Is this supposed to be a joke about shitty overpriced psychologists? It’s hard for me to tell. It’s kinda the anxiety equivalent of telling someone with depression to just not be sad, which I guess is funny, a little.

I’m 50/50 on whether this person is being an ignorant ass or trying to make a joke.

I think it’s a combination of things. One, they are good at synthesizing huge amounts of data and detecting trends, which is useful for surveillance if you’re not that hung up on being exactly right all the time. Two, they are very energy-costly, so their use drives up the price of energy, which drives up the price of fossil fuels.

Yep. After Lincoln made it famous people began to see presidential assassination as rather passe. And he loses out on the shortest tenure record to Harrison, so nobody remembers poor Garfield for much other than his mathematical contributions. Or contribution, singular.

Fun James Garfield trivia: he wrote a proof of the Pythagorean theorem.

Notable wiki editor burn: “Garfield is thus far the only President of the United States to have contributed anything original to mathematics.”

I wonder how often so-called “normal” world leaders pull Keystone Cops bullshit like this. Seems like the kind of thing you only resort to if things are already going very poorly / stupidly, but it has to happen from time to time. I’m sure the secret service has done some truly wacky capers that have never seen the light of day.

Exiting a cult is a process. The people who voted for Trump at least once have generally been indoctrinated with distrust and hatred of Democrats for most or all of their lives. All that indoctrination doesn’t go away once they start to see the cracks in the MAGA facade. Continuing the process takes work, and some of them will do it and some of them will either disengage or recommit to the lie. But some of them continue to do the work. It takes time.

But agreed, they aren’t to be depended upon to make good decisions, so if you’re not close to the cult you still have to vote.

IMO it’s not wise, and it is a symptom. Congress has been ceding more and more of its authority to the executive for a few decades now because it makes it easier for incumbents to avoid controversy and win reelection. The executive branch has become more powerful and is now being molded by the Unitary Executive Theory, or the “What if we had a king but used a different word” theory. It’s this idea that all executive power flows from the office of the president, so anyone not the president must either toady up or prepare to get fired. Except the fed, for some reason 🤔🤔🤔

I think some other executive departments, particularly DoJ, should have directly elected leaders and should be able to control their disbursements from Congress independently of the President. They should be a check on the President just as the President should be a check on them. I’m pretty sure that would require a constitutional amendment and I’d want someone more versed in political theory than me to describe exactly how executive authority should be divided, but as it is the US presidency is far too powerful for the country’s own good.

This comment is less useful than an astrological reading.

I love critics who love the things they’re critiquing.

I had a job for a while where my main task for about a year was reviewing / editing configs on servers, in which I learned the basic functions of vim (opening, closing, seeking, copy / paste, find / replace, etc.) and used them enough to get them embedded in my memory.

I use vim less now, as I still prefer graphical editors with a visual file tree for most development tasks, but I still have the simple stuff ready at hand when I have to jump on a server and change a config file. I’ve “learned” new tricks with vim since then, but I have a harder time remembering them when I don’t use them every day, and I periodically come across vim functionality that I’ve encountered before but then forgot.

So, maybe six months isn’t so far off, but it’s not that I dedicated myself to studying and learning the full length and breadth of vim’s capabilities for that whole period. It’s more that I picked up the basics pretty quickly, maybe after a few days of getting settled, then repeated the basics in slightly varying contexts until they became rote, which took longer.

In no particular order:

Dr. Becky (astronomy)

Josh Johnson (comedy)

New Venture Games (old man boardgaming)

Cornell Lab of Ornithology (ornithology)

Ant Lab (entomology)

Practical Engineering (engineering, mostly civil)

Numberphile (maths, as they say across the pond)

The Octopus Lady (marine biology)

Juniper Dev (young gun making games)

suckerpinch (software stuff)

Jenny Nicholson (media critic)

engineerguy (engineering)

Steve Mould (physics)

Dang, I gotta clean up my subscriptions. I tend to add people when I find one good video, then ignore them when I find they aren’t to my taste

We are really going through it, and it is uplifting. There’s more to be done but this is progress.

I think Horace drove him to this because he wanted to live his circus dreams with Phil. Who would know better how to get, and then dispose of, a horse’s head than an actual horse? It’s common sense.

Yep. Popped like a balloon. InfoWars got footage of it and Tim has been investigating the event for some time now. Presumably still is, beyond the veil 💩🪦👿🙏

Are there good resources for finding union tech jobs? I see them every so often on regular job boards but it would be nice if there were a site just for union hiring.

Make making friends a priority. Join clubs, go to parties, ask classmates if they want to study together. If you don’t have a mealtime crew, ask people in the dining hall if you can sit with them.

Be careful with drugs, especially alcohol. I’m not saying don’t experiment, but be mindful of how much you’re using and the effects they have. I was not careful with alcohol in my youth and… I wish I had been.

Try things you’re interested in, and try things you aren’t interested in. It’s hard to know what’s interesting without giving it, as they say, the ol’ college try.

de facto mom > de jure mom

You’re welcome! I hope you find your people, we’re going to need a lot of local organization to get through this.

I haven’t bought an oscilloscope in a while but that seems like way too much.

One of these days I gotta write a proper program in a lisp. Everything I read about them makes them seem really cool, but I’ve never gotten around to it.