Disagree. The GOP was radicalized from the inside via the Tea Party wave of 2010, and while there's little of value to have come out of that there's a lesson on how to execute a sort of internal coup within the party system, instead of looking to third parties that are doomed in a FPtP system like America's or hoping the Democratic establishment "learns their lesson" from a hopefully-brief, violent interlude of fascism. Progressives tried like one-and-a-half times to do things top-down with Bernie and then decided to wash their hands of the whole party, rather than doing to work to elect grassroots progressive candidates like AOC and Mamdani from the ground up, build a bench, and change the fundamentals of the conversation within the Democratic caucus and national apparatus.

The silver lining of what's happened is that there are finally exciting, charismatic progressive candidates making inroads as the current party establishment twists and fumbles and (probably just importantly) primary voters stop selecting for the status quo and lowest-common-denominator "bipartisan" appeal, but my fear is that it may be too little and too late to stop the disaster.

The problem comes when you're weighing a protest vote/no-vote against milquetoast corporate centrism, and the outcome should that protest vote sway the election is that the Slavering Fascist Apocalypse-Makers sweep into power, turn any future elections into tightly-controlled farces, and then begin a sweeping range of internal and external pogroms. Voting for the corporate centrists sucks, but from a standpoint of harm reduction it's the only viable choice. A bunch of people stayed home in 2024 on the logic that by doing so they'd send a message to the Democrats, and as a result America might lose its democracy entirely.

The protest vote logic 100% works when the opposing side isn't ready to kill you given half a chance, but the American right clearly is, and has been for the last decade, and now the most vulnerable are in the literal and metaphorical crosshairs. You could make an accelerationist argument, that what we can build back up from the wreckage of what's to come will be better for all (and it might well be!) but history tell us that's no guarantee -- and even then, you have to answer for those who won't live to see the better days to come, or who will suffer greatly against their will in the process.

It's shockingly easy to get this sort of information on just about anybody. Many if not most cities and counties have publicly-searchable tax parcel data available on their GIS portals, and quite a few of those include the owner's name as a searchable field. If you know roughly where somebody lives, odds are pretty good you can find their home address.

I deal with this sort of data a lot for site master-planning studies, and lately I have noticed some cities don't provide ownership data in the public portal anymore, but you'd be surprised how many still do.

There’s a series of photos from a wildlife photographer that are essentially selfies of him with a litter of cheetah cubs that the mother cheetah literally dropped in his lap while she went to go hunt. It’s been theorized that the only reason cheetahs have never been domesticated is that that they’re very difficult to breed in captivity.

I think Gen X went from "invisible" to "the enemy" in a lot of folks' minds when exit polling showed that they broke for Trump in 2024 by a greater margin than any other age group. Before that point most millennials just knew them as their cool older cousins, whose childhood was shrouded in a warm haze of half-remembered, half-imagined 80s nostalgia.

Madison's thread detailing the whole thing is available here if you want to refresh your memory, but the TLDR is that, at least as of 2-3 years ago, LTT maintained a sweatshop production pace, was a hostile workplace in several dimensions, and executed a rugpull on Madison in terms of permitting and supporting her independent efforts in a way that created a practically textbook claim of promissory estoppel.

In the wake of the blowup, Linus and LTT more generally did make a lot of appropriately sorrowful noises and promised to do better, and I suppose it's possible that they have done so, but I don't really consume their content and TBH haven't bothered to check.

Time to bring back gibbeting!

I'm currently 100% remote, and to be honest I do sometimes miss having coworkers to shoot the shit with, and there absolutely are practical drawbacks to being remote -- especially if you are the one remote worker on a team that is at least partially in office together. At least for me the benefits of being home all the time do outweigh that, on balance, but I'd be lying if I told you that I felt that I was as well-integrated with the rest of my teams as I could be, or that being just a voice and/or face in a video call doesn't have some amount of impact on my long-term prospects.

That said, I really only miss a small handful of my in-office coworkers, and we still do make a point of grabbing lunch every month or three. The rest of the in-office experience can stuff it.

Be careful about that one, though. In addition to Word, for whatever reason iPhones automatically convert “--“ to “—“ so if you’re dealing with anybody like me who marks mid-sentence breaks with double dashes out of old habit, you’re going to get false positives.

Interesting that drop kits are an easily-sourced thing nowadays, I've looked at modern trucks and genuinely wondered how one is supposed to access the bed without a stepladder as they come from the factory. I think it's subtly damning that GMC, among others, has been marketing their multi-position tailgate's ability to function as a bed step. They've made trucks so tall as a vanity thing that it negatively impacts the their ability to actually work as a utility vehicle.

I've been begging (sometimes literally, I know a guy who works at Ford) for a small Maverick or Ridgeline-sized PHEV pickup for years now, and the Big Three seem to be specifically avoiding making such a thing. I don't need to be able to tow a guided missile cruiser, I don't need to sit ten feet in the air to feel safe, I don't want dual 30-gallon fuel tanks in case I need to drive to Cape Horn without stopping for some reason. I just want to be able to commute in town on electric power, handle small home-improvement hauling tasks (mulch, appliances, lumber, etc), and still be able to road trip or pull a small trailer in a pinch. And there are dozens of us, at least! I see people asking "PHEV Maverick when!?" anytime I search the Net for news on the topic. But nope, no PHEV pickup for you, unless you want to buy a Ramcharger -- and deal with being associated with the kind of person who drives a Ram product. No thank you!