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.

Theorizing about and then venting about Ocean Gate is one of my formative Fediverse memories. God what an ass Stockton Rush was.

I think it only works if you understand from reading other strips that she’s already dating Mister Bignose McLongface and that he’s no saint.

The absolute numbers are still very low, and these folks tend to have more babies overall, so I don’t think there’s much silver lining here, even a grim one. They’re just accepting higher infant mortality for no good reason because they don’t understand statistics or that evolution doesn’t care about “perfect” or about any individual baby (or anything else of course, because it’s just a biological principle, but you take my meaning).

You have to work with who gets born and just try to bring as much critical thinking and empathy into the world as you can. If anything “good” will come of this, it will be as cautionary tales parents and doctors tell pregnant people.

I swear there’s a non-trivial percentage of new parents who simply want any excuse not to see their babies get poked with a needle and start crying. Combine that with the other MAHA, Jesus, and/or Woo nonsense, and especially with a fundamental misunderstanding of how much infant mortality the human population can absorb and still be evolutionarily “successful,” and you get stories like this one.

I also love that this version of flat earth theory is perfectly okay with our living on the surface of a huge spherical object floating in space.

And one of his stated reasons is that the Empire is nationalizing industry. Lucas is well-meaning but all over the place. The political influences are many and not super deep, just like the the literary/cinematic ones. The brilliance arises out of the pastiche spread liberally across the bones of a fairy tale.

I think it’s very possible to read too much coherent political thinking into the soup of influences that Lucas was tapping into for Star Wars, particularly the first one. He was anti-Vietnam War, absolutely, but he also got to the point of filming a scene where Biggs is decrying the Empire’s nationalization of industry, and the aesthetics were absolutely good Allies versus bad Nazis.

He was basically a pretty average left-leaning American boomer. He loved big oil guzzling cars, but also rooting for the little guy. He hated Richard Nixon and mapped him onto Palpatine, but in his initial thinking was an ominous but naive shut-in who was manipulated by his advisors; hardly the apologia any serious analyst of Nixon would have gone with. Lucas had us rooting for the Rebels to overthrow the Empire and replace it with the Republic, but also wove in an absolutely medieval fondness for royalty.

All of it was because the fairy tale was more important than the specifics of the politics, which were basically anti-authoritarian vibing.

According to the reddit OP, it’s the Vande Bharat Express in India. The ports look like the typical travel adapter ports that can handle several different plug types, but the UK plug sort of asserts itself visually, LOL.

Only Steam refund I ever got was for a Pool of Radiance re-package. Spent WAY longer than the testing period just generating the party, because JFC was it tedious on early gold-box games, and by the time I started running into bugs (introduced in the update? original? Who even knows?) barely outside the gates to Old Phlan, it was theoretically way too late. I had to explain a forty-year-old game to the poor customer service rep, but I got my 8 bucks back.

I could, but that feels like way too much work.

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