In 10 to 18 years, I bet Trump gets memory holed by the Republican Party, much like George W. Bush. They will move on, and they will try to pretend that Trump and MAGA had never existed.

The core of MAGA is Trump, and no one has been able to really duplicate it. And Trump is an old man who is already slowing down. There is no succession plan. I think the movement dies with him, maybe with his presidency. And then they pretend they never supported him.

I never said anything of the sort. But if you want a closer analogy, we should judge Donald Trump, Jr. for his father’s crimes. He has vocally supported his father and often been involved.

They are cut from the same cloth. He has a reputation for beliefs that are as hard-line, if not more hard-line. The slaughter of protestors is absolutely relevant.

The slaughter is also part of a power structure he has put himself on top of. And there is no indication that he will be any different than his father. The power structure may change a bit after this latest war, but fundamentally it is prone to deadly crackdowns on dissent.

Yup. Not a bad message, but a terrible messenger. His father is responsible for the massacre of thousands of protestors, and he was by all accounts part of that.

RFID tags seems like an odd choice. They have such a limited range. It feels like there would be a material that is extra easy for sensors to detect, and could maybe carry a small amount of information.

But the news isn’t really like that, though. Like, currently my news feed has multiple items on the aftermath of Trump’s Lincoln Reflecting Pool project. That is something on the other side of the continent with no impact on my life and which I cannot do anything about. Every local murder gets a news story, even though most individuals are much more at threat from other things. Apes together strong, but maybe not this together.

Setting aside corporate surveillance, I have started to have a love/hate relationship with AI transcriptions in meetings. My auditory processing isn’t great, so it is nice to have notes. And it’s not replacing a job that someone was doing before. At the same time, it makes me feel more on edge. Everything I say becomes part of a permanent record. And I am part of a public institution, so that is subject to FOIA requests AFAIK.

It isn’t really an imperial thing. It’s that, 250 years ago, when the tiny, newly independent nation was deciding on a name, no one bothered themselves with a new and unique name. And as you noted, American is the only part of that name that works as a description of a resident, even if it’s nonsensical.

If so, then okay. The idea is that single use plastic is used because plastic is so damn cheap. From what I understand, the precursor is basically a waste product from oil extraction. But add a small tax and it breaks the model.

A single cheap fork is less than US$0.01 on a commercial restaurant website. For many restaurants, that is easier to deal with than washing dishes. But let’s tack on a $0.05 tax per single use item or $0.50 single use tax. Pass it directly on to the customer on the check.

That puts single use more on an equal footing with restaurants that are reusing dishes. Single use plastic doesn’t have its true cost built in. A tax can do that in a transparent way.

Fred Meyer (owned by Kroger) sells close dated food at half price. Produce with blemishes is set aside and sold in reduced price bundles. I am sure they still throw away plenty of food, but the reduced prices do seem to attract buyers (myself included). Some items just never make financial sense at the regular price, but half price? I’ll take it.

Now it’s Mother Earth Green.

Trump has gotten more brazen. Buy his cryptoscam, pay to build his ballroom, give his wife a sweetheart movie deal, the list goes on and on. And yeah, then there’s the IRS tax audit immunity that would allow him and associated people to steal an estimated $100 million in forgone taxes. Truly a man who looked at the Russian kleptocracy and said “I want some of that.”

I work at Portland State University, which is embedded in downtown Portland. They have small maintenance trucks that go on street that have many traits in common with Kei trucks. They are too small, slow, and unsafe for a freeway, but are perfect for carrying cargo around campus. I am unclear why there is a carve out for those trucks, but not for Kei trucks.

You have to take care of screwworms far from the US border. This was all part of the gutting of USAID. DOGE saw it was a foreign aid program operating through the UN, didn’t bother understanding it, and just cut it along with the rest of USAID. But hey, something happening in Central America could never affect the US, right?

This outcome was predicted for at least the past year, since the program was cut. Will ranchers who lose cattle finally punish Trump and Republicans at the ballot box for doing something monumentally stupid? Or is Elon just going to be used as a convenient (if somewhat deserving) scapegoat?

I read a bit of the stuff from the tip line. Some of it is very raw, and that’s putting it nicely. Like, I had a neighbor who was troubled by delusions. Some sounded spot on like that, a story that wasn’t just absolutely wild, but didn’t fit with some known facts.

Wish granted. Those apps are now all rewritten as Swing Java applets.

There is a certain strain of Christianity that must see itself as the underdog in a cosmic war of good and evil. Everything fits into that overarching narrative.

No president has done it and it certainly was not the intent of the pardon power. But it is not explicitly forbidden. Hopefully if he tries it it gets ruled against, but after SCOTUS made that horrible ruling about presidential immunity I have little confidence.

Trump getting away with a pardon and then getting assassinated is, in my mind, one of the worst scenarios. It martyrs him in the eyes of his cult. At the same time, it sets out legal precedent for a future fascist/authoritarian to pardon themselves for misdeeds in office. He’s an old man anyway and won’t last much longer. Let’s hope it does not come to pass.

Trump is 100% going to pardon himself. And I have little confidence that the courts will stop him. They will talk about history and tradition when it suits them, but I can totally see them making an exception for yet another unprecedented action.

In the US, the mortgage interest tax write-off goes disproportionately to the wealthy. It also inflates housing prices, so it doesn’t really help affordability. Certainly not enough to justify the cost.