I used to pride myself on my tea snobbery, sampling green tea varieties from the farmers market and using a ceramic infuser.

Then one day I stopped having time for all that and found that Constant Comment was actually quite lovely and available everywhere.

Black tea with orange zest and spices. Simple, but everything I really want from a tea. Lady Grey is good too.

I’ve been assured that AI will fix it.

“Done is better than perfect.”

Everything is political.

I thought that was the free space.

Voter: Why does the economy suck so bad?

MAGA: Because brown people.

Harris: You’re crazy, the economy is doing better than ever!

Simple as.

Even though stars come in singlets, binaries, trinaries, and even greater numbers of multi-star systems, we’d only ever found stars orbiting one — or, at most, two — stars.

I think they mean planets.

Canonical Strawman Leftist™ describing their utopia: “Everyone votes on everything, and we engage in thoughtful discussion to persuade our neighbors to make good choices with their votes.”

Same leftist describing today: “Voting is pointless, and it’s impossible to change anyone’s mind.”

If my time consulting is anything to go off of…

The agency provided several options. The client liked 3 of them and wanted them all smooshed together.

Client opened up the agency’s .pptx and moved some things around until they had this monstrosity and said “There! That’s what I want. See how easy that was? Why do we even pay you?”

The designers quietly held back the urge to quit on the spot, but the lead said “Absolutely, that’s a great decision, we’ll have a final version for you tomorrow!” And the designers took great joy in delivering precisely what the client asked for.

It’s the private equity playbook. Sell all the real capital assets to cover existing debt, rent replacement assets from the owners themselves using new debt, run operations so lean that you burn out 100% of your labor force, then declare bankruptcy and settle your own debt while keeping all the assets.

It has already destroyed swaths of the private sector, and now they wanna do it to the entire economy.

Also Hardin was a white nationalist and pushed his “tragedy of the commons” theory as a justification for eugenics.

So every time someone references his pseudoscience, they’re breathing life back into a dead fascist’s racism. Yaaaaayyy…

At least we live in a time when evil dumb rich guys are still mortal.

Return to freakin sender!

He and Trump deserve each other.

You underestimate the power of whining online.

MAGA is the result of decades of talk radio and pseudo-journalism aimed at curating a very specific way of seeing the world.

They refined a narrative that was persuasive, easy to upload into people, consistent in how it framed emergent issues, and instilled a sense of urgency that encouraged its adherents to spread the gospel and get politically active.

Obviously, we need to vote. But if you think victory is getting a Bernie 2.0 to 51% in a primary, you’re gonna be sorely disappointed by the general. It needs to be a slam dunk. We need a cultural win before we can have an electoral win.

Sir, yes, sir!

If you’re interested, my comment was basically a sample of this fantastic interview with Anand Giridharadas: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2023/04/02/yanss-256-anand-giridharadas-wants-americans-to-change-their-minds-about-their-ability-change-other-americans-minds/

They’re all towers. But the buttons are all pretty shallow with very light actuation force required.

And they all happen to be situated such that the corner which has the button is the corner furthest away from the desk, so when she jumps up onto the PC as a platform to get ready to jump onto the desk, her feet are all grouped up right in that corner.

And you can imagine that if she’s crouched down ready to jump, and I put my arm out to prevent her from jumping from the tower to the desk, that’s a lot of pressure all applied to her little toe beans.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence. But that experience, together with seeing this Mac Mini design, has made me wonder why we tend to put a button with such drastic effects right out in the open like this.

You’re catching downvotes, but you’re not wrong.

The emotional vibe from the left is: “If you’re not enough of a leftist according to my unique standards, you’re basically the worst person to ever exist. And don’t ask me to explain, cuz it’s not my job to educate you.”

The emotional vibe from the right is: “Welcome home, you clever protagonist you. You knew the truth all along, you just needed the courage to admit you knew it. Hey, while you’re here, I’d like to introduce you to a few other things you might not realize you already believe.”

The supreme irony is: The right doesn’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe you can persuade people and get them on your side and move forward with a cohesive vision of governance. Yet they’re doing a better job of persuading people than the left is.