a good line from an obituary of Gene Lewis, one of the most remarkable teachers and mentors i was once fortunate to have. i only learned yesterday of his passing, and i am sad about it.
“He outlived Henry Kissinger but not Mel Brooks, and he probably would have been fine with both outcomes.”
tired: inventing the future.
inspired: reinventing the future.
Is NASA’s Artemis program really this bad?
see #MaciejCeglowski https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
@politicsbot this is about an abortion ban, not an election ban.
“the monopolist is like a politician who wins power – whether through greatness or by deceit – and then gerrymanders their district so that they can do anything and gain re-election. Even the noblest politician, shorn of accountability, will be hard pressed to avoid yielding to temptation.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/
@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch it is right! i guess the feelz is a matter of opinion.
right but it feels so wrong:
scala> None.forall( _ => false )
val res0: Boolean = true
Chris Peel @chrisp has put together a really great history of US income tax schedules, including an animated graph of effective rates. https://github.com/chrisvwx/pub/blob/master/tax/README.md
there is only one homeland and we all share it.
the humans are a little better in person.
@Catvalente i had a friend endure it. she went to so much trouble for the privilege. but in the end it wasn't badass enough.
wreak and reek make an impressive homonym pair.
US DoJ: “As cryptocurrency markets continue to evolve, the Department will continue to root out fraud, support victims, and restore confidence to these markets.” https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-brothers-arrested-attacking-ethereum-blockchain-and-stealing-25m-cryptocurrency
so confidence in crypto markets is now a state-supported good?
this case is so weird because as i understand it was an attack on a protocol by which it’s become conventional for miners to front-run user transactions. more conventional rent extractors get protected, less conventional ones get prosecuted.
@Transportist the M&Ms do. definitely.
the ethos of the discourse has hardened; these days it’s “by any memes necessary”.
@Hyolobrika @Nerdfest @admitsWrongIfProven @fraying from what Zeus’ ear?
@fraying @Nerdfest i want entirely to agree. and perhaps i am letting myself just be fooled by the tails of a distribution. there is always some probability a rich and entirely talentless asshole gets three-times lucky in his vanity purchases and the people he hires to run them. still, i have to concede that it's unusual, whether due only a statistical artifact or more than that.
@curtosis it's a great mystery to me how despite all the predation in the world and the bursting balance sheets it yields, our most gargantuan masters manage to leave the most basic aspects of their most basic (therefore unsexy, undifferentiating i suppose) products egregiously flawed when rounding-error levels of investment could correct them.
@admitsWrongIfProven @fraying @Nerdfest good point. though it is an eternal mystery that Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX exist and have sometimes done remarkable things, much as I don't like to credit their founder and under his influence they sometimes do awful things.
@curtosis (i have a terabyte "free" since I pay for Office 365, and i had similar not-great issues with sync.com (path length restrictions that blocked the whole sync). so I quit sync.com. but i do kind of wonder if i'm an idiot to actually use OneDrive, given the level of attention to privacy and security consistent with barfing on question mark and quote chars.
