So many rainbow explosions…

Shows what you know! In most parts of the US, there is no train!

I agree, but ol’ Don is, if nothing else, a curator of interesting writing prompts.

The DeBeers-ish sentimental marketing is also a bit of a scam, which ends up working nicely with the cost being a scam. I am very happy with my 25 year old English Lit degree; it was was what I was able to get through with where I was discipline-wise, and I did learn all those critical thinking and life skills, and it even opened adequate doors, career-wise. I reckon my grades were inflated somewhat by my professors’ sheer relief that I was engaging with the material and, for all their flaws, my papers were obviously my own work. Still, I think my memories would be very different if I had graduated with $180k of student loan debt from a bucolic college somewhere in the New England hills instead of a $2k balance on a Discover Card, incurred over 4.25 years of nonsense at local state U.

I’m all for college, and not just STEM and business. Frankly some our current generation of tech leaders could use to have taken a few more philosophy classes (except for Peter Thiel… oh my) or at least smoked a few more bowls with the liberal arts kids. Still, people need to be clear-eyed about what a degree will and won’t do, and they need to understand that you absolutely can and should put a price-tag on the experiences.

Now I want to know which of Two Princes or Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong you haven’t heard yet. The two-hit-wonder disrespect here is staggering, I say. Staggering!

Bloemfontein, I think.

I don’t know if they still do, but for a long while IKEA was selling tabletops and shelves that were a honeycomb of cardboard with a very thin frame of some softwood or manufactured wood product, and then a synthetic woodgrain veneer. Super light, and pretty strong… for their weight.

And the need for “progressives” for the nerds who already had their distance vision murdered by genetics and books.

For the Z’ers, “books” are stacks of paper, typically glued together on one side, with a single audiobook or podcast transcribed onto them and displayed in a fixed font.

LOL, fair enough.

I use a fintech for my little glorified garage sale ecommerce site (literally hundreds of dollars of sales so far!). I have no idea how you burn through all that runway to do a slightly better banking app for some random regional bank, plus some agreements with the Credit Card companies and a crypto wallet.

Excellent. Thank you!

I also saw “deputy,” but the common tie seems to be replacing or substituting. I wonder if it was then-current Hungarian jargon for the switchboard operator having to constantly plug and unplug the patch cables.

And Alexander the Great would be proud of her solution at the end of the workday.

The Eternals was a documentary.

That might be even cooler than the brown tie-dye Duel of the Fates shirt I was rocking.

TPM has its charms, but good lord the delusion I invested in trying to convince myself it was better than it was…

Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never give George Lucas unrestrained creative control.

This is one of those silly little games. When your entire framework for analysis depends on certain political principals, you can then be coy and pretend that the results that follow are not political, because after all they simply follow with impeccable legal reasoning from a closely held judicial philosophy. Of course, where do those closely held judicial philosophies come from? Why, the judge’s instincts about policy priorities, their reaction to the flow of Constitutional Law as they studied it or, in the case of Thomas, what Harlan Crow pays him to think. In the case of someone like Roberts, you’re playing the long game so being disciplined about how you apply your framework means Trump only get 90% of what he wants and therefore you can say shit like “we’re not political” with a straight face.

To be fair, all sides have agendas that inform their thinking. Some agendas are just way more evil than others.

In fairness, one of the issues is that there’s an absurdly high bar to amend it, and the downright scientific polarization of our political parties in the last 50 years or so has meant that they’re constantly fighting over the middle, meaning there is unlikely to be consensus without something deeply traumatic happening first. The ERA was our canary in the coalmine there, I think. Of course, this makes it even more absurd that SCOTUS has leaned hard into textualist analysis that is completely unsuited to running a complex modern nation-state with a creaky old constitution. We need to take a page or two from papa UK and enshrine certain norms and principals as constitutional matters without obsessing over fucking commas like we do now. The irony of course is that doing so would take a constitutional amendment.

As a one-time student of Con Law, I will respectfully disagree. It’s clunky, vague, out of touch with the settlement patterns of the country in the last 230+ years, and willfully ignores that political parties and bad actors are a thing. I have come to resent the lionization of the document and its drafters. The basic outline of a democratic republic is laudable and has somehow more or less endured, but it is what it is: a good start from clever provincial lawyers whose ideals outstripped their personal behaviors and helped make it work better than many would have thought, but who were still absolutely dealing with the issues and expectations of elites in the 1780s.

For goodness sake, judicial review isn’t even in there. John Marshall basically made it up. So much with the US Constitution depends on norms and assumptions, yet we worship it like a holy text (e.g. “our own inadequacy to follow its teachings”). This makes it a HUGE problem when some smarmy asshole decides norms don’t matter and the Supreme Court has (rather hypocritically) decided that only the text matters. At a minimum, we need some serious “patch” amendments to lock down things that no one thought anybody would be a big enough asshole to test.

nowlookhereaintnoneogothicpeninknonsenseahtellyoowhut justsumdangoletexashillbilliessippindangolecocktailsknowhudimean andwearinbowlerhatsandtiesandwatchindeadtreesandguesswhat well… dang.

dangoledwardgoreymaniguessthat’sboutright.