for visiting heads of state, meeting only with Trump is a bit of a slight. it’d be like getting a meeting only with the Vice President. you know you mean something to this administration if, like Modi, you get a one-on-one with Musk (or a one-on-one-ish with Musk and a bunch of his kids).
before President Musk, we'd gone 16 years without a commercial jet accident. somehow everything is breaking down now. i guess he arrived just at the nick of time!
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you know how chain restaurants make up their own clappy birthday songs to gather 'round a table + celebrate customer birthdays with? if i still had local IRL friends, i'd want to make up a song praising federal workers, get together + troupe from post office to post office to sing + celebrate them.
the nonfascist political coalition needs to become a bit more Christian in the sense of "whatever the fuck you've said or done in the past, however you've sinned, join us now in our worthy project and you will be welcomed and redeemed." may the vote be our sacrament.
part of the fascist ethos is that the weak and disabled should die to render the larger community stronger and more beautiful. i think this explains some of Republicans' elite-level accommodation of anti-vax stuff. Republican elites know vaccines are safe and effective. 1/
the problem isn't that vaccines don't work or that they have side effects. the problem is that they do work, and interrupt a "natural" culling of the runts. 2/
the rest of us (well, looking in the mirror, the rest of you) are left with burdens of care and the economic cost of "accommodations". the weak and old should want to die for the greater good of the nation the young and strong would build and vigorously enjoy. /fin
every democrat should face a primary. even the ones i love. letting democracy become a kind of sham running on autopilot, in which most of us don't feel we have a meaningful voice, has rendered us vulnerable to all this kind of shit. campaign finance of D primaries should be v restrictive though.
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weren’t they supposed to close our borders to criminals?
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i remember when we had a CDC.
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was roberta flack’s death (rip) a sign they’re no longer contenting themselves with killing us softly?
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i know Musk likes SF, so it's pretty cool that DOGE is like the governmental version of that story "Gambling Device" by Frank Herbert.
i got a scary letter from, of all states, the State of Florida recently, threatening me with a thousands of dollars penalty. to address it, i was gonna have to send documents back and forth to my elderly parents and get an affadivit signed. (it had to do with retitling a car.) 1/
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i phoned, accurately and truthfully explained the situation. initially, the person on the other end of the line said i should get the affidavit done, and i agreed we would, but when she realized it would be burdensome and saw that my story checked out, she just ended the case. 2/
the faceless bureaucracy, it turns out, is made of human beings who have some latitude to exercise discretion. there is danger in that — they could be biased! corrupt! 3/
but often, usually, they exercise judgment as best they can. as citizens, we have people we can appeal to, who can understand our situation. i wonder how that will work with the AI bots. 4/
tell me, when all the megacorps switched from human customer service to automated phone trees, was that more or less "bureaucracy" in the pejorative sense? 5/
because from my perspective, firing the humans makes the world more kafkaesque, not less. /fin
One of our best.
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i'm just waiting for the Platinum Card. and then of course the Black Card.
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people think the “five questions” thing is about evaluating employees, or more cynically coming up with pretexts to fire them, but i think he’s trying to get government workers to generate data in order to train his AI.
investment (in amenable sectors) begets productivity as much as productivity begets new investment. cf @chrisdillow.bsky.social stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
On intensive vs extensive growth
Link Preview: On intensive vs extensive growth: There might be more to be said for the government's approach to raising economic growth than we think. To see what I mean, let's first see the criticism of its approach. This rests upon the distinctio...
word of the day! (new to me!)
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one way to shrink the Federal government is by impeachment.
say what you will but the franchise was prescient. Bond villains are real.
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