probably didn't think much about politics.

No, I think he was probably already further to the right, but moved at least some of his views to the left. You do know who Nick Fuentes and the groypers are, right?

This almost earned you a "Foe" tag. I haven't impugned your intelligence or other personal characteristics. Keep it civil, please.

Indeed, left-wing violence is on the rise, but that's coming from a point where right-wing violence utterly dominated the space for decades. Don't go assuming that your side is somehow less violent just because they've been relatively quiet this year. And although I'm actually not on the left, if I were I wouldn't assume that my side is inherently less violent, either, because the opposite was true in the 60s.

The only correct reaction here is to condemn political violence, full stop, and not to care what the motivations of the individuals were (though, obviously, I have a sick fascination with understanding their motivations and spend way too much time digging into whatever we have).

Note that condemning political violence, full stop, is not what Trump and the GOP leadership are doing. They're condemning only violence from the left and ignoring violence from the right. This is very bad for all of us left, right and center.

What makes you think it wasn't?

Like the flat Earth conspiracy theories, the COVID conspiracy theories are really amusing, and for the same reason: The theorists can offer no plausible explanation as to why the alleged conspirators are doing the dastardly thing. During COVID, the best rationale on offer was "To control us!". Okay, but if someone wants to control you, don't they generally use that control to make you do something that benefits them? If I built a mind control machine, would I use it to make people give me money and sex, or would I use it to get them to turn in a circle three times before going to bed?

The best the flat Earthers can come up with is "It's a plot by NASA to get money from the government", which they then "prove" by ginning up some math that shows that the cost of deceiving the world just happens to be about the same amount as NASA's budget. Except that actually disproves their point. If I'm going to create a hoax to extract government funding, I definitely don't want to spend every penny of the funding on running the hoax. That's just working for a living, and if I'm a scammer it's exactly what I don't want to do.

It has not, though keep in mind that you don't actually kiss their cheeks, you kiss the air next to their cheeks. What touches their cheek is your cheek, if anything (often there is no actual contact).

Huh? Right-handers writing left to right and top to bottom have no problem with this. When you go to the next line, you don't touch the line above. It's above, and the pen extends beyond your fingers, so your fingers stay well away from the just-written line. If you're a left-hander, going to the next line isn't the issue, the problem is smudging the just-written characters on the same line... except that left-handers often avoid that problem by cocking their wrist sharply to move the edge of their palm up out of the way so it doesn't touch the just-written letters. That then means they might smudge lines above. They make it work, mostly, but it's tricky.

Exactly my point.

MAGA assumed from the outset that he must be far-left, both because it confirmed their own biases and because they didn't want to believe otherwise. They did the same thing with the kid who shot Trump, though he turned out not to really have any political intentions.

It's actually pretty plausible. The alt-right has been pissed at Charlie Kirk for years, especially Nick Fuentes' groypers, who have considered Kirk a race traitor. And there is some evidence that Robinson had sympathy for groypers, though at some point he decided he was gay and probably started to get pissed about Kirk's anti-LGBTQ screeds. Perhaps he shifted left generally, perhaps he remained generally right-leaning except on those issues, we don't know. The only information we have is a vague claim by his family that he had become more political and that he disagreed with them.

We really don't know that for sure. On balance I think he probably had shifted pretty left, but the evidence is ambiguous at best. Maybe we'll learn more, but it's possible we'll never know unless Robinson decides to tell us.

If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that Robinson's politics were pretty muddled and his main reason for hating Kirk was the LGBTQ stuff.

If the best available evidence indicates X, but you believe Y based on gut feel, then later solid evidence of Y is developed, were you right? Further, should this experience convince you to trust your gut over the best available evidence in the future?

Yep. Google, at least, started this transition during Trump1.

The company has long had engineering sites in various other countries, but until Trump1, the primary focus was always on cities where Google thought the global talent would want to live. Low cost was clearly not the driving factor in the selection of London, Zurich, Munich, Tokyo and Sydney, to name a few of the ones I visited. US sites were similarly not located in low-rent areas. The workforce was definitely global, because Google wanted to hire the smartest people and while the US does have its share of brilliant minds, the US has only 4% of the world's population, so most teams -- even in the US -- ended up being minority American.

During COVID, Trump leveraged the health crisis to essentially halt H-1B approvals and renewals. This caused significant problems for Google. My own team lost a few people because they couldn't get their visas renewed and had to go back home. Some chose to move to other Google sites overseas where Google could get them a work visa, others simply went back to their home countries. One trans woman on my team was in a particularly tough spot because her home country (India) refused to renew her passport because it didn't recognize her new gender. She couldn't get her visa renewed, couldn't go home to India, and also couldn't move to any other country with an expired passport. Luckily, she had a lot of nVidia and Google stock she'd been saving up to buy a house, and by cashing that out had enough free cash to get an EB-5 "investor" visa. It's good to be rich, of course.

Anyway, Google saw what was going on and, anticipating future troubles of the sort, refocused its overseas office plans on building up teams and infrastructure, especially in India which provided so much of Google's engineering talent anyway, with the intention of shifting whole projects and workstreams there. The company had long required a significant percentage of all staffing growth to be in the US (and especially in the bay area), but that policy was scrapped and replaced by its opposite: A certain percentage of all new roles must be based overseas.

It's still the case that the center-of-mass of Google is in the bay area, but the company is actively working to change that, to build up overseas capacity, and not just groups of junior engineers under a manager whose role is to pass them detailed requirements for implementation, but instead full teams with highly-skilled and experienced senior engineers and managers able to take full ownership of major product areas and move them forward.

Trump's latest moves will just accelerate this transition. The result will eventually be a hollowing out of the company's US capacity, and therefore a reduction in the need to hire American engineers. Lucky for me, I'm leaving Google for a startup and anyway am not far from retirement. Between this stuff and AI being poised to replace junior engineering staff it's a good time to be getting out.

Also, I think it will soon be time to start shifting investments out of the US.

Cppcheck doesn't flag anything in Waffle Iron's example.

It also doesn't find anything wrong with:

std::vector<int> vec = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
auto it = vec.begin();
vec.push_back(6);
std::cout << *it << std::endl;

Which is another common example of how you can write memory errors without using C++ pointers.

Sure, so C++ is safe as long as it's used in a way that makes it incredibly painful. Sounds good. Let's just require all C++ code everywhere to be written that way. Rust usage will skyrocket overnight.

He unintentionally used Signal? How drunk was he?

For a really rigorous definition of "fair", it's impossible to have fair democracy at all. Arrow's Theorem demonstrates this to a large degree, although many have argued that some of his fairness axioms are excessive. More recent research has concluded that fairness is the wrong standard, because there's no way for an electorate's "will" to really be fairly represented by any electoral system, not in all cases. Some systems can do better most of the time (and "winner take all" is particularly bad), but all systems fail in some cases.

What we need to aim for instead of fairness is "legitimacy", which is more about building broad acceptance of the system than about fixing the system itself, though it's easier to build acceptance for better-designed systems.

Having the country's top politicians continually claiming the system is unfair and rigged is, of course, the worst possible thing to do if you want to build support for the legitimacy of the system.

I decided to check :-)

According to the Book Censorship Database from the Every Library Institute, both "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" have been challenged, but only "Of Mice and Men" was removed, though "restricted" is more accurate. The Birdville Independent School District in Texas removed the book from general access, allowing access only to the AP English class, and the Indian River County Schools in Florida restricted it to high school students.

No Doctor Suess books were banned, although Suess Enterprises voluntarily ceased publication of six books.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.