for people who excuse Google's — and now Apple's — capitulation on the orwellian renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as *of course they just use the official name*, please read Google's explicit policy on this question, from 2008. publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-... ht @dangillmor.bsky.social

perhaps worse than a US withdrawal from NATO would be a US that sowed chaos from within the alliance. Europe still requires functional security arrangements.

one day a Russian prisoner is freed (Marc Fogel, great news). the next day the US Secretary of Defense concedes Ukraine’s territorial integrity and aspiration to join NATO. our transactional President sure knows how to strike a deal.

he loves that truth won’t ever matter to the 99% who never check and the ones who do and say anything can’t be trusted they’re on the other side. nothing matters it’s funny!

the calculus is simple. by default, senators get reelected. incumbency bias is extraordinary. but if you put a target on yourself by defying the MAGA-ists, you very well might not. go along to get along. and fewer death threats. the world’s greatest deliberative body.

conceding in advance. the art of the deal. peace through strength.

they believe bitcoin ultimately “wins”, i think. or, to attribute just a bit less idiocy to them, some constellation of crypto assets. the nation state is over, they think. they’re just front running the inevitable. they have bubbled themselves into (very powerful) morons to a remarkable degree.

the ghost stories / horror films write themselves. weird shinings in glitzy golden towers. new cultural frontiers for the tired indian burial ground cliché.

no one told us how entertaining the apocalypse could be. or alternatively, the road to hell is paved with engaging content!

where is your will to power, soystat?

📌

if we think of Musk/Trump as PE-style takeover artists, won’t they sacrifice long-term value embedded in tacit competences and relationships in favor of extracting short-term cash? asks @csissoko.bsky.social (Musk’s approach to expenditures sure seems to rhyme with how PE raiders squeeze prey.)

blame Trump for the collapse in US NIIP!

without comment. www.thetimes.com/world/europe...

(according to this piece, the bottom falls out a bit before US rates increase, around 2017. dark anitmatter.)

i think US NIIP has deteriorated lately? www.rabobank.com/knowledge/d0...

i wonder when Musk reads a story like this, does he feel anything? does he have any regrets about how he went about things? “There’s nothing wrong with a review of aid spending – this happens regularly. But existing programming should have been allowed to continue while the review is carried out.”

DOGE is a rootkit.

they say life imitates art, but this is too stupid for a screenplay.

someone needs to write a novel, speculative fiction, describing how it all goes down from the perspective of a young man overcoming trauma, unwinding to his therapist what it was like observing it all from the shoulders of the special government employee who exuberantly provoked the cataclysm.