Jeez, even the people left on Xitter are excoriating him (Nitter link). Also, is that a woodland camo tie, flag belt buckle, and a god-damn zip-up fleece under his suit jacket? I’m no fashion maven, but WTAF?

Clarence Thomas is a Peter-Principled mediocrity who convinced himself that going to Yale somehow closed more doors than it opened for him, and ironically he let that bitterness turn him from a promising, if rigid, attorney into the exact kind of token he feared people saw him as. We are therefore subject to a naive and inflexible judicial philosophy that somehow always breaks in favor of whatever nonsense the Republican party wants, and he’s so scarred by his own self-defeating choices that he sees no issue in running a grift to get the money he thinks he deserves.

He wasn’t born to be a monster, but he sure made himself one. He’d be a tragic figure if he weren’t fucking over the entire country in real life.

The official response is a weak-ass statement praising the sentinel but absolutely avoiding any mention of why the guy had to speak at all.

Committing to it was Trump, but it was executed on Biden’s watch, and he did not execute well.

With all due respect, Don, how the hell are we supposed to comment intelligently on that? That question is so deep into the poppies that I’m getting a contact high.

Then I will say no more about events themselves. The show itself can be up and down, but it’s always worth the ride, IMHO.

Fair, but do we then not get super-sweet white M-16’s?

Usenet but via AOL. I was a few months after Eternal September began. I believe “100% certified non-cringe” user MODESTGOD has a post or two that made their way into searchable archives.

You may be right.

I would gently counter that while many of them can be fixed in software, the list is mostly hardware issues or real driving risks. It’s a shoddy vehicle that was also poorly coded.

Even completely beyond Elon’s personal fuckheadery, which really shouldn’t be dismissed, it was still a bad product:

• poor fit and finish
• frequent recalls
• poor durability, including cheaping out on the stainless alloy for one that’s barely worthy of the name
• poor truck functionality for the few who would want to use it that way
• pricier than expected
• took a concept design we might generously call polarizing and pooped the production version out the anus of their design process looking less like a Martian armored personnel carrier and more like an unpainted Pontiac Aztek.

I hope that this means thoughtful conversations about how much AI compute infrastructure is actually useful given realistic demand curves, where it should be located, what resources will it require, and, importantly, how the companies that benefit from it will directly share those benefits, as compared to hazy gestures towards “economic development”.

I fear that this is just the industry telling us they’re about to start lying even more than they have.

On a related note, as a parent I think school perfect attendance awards are perverse. Congratulations, we’re rewarding a kid for being a disease vector and being sent to school miserable and snotty, or at best making other kids feel less-than because they received proper treatment and isolation. I would guess that the average perfect attendance kids costs the rest of the school at least half a dozen absences per year.

I’ll try to say something a little more precise, I hope. I have limited sympthy for the individual fate of somebody who does some of the things that can get a person executed, but the death penalty itself is not a good thing.

I just don’t see the value in revenge, and as much as we all feel for victims, the reason you have society make these decisions is because you know victims and their families can’t be objective. Maybe some of them will even really feel better, but the rest of us won’t. The death penalty can only go wrong, either by being inequitably applied or literally dooming the wrong person to die with no way to salvage what’s left of their lives if you learn of the mistake later. Or hell, with recent attempts, it can just literally go wrong and torture someone, maybe even without even killing them.

Permanent removal from free society is more than sufficient for public safety and deterrence. More blood doesn’t bring anyone’s loved ones back; it just makes a community that much more grim for indulging its worst instincts.

FWIW, they haven’t actually executed anyone there in twenty years, and Newsom issued a moratorium when he took office in 2019. In typical Newsom fashion, he’s playing it for maximal media attention, but this is not some huge change for California.

As for the rest of the US, feel free to pile it on. Capital punishment erodes the soul of a nation, and the more you use it, the worse the corrosion.

Idiots who don’t understand that, to evolution, your baby is a fuckin’ rounding error, and they also don’t understand why it is that infant/childhood mortality is now so low. I think these motherfuckers think that ER is the end-all be-all of medical science, rather than a side show, when compared to decades of development in preventative medicine and public health policy.

Yes. Even gerrymandered as they are, Texas is probably sending one more Democrat to the House of Representatives than in 2024. That it wasn’t worse for them is probably the closest thing to a silver lining the Republicans have in Texas this year.

The one thing that Democrats need to understand is that this is now a purple state, not a red one. in 2028 we’ll likely see Republicans who aren’t “frothing at the mouth” racist, and while the statewide officeholders will have more time to show results, there’s no guarantee that the state votes blue in the next presidential election.

All that said, between Musk and a pair of Christofascist oil billionaires, we in Texas were up against it, and I’m extremely happy there’s some sanity and some proof that money has diminishing returns.

You’re right, but god what I wouldn’t give for a good-faith constitutional convention. Trump has proved that you can’t do this bizarre dance we do in America where the constitution is vague and rickety and relies on jurisprudence, legislation, and unwritten norms, but simultaneously treats the governing documents as holy writ.

And it’s Fetterman-proof in the Senate. What a weird and great night.