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.

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!

Sorta yes and no. T-Mobile US is its own corporate entity, but their majority shareholder is Deutsche Telekom, and they take their name from that company’s mobile service brand.

Anti-discrimination laws in the US apply to discrimination based on what’s called a “protected class,” which essentially boils down to a small set of personal characteristics you’re not allowed to base a decision about a person on. For the purposes of housing, this includes race, skin color, and national origin, gender and sexual orientation, whether there are minor children in the family, and disability.

“Being somebody who the loan officer has a deeply personal vendetta against” is not a protected class, and if the original OP did in fact reject a mortgage application on that basis they’d most likely be legally in the clear. Whether their employer would be happy to know about it is another story, but if it was anywhere near a coin-toss decision I doubt they’d ever have to justify themselves.

The counterargument is that Missourians keep passing progressive ballot measures while simultaneously voting for people who vocally oppose said measures and immediately repeal them because they see politics as a team sport rather than anything that actually affects them. A progressive message might speak to these voters, but voting R is, some reason, as baked into their identity as rooting for the Tigers is.

I was hoping to avoid credentialiam, but… You assume much of what I do and don’t know. I grew up with a parent in higher education administration, and due to my own career I am regularly in communication with a range of R1 research universities, including two which I am currently preforming long-range lab space demand forecasts for. I have had a front-row seat to how the sausage gets made in higher education for the last three decades, and I am regularly talking to senior leadership at one of the top 5 schools in the US for medical research, specifically about these kinds of staffing issues and how the illegal impoundment of NIH and NSF grants are affecting them.

Am I intimately involved with the budgeting process at Harvard specifically? No, but then I’d wager you probably aren’t either, and it’s not that hard to look up stats about their endowment and do some basic math about them. You’re stuck on this one point that about 80% of is earmarked for specific uses, when their overall endowment is so enormous that that number is practically immaterial to the argument. (10% of it is specifically earmarked for the School of Medicine, by the way, which is where most of the lost grant money was concentrated.)

I am not proposing that there is some grand conspiracy at work to throw researchers out of Harvard. Rather, as the tone and tenor of the article linked above would suggest, Harvard’s administration is laser-focused on the money, and is starting from the notion that line must always go up no matter what. I don’t doubt that the usual academic politics is preventing the broader university from thinking that it might be worthwhile to share the load to keep scientists working while Harvard fights this, and that’s a shame.

Dude… my “janky math” is that 500,000,000 / 53,000,000,000 is ~0.01, or 1% versus the ~9.5% ROI they received on donations and investments last year. You can check that with a calculator app in about ten seconds if you doubt me, and my “conspiracy theory,” which you would have found in the post directly above if you bothered to actually read it, is that Harvard is making the shortsighted decision to hoard its cash and use the cuts as an excuse to cut perceived low-performing lab teams, rather than make a relatively minor outlay to keep everyone on, and make an implicit statement about the importance of research and the weakness of Trump’s hand here.

Did you read past my first sentence? They can replace the entirety of the research grant funding they receive from the government out of pocket and it would barely even dent the rate of growth of the endowment. You think you’re making a clever point here and you’re just not.

Run the numbers. 20% of Harvard’s ~$53 billion endowment is more than $10 billion that they can spend, no strings attached. Harvard receives just shy of $500 million per year in NIH grants. They could fund the next four years of their scientific research completely out of pocket, and it would only cost 4% of the endowment, and leave the overwhelming majority of their unencumbered funds intact. Hell, 4% isn’t even half of the endowment’s growth rate last year — they could do this indefinitely to make a point and still grow the endowment. Is reducing their annual net profit by ~10% small beans? No, but it’s entirely doable and wouldn’t create any catastrophic impacts on the rest of the of the institution.

For what it’s worth I am in regular contact with another R1 institution that previously received significantly more federal research grant funding than Harvard, with an endowment a fraction of the size. To my knowledge they’ve frozen new hiring and are planning to tighten their belts in terms of capital expenditure, but they have not moved to cut researchers yet. This feels like a short-sighted move on Harvard’s part, and I rather suspect that they’re taking the opportunity to cut perceived chaff more than anything else.

Posted to the wrong comment, whoops

Architect, so in the neighborhood… I mostly interact with UL in the context of fire-rated assemblies, though.

You’re acting as if Harvard has no control over the way they utilize the endowment, and that’s just not true. Of course they want to manage it so that they are only drawing from a portion of the gains rather than actually spending it down. Of course some percentage of funds are earmarked for specific purposes like new buildings, endowed professorships, and the like.

None of this means that Harvard cannot make the strategic decision to dip heavily into the endowment to maintain researchers’ livelihoods while their fight moves through the courts. Arguably it’s the fiscally-responsible thing to do, because many of the affected researchers are going to be losing work in progress that may have to be replicated if they are ever rehired, and some portion of those laid off are going to move on to other things, impacting Harvard’s research capacity and their reputation as a desirable, high-status employer in the sciences. One would have hoped that they picked this fight with the intention of winning it, and failing to tap the endowment as bridge funding while the legal challenges play out risks making it something of a Pyrrhic victory.

I recently switched phones and forgot I didn’t have an adblocker installed yet. Clicked on an article and holy shit the modern mobile web is a toxic hellscape without it…