Thanks, I’ll check it out!

A friend and I just had a conversation today about how using contractors instead of CalTrans crews to build CAHSR has probably meaningfully contributed to the cost overruns. There’s one instance I’m aware of where a contractor submitted a cost overruns to the authority for reimbursement on THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS of long distance calls. In 2017. Motherfucker, use Skype, email somebody, God damn. But we both know that was a scam, and thankfully, so did the inspector general.

You know, the last ten years have been a whole lot of “no way that will happen” and then that thing happens. I never ever would have believed that Luigi would have caused the kind of outpouring that he did or possibly even set a UHC bankruptcy in motion. We’re sitting on a powder keg, saying it’ll never go off because the sparks never caught for long before.

Tbh, we’re not doing a lot better in terms of only allowing state-approved dissent. We night have slightly different vehicles and methods so we can still keep up appearances, but the real dissidents still get 360 no scoped by the FBI or harassed by the fascist public-private cooperative. That trend is only getting worse under Trump’s guidance, paired with the endless Republican simpering for him and a democratic party that fights its activists harder than it fights the opposition.

So, is this an announcement/plan, or is this an acknowledgement?

Idk, it’s easy to get depressed about it, but I think that there’s another interpretation. It shows that Gen Z recognizes how fucked everything is, and recognize the urgent need for drastic change, which is what Donald promises, even if he’s a colossal piece of shit and the changes he promises are pure grift. Yeah, they’ve been taken in by the right, but only because the right has seized on the populist moment while the institutional left is still fretting about decorum, rank, seniority, process, and literally anything else before results. If the left gets out there and starts swinging for the fences, I think we can turn things around. So, of course, the democrats are preparing to rise to the occasion by offering Gavin Newsom and his plan to build the biggest bulldozers on earth for bulldozing the homeless.

I think this is part of why Bernie was yelling at people to run for office. We need more options, more people who are willing to turn their back on the establishment, on the left.

Brb, putting anime speed lines around Ben Affleck smoking

I had a friend who’s super into this stuff (he’s a furry) break it down. Intercepting rockets is fucking hard, even with computers and advanced sensing and everything we’ve got on our side, it’s really hard. Israel’s Iron Dome fails to intercept a pretty large number of rockets overall, and those are much lower altitude, lower speed rockets compared to MRBMs and LRBMs. According to Wikipedia, during the re-entry phase, ICBM warheads are clocking about SEVEN KILOMETERS PER SECOND. The fastest commercially available bullet is the .220 swift, which does a measly 1.2 km/s. So, knocking down these warheads, without considering the countermeasures that we know ICBMs use (chaff, decoy warheads, etc) is like trying to reliably hit a bullet five times faster than the fastest bullet available with another bullet. This is fucking vaporware, much like Musk’s hyperloop. We could be focusing on nuclear disarmament and building and iterating on proven tech that we know works, but everything just has to be a goddamn scam.

I think Mothra would be a pretty dope patron. Most of the pact comes down to lighting lamps and fighting any reptiles you find.

Californians: “idk, he just kept asking and I kept saying, like, the beach? The coast? The seaside? Eventually he just stormed off in a huff, but, yeah, no, super weird guy. I still don’t know what he wanted.”

Context: as long as I’ve been on the west coast, I’ve literally never heard anyone call it the shore.

I really want this to be it. I want a big enough mass of freak conservative boomers to die off of old age and for the republicans to finally push everyone else hard enough that this country finally fucking snaps and swings left so hard that Reagan’s grave belches black smoke for a month. I hope we swing left so hard that all the Fox News assholes run bawling off to Russia, all the neoliberal dickheads move to their neoliberal paradise of [some offshore oil rig], and we end up fixing all kinds of shit that’s been broken for basically my entire life.

I know it won’t; we’ll just get a bunch of working class republicans standing around the wreckage and mumbling “can you imagine how much worse it would have been under Biden?” to each other.

Meh, there were a few times where the comedy could have probably taken more of a backseat than it did, but the comedy didn’t overall bother me that much. I did like that it was a more unpolished take on what life in Starfleet is like, and the comedy was the vehicle that that view was delivered through. I mean, take Shax and T’ana making it super uncomfortable to be roomed close to the holodecks; realistically, who isn’t going to get up to some freaky shit with tech like that? The live action shows kinda dance around it, but I like that Lower Decks was able to address it outright because it’s allowed to take itself less seriously.

Yeah, I also absolutely hate the lighting. Everything is either way too dark or way too bright or somehow both at the same time. I remember seeing a trailer for one of the later seasons and the federation ships seem like they’d super uncomfortable to be on.

I’m increasingly certain that the actual plan here is to destroy the federal government. I still go back and forth between “it’s about fascism and authoritarian control” and “it’s about dismantling the federal government and starting Fuedalism 2: it’ll be better this time because we’re the ones doing it”, but lately I’ve been leaning more to the latter.

Right, but there’s lots of studies that show that those parking spaces are actually much more beneficial to everyone- business included- as bike lanes, bus lanes, seating stalls, and nearly anything else besides parking.

I’m a big fan of the hostile takeover proposal.

If anyone deserves for his workers to get unionized, it’s this asshole

I use a sewing machine needle, works great, just don’t go crazy and break shit.

Burying the lede a bit here, Trump spent that whole meeting talking about Afrikaner genocide and said that that was what Elon (who was present) wanted.