if March 4 was chosen as the date the tariffs take effect in order to let March 3 be the day of frantic negotiations to postpone them, does Trump/Vance outraging trading partners on Friday render it harder for them to deliver the pretend victories that Trump demands as pretext for postponement?

mad occultists.

democracy demands a public resistant to manipulations. but large-scale consumer capitalism demands a public susceptible to manipulations, that can be shaped to demand all that is supplied. hmm.

reading this excellent @williamcb.bsky.social piece, i can’t help but wonder whether Canada wouldn’t be the 52nd state. that in the name of Blairite cloying techno-optimism Britain might import its own DOGE from US providers… i feel like a ghost, struggling to rattle chains to warn the still living

“I don't think I'm alone in saying that I'd be okay if my 11-year old kid wanted to carefully build a collection of culturally-significant items they could fuss over after school. Comic books? Pokemon cards? Fossils? Sure, that's all good. But I'd be appalled if they went to a casino to play slots”

a zinger from Thomas Friedman. “I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV.​“ www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/o...

the difficulty is, Zelensky is not #pathetic.

( if you want to chat, weekly interfluidity office hours starts in 5 mins, on the half hour, www.interfluidity.com/office-hours/ )

can we trade presidents?

I'm accelerating the pace at which I'm sending letters to my Congressional delegation. Here's today's, "DOGE massacre at NOAA / NWS threatens Floridians" notes.interfluidity.com/vyQHxyjgRair... (I distrust their shitty webforms, so I'm trying docupost.com to conveniently send by postal mail.)

can’t wait ‘til Musk emerges from Ft Knox with photographic evidence of Scrooge McDuck.

this by @radleybalko.bsky.social is breathtaking. i'd encountered almost all of it, but you put it in one place and realize the scale.

i suspect they’re killing NOAA not because it’s wasteful or dysfunctional, but because they mean to expensively privatize its functions.

this is, um, fantastic news for Florida, epicenter of MAGA and also, um, my family.

this is what "efficiency" looks like. im-in.space/@Chip_Unicor...

is it against the law for government officials to "press" colleagues and subordinates to violate the law?

there is no one more innocent of every sin, of any action, than Elon Musk. he is merely present, and then somehow unexpected events unfold.

DOGE is murder.

it's unsurprising that Musk and Trump are such enthusiastic fans of LLMs. they hallucinate in roughly the same way.

even more threatening to our collective epistemology than AI slop are wiseguys who intentionally confuse Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder.