Not that we need to open this can of worms here, but it’s a pet peeve of mine that “vanilla” has become a term used to mean plain, boring, sheltered, standard, mediocre, underwhelming, basic, and uninteresting.

Vanilla is an amazing flavor that comes from orchids that must be hand pollinated to cultivate at scale, and has a long and interesting history. It’s the second most valuable spice after saffron.

Just feels wrong to use that as a synonym for bland and blah.

LotRers.

Fans of Lord of the Rings.

Maybe not the best parallel but a good point nonetheless.

A more apt comparison might be:

“What’s the best all-beef hot dog I can buy at my local supermarket?”

“Ugh! OMG! Don’t do that to yourself! Why would you even want to bother with eating beef if that’s the shit you’re going to put in your body?! Just get some Japanese A5 Wagyu ribeye and thank me later!”

Just wait till November.

That quote has been changed a bit, but in it’s original form I think it was Churchill.

And the general idea is that as you age your idealism is tempered by practicality, as well as having adapted to the situation and built something of a life of your own, so you’ve gradually moved from the camp of “very little to lose/give up in exchange for all these benefits” and toward the camp of, “you know what, I’m doing okay, I’ve figured out a way to make it work, and I’d rather ‘the system’ just leave me alone at this point, since I’ll be footing the bill for things that aren’t even going to benefit me that much”.

Obviously it’s a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.

It’s also worth remembering that “liberal” and “conservative” meant something different mid century than they do now. Especially with the MAGA influence.

Most jobs like that, or really any pay scheme other than piece work or an hourly wage usually has the process of:

1. You can take as much PTO as you like.
2. You can take as much PTO as you like…provided you get all your work done.
3. You work like a dog, get all your work done, and take time off.
4. Since you were able to get everything done and have time left over to not work, your boss increases your workload, so now you have to work like a dog, all the time, or else you’ll never get everything done.

It’s like playing chess, and while the other player can’t change the rules as they go, but a condition for playing with them is that they get two moves every turn.

How old are you?

She was well after my time in terms of marketing and promotion but I definitely knew who she was and what her music was.

PA is only purple on the side that faces the rest of the country.

At state government level, it’s a special breed of the worst aspects of both parties.

Fucking cormorants…they kill lots of fish that they can’t even eat, plus a ton of fish that they do eat…and they’re federally protected.

Nope.

And even if it did, it was restarting itself anyway.

Bought a pixel 3 as soon as the 4 was released.

It was a fantastic phone… except for the two times it got stuck in a boot loop until the battery died.

Bonus points for the second time, when, thanks to a google update for emergency services, it decided it should dial emergency services every time it restarted…meaning I had to stay up until 330am that night, hanging up on emergency services, until the battery finally died.

A year or two ago, I bought a P7 Pro to replace it, hoping it’d have all the good of the P3, but with better camera, bigger screen, and no boot loop.

It is indeed bigger, the camera can zoom more, but isn’t necessarily better, there’s no boot loop issues which is great…but I find i have more cases of the phone locking up and needing a restart…and the in-screen fingerprint sensor (and gesture controls) are absolute hot garbage compared to the P3.

The fingerprint and gesture annoyances have been enough that my plan now, unless there’s something significant that changes things, is to go back to an iPhone for my next phone.

My thought is more along the lines of, “Regardless of his talent level, is this really the kind of person that his country wants representing them on the world stage?”

Like, okay even if he’s the absolute best by an order of magnitude…if he were from my country, I’d rather lose every match than win on the talents of someone like that.

I don’t care about that so much as the hyper specificity of not only “you have to be on the political left here” but “being to the left isn’t enough, you need to be this far left, and hold these specific views on politics, technology, etc.”.

And the community that is here is, amazingly, somehow even worse than Reddit, on average, when it comes to being a hive mind that is wildly intolerant of any disagreement.

Not only that, but there’s a 100% chance they sell this shit to you as a forever mouse, then in a few years if it’s not making them money hand over fist, they’ll discontinue it and keep your money.

Thank you.

It shouldn’t (still) surprise me, but it always does…when people do drastically misunderstand or misinterpret economic information.

legions of career bureaucrats who run federal departments get replaced with Trump loyalists.

For many of those bureaucracies, this is absolutely foreseen and intentional.

See…while bureaucracies often get a bad rap for being slow and inefficient, there’s often simply no (superior) alternative. It’s like how everyone bitches that it takes so long to get from point A to point B on the interstate, but taking an alternate route that avoids it takes even longer.

And while they may be frustrating, they’re usually run by capable people in the federal government. The lazy federal workers that the civil service is known for do exist, but they don’t typically rise to the level of making their bureaucracy work or not work, they’re low to mid level functionaries who’ve found a niche where their team will carry them and pick up their slack without creating a department-sized blip on the radar of any high level official.

These P2025 people…and MAGA Republicans in general…are trying to set up a win-win for themselves with this tactic: either they replace bureaucrats with loyalists and turn it into a reward system they can use to shore up support…or they remove enough pieces of the Jenga tower that it collapses under its own weight, proving their accusations that these agencies are dysfunctional, and using it as a flashpoint to push to eliminate these agencies and privatize the functions they performed…both allowing them to turn that service into a profit source for friends while also freeing up those tax dollars for their own purposes. And in the process, the American taxpayer gets sold down river to an organization looking to charge as much as the market will bear for the services that were once funded through taxes. The people will still pay the taxes, of course… they’ll just get less in return for them and have to pay more of their wages to get the same or worse services.

It also wouldn’t cover a meal from Uber Eats.

Definitely worse than nothing.

I hate to say it, but it would not surprise me one bit if Harris loses in November because Rust Belt moderates in PA, WI, and MI wouldn’t vote for a black woman.

I hope I’m wrong, but right now, for me, that’s the least surprising of possible futures.

It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.

When I first heard about what was going on, I assumed that “CrowdStrike” was not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack where they used systems they’d previously hacked and had them all do the same thing at once to another target.