I’d like to think there is a strategist in her camp who urged Biden to stay in for as long as he did, and only swap out after the first debate, closer to the 3 month runway mark. And that strategist is just waiting until after the election to gloat publicly about the scheme.

Now that’s a conspiracy theory I can get behind.

Completely agree, and will definitely make that change. As soon as Panera Bread starts selling Chunks.

I find that system inconvenient, as it does not inform me of how I should eat any given item. Classification for the purpose of classification is insufficient. However, an alternative that allows me to prepare my ustensils based on the classification is useful, and therefore I propose…

Soup, salad, and sandwich are the three states of food, and they can go through phase transitions. They are closely accompanied by spoon, fork, and knife, respectively.

• A soup is any food that requires a spoon, and thus includes soups, drinks, cereal with milk, etc. Tipping a container is merely the use of the container as a large and unwieldy spoon, a straw is similarly a spoon when its topology is combined with suction.

• A salad then is anything bite sized that can be forked, and one’s hands are little more than fleshy forks, the fingers prehensile tines. Popcorn, salads, cut up steak bites, a handful of cheerios, etc.

• A sandwich is anything that requires it to be cut in order to be consumed, and one’s incisors are merely built-in knives. A sandwich is thus the vast majority of the cube rule’s content, and only because the cube rule focuses on the physical location of the starch. This is, of course, entirely irrelevant when it comes to the consumption of food.

• To observe a phase transition, one can cut up a sandwich without consuming it, thereby turning it into a salad; can drown a salad to turn it into a soup; can freeze a soup to turn it into a sandwich, etc.

Shredded cheese is a salad.

AI can draw fingers, Midjourney fixed that in their model over a year ago now.

So I’d say we have a real race on our hands!

Is it bad that my first thought goes to “have you tried a federal database that keeps track of guns, gun owners, and gun ownership applicants?” And yet I know this new idiocy is far more likely to happen than the much more reasonable yet somehow illegal federal gun registry.

Something about English wants me to say it should be “Battle of the Santas Clause,” but not knowing any of the rules, I couldn’t tell you why.

Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.

If dropping a database scares you, you are either unaware of the disaster recovery process, or there isn’t one. Edumacate yourself, or the org, as appropriate, so as to increase your confidence when dropping databases.

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.