Mitch's Blog

The Guardian, quoting Yale historian and author Timothy Snyder:

“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.

“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”

As Trump tries to control Congressional Republicans, he threatens lawsuits and primary challenges, and Musk will fund all that, making Trump increasingly dependent on Musk, Snyder says.

ht @nitpicking@mstdn.party

The problem is that this is, at the fundamental level, a terrible idea.

There’s a reason that mathematics doesn’t use English. There’s a reason that every professional field comes with its own flavour of jargon. There’s a reason that contracts are written in legalese, not plain natural language. Natural language is really bad at being unambiguous.

— David Chisnall

Scott Lewis at Voice of San Diego:

A few weeks ago, a man in the alley behind our house began screaming. Screaming is not unusual around us, unfortunately. But usually it comes and goes – less frequent than the airplanes, more frequent than the helicopters.

One man walks around screaming all the time. Long beard, bike. Sometimes he begs on the corner. Sometimes he disappears for weeks. But he’s always back and almost always screaming.

This wasn’t him. We know him. This was deeper, closer and more disturbed. And it wasn’t going away. It scared my daughter. I went back there with the flashlight and found the man. He was ensconced in a combination of blankets and garbage. He was ranting incoherently, unaware of me even as I tried to get his attention.

I finally yelled “Hey!” He turned and looked right at me. “You’re freaking people out.”

He snapped out of it. “I’m so sorry. I know, I know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”

The way he snapped out of it turned my anger and fear immediately into pity and wonder. It was like he was two people. The one made mad, screaming at the cold, fueled by the drugs, the trauma. And the one below the surface almost watching himself.

It was cold. San Diego is more comfortable than most places to be homeless but try sleeping in 45 degrees. It is bone-chilling cold. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t last more than a night or two before … well, before I did things that would probably lead to screaming.

We are now entering the eighth year of the homeless crisis…. We are numb to so much of it. The suffering and poverty. The disorder and chaos.

…

San Diego is facing a catastrophe. The city is teeming with suffering. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its cost of living is extreme and escalating rapidly. People are leaving. The region’s growth projections, for the first time in decades, show a peak and downturn not because people don’t want to be here but because they can’t afford to be. Public school enrollment is down.

San Diego’s history, however, is full of moments when it seemed irredeemable. Every city has a similar story – moments of prosperity followed by recessions, public health crises, disasters, despair but then great leaps in design, construction and innovation followed by growth and prosperity.

We can, once again, meet the moment. But in 2025, it will take something we did not see in 2024: creativity and leadership.

Welsh continues to be a lone voice saying the war in Ukraine is going very badly for Ukraine, and he predicts victory for Russia in 2025. The major news media are pointing the other way — that Russia is getting clobbered.

That doesn’t make Welsh wrong. In 2003 everybody knew the US invasion of Iraq was a great idea, the Iraqis would welcome us with flowers and we’d be out in a jiffy.

Well That Was Hell: 2024 In Review.

He looks back on the book here and mentions that parts of it are now dated.

The ony part that stands out in my memory as dated is that the soldiers' communications-compute devices are called “PDAs.” Now they’d be called “phones.”

The novel is a lesson in marketing. It’s got a good gimmick. The gimmick is that in the far future of the novel, medical science has advanced so that it’s inexpensive to rejuvenate old people and send them out as soldiers.

That kind of gimmick will cause people to pick it up in a bookstore and take a closer look. But a gimmick isn’t enough; the book also has to be good to generate the kinds of reviews and word-of-mouth that really push sales. And Old Man’s War is, indeed, a good book.

Why You Should Relish Embarrassment

Woody Fraser, Pioneering Producer of Daytime Talk Shows, Dies at 90. “He spiced up the format in creating ‘The Mike Douglas Show’ and brought ‘Good Morning America’ to life. But his career ended under a cloud of sexual harassment claims.”

Ian Welsh does a better job than I did articulating what I was trying to say in my earlier post on this:

H1-B visas obviously take jobs from Americans. Yes, companies must say they doesn’t, but they do. H1B workers can’t leave their employers unless they have another lined up immediately, so they do what they’re told or go home. As such, they obviously have reduced bargaining power compared to natives or landed immigrants. This drives down wages for natives, “if you won’t do it, we’ll get an immigrant to, and they’ll take the wage we’re offering.”

The left-wing argument against guest workers, and H1B visas are just tech guest workers, is that if we genuinely need workers, then they should be over here either as landed immigrants or on a visa which allows them to quit and have some reasonable time to find another employer. A class of workers with reduced rights will obviously be preferred by management and will reduce the bargaining power of native workers.

Also, Vivek Ramaswami is spouting nonsense when he claims that America’s problem is cultural, because we venerate prom queens and jocks more than nerds. Nerds were no more popular in the 1950s through the 70s then they are today and yet America led the engineering world in those decades. The reason we’re lagging is because we’ve outsourced that work to China.

@pratik

Newly deciphered manuscript is oldest written record of Jesus Christ’s childhood. He hated having to play dodge ball in gym class.

Interactive dingus shows the popularity of names over time. I’m surprised to see “John” declining toward zero; it was a hugely popular name when I was growing up.