sethammons

sorry, wont make it. Appointment.

Ok

sorry, wont make it. Stupid appointment.

Banned!

So no discussion happened and they were left uninformed? I talk through things with my family and share different takes and sources. Some are unhinged and called out. But usually there is lots of common ground. And sometimes changed options.

No single raindrop believes it to be blamed for the flood.

I think this is wildly wrongheaded. The socially polite "no politics" is a critical insulator allowing normally non-socially acceptable behavior to grow.

I am convinced it is those in power not wanting an informed populace.

We are not in uninteresting times. People need to be engaging in world around them, not ignoring it.

A: "My neighbors are scared"

B: "Don't talk about that, we might get testy because I think your neighbors should be scared."

I immediately took it to be a slick 2001 reference.

Devs tell computers what to do. Computers tell Daves "I can't do that."

The doctor from Idiocracy: it says your shit's fucked up.

We are getting ai responses from cloud providers. From both aws and google, my teams have received obviously ai generated and non-applicable advice.

The latest was that we need to write in object pooling in their client code, an option that doesn't exist yet in _their_ client code. Like, yo, that is a you-problem on performance bottlenecks; we expect you to provide solutions.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent

Item one: find and complete abandoned check lists.

Item two: forget this checklist exists

I mostly kid. My life is ruled by checklist, alarms, and calendars. I have a single notebook with a carry forward pressing items style checklist. Two columns: priority and keep in mind. I have to abandon it quarterly because i cannot do everything on the lists.

Everyone I know who says they want government ran more like a business are actually saying "if a business was that inefficient, it would cease to exist." They are quoting $500 hammers and tossing around tax money like, well, tossing around someone else's money. They want better stewardship.

However, many who claim to want this better stewardship have no idea how wasteful businesses are. And the idea that government should profit off its services sounds good to the (capitalist trained) mind, at least on the surface. Dig an inch deep however, and it should be obvious that the government is managing cost centers by definition, and expecting a profit is asinine. The goal of being business-like quickly degrades under scrutiny. Digging an inch deeper is seemingly impossible for many.

Yeah, the idea of running it like a business should die. But I think most who say it acknowledge there are differences and what they are really wanting is stewardship.

Glacier park had 150 glaciers in the mid 1800s. Today it has 26. No crisis to see: we still have nearly 20% of what we once had /s

That doesn't track. As a recipient, checking one location for updates (my inbox) is easier than polling N websites for updates. If I had to recall all the various websites for everything I need updates for, I'd quickly miss updates.

When working in Elixir, everything is about the shape of things. I have now taken that word usage from that ecosystem because I find it useful.

In all the cases you mentioned, the banks have risk. Normal lending falls into normal economic rules. We've (effectively) removed the risk for banks with education loan. Wanting "all their money" is a translation of "accept no risk." The risk is required for economic rules to apply.

Why should banks not accept risk at all? Why was 7 years protection not effective? I have seen no evidence that the previous protections banks had were insufficient.

Spherical cows. You are applying economic theory in a vacuum. Sure, we joked at the time we could just declare bankruptcy and keep the degree. However, show me sources showing that this was a real problem. It wasn't.

Simply, people were not playing the game that way in any serious way. I am pretty sure I have never met a single person who declared bankruptcy purely to avoid a student loan.

Which is it? Greed by banks. They were functionally fine up through the late nineties. The rules changed because banks wanted all their money instead of nearly all their money.

This is not market economics. This is regulatory capture. Market economics suggests they were more market based when there was risks to banks. The risks are removed and they can print out debt.

Technically true is the best kind of true.

Fact: they were dischargeable. Fact: there was no crisis else rates would have already factored in. Else the argument is they were losing money overall. They wouldn't do that for literal decades. Fact: after the loans were no longer dischargeable, banks were guaranteed their rates and stopped being competitive with them and rates increased.

Everyone would do it.

No, they wouldn't. Source: go back a couple decades, and student loans had low interest rates and were dischargeable in bankruptcy. It was an option. And, in fact, practically nobody did that.

Why would it be better to not allow the debt discharged ever? That is the current situation. 7 years as a limit is better policy than "you owe this forever no matter what"

The full reason is that preventing bankruptcy is the only way to keep interest rates low and make the loans widely available

"They are eating the dogs and cats." It simply isn't true. I got my student loans a quarter century ago. Back then the loans were dischargeable and low. My loans came in at like 4% interest at the time.

It is propaganda that it was a widespread problem and the "solution" was to legally protect banks from risk. Then rates exploded and regulatory capture kept people locked in.

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/25/trump-iran-oil-insider-trad...

Lmgtfy: there are many articles and plenty of analysis available. Trades are happening on prediction markets minutes before Trump announces market altering information, trades that only make sense when you know that Trump is about to make an announcement.

I was experiencing daily crashes of ghostty on mac with no crash report, always during claude sessions, and after the crash, I'd lose my session. Though, now we can cmd+f to search ghostty output as of the most recent version.

Le sigh. Fine, the punishment was you forfeit your chickens to your neighbor. Should those chickens be inedible by the new legal owner? What if they have to return them later if new evidence comes to light?

there shouldn’t be irreversible punishment

I am not convinced. "You can no longer hold office" is a permanent punishment. Why should that not be allowed?

Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence

I am also unconvinced. I don't think it is fair to treat a child like an adult and I think those in power should have more stringent standards and larger consequences for violating them.

I tie knots at the ends of my drawstrings to prevent them (mostly) from retracting

I don't have a twitter or x account. I clicked the link, a log in modal popped up, I dismissed it, then was able to play the video. Firefox on iPhone if it matters.

The smart spider is portia, a jumping spider. A quick search uncovers zounds of videos, articles, and scientific publications on them.

They specialize is hunting spiders, changing hunting tactics based on type and number of prey. Yes, they count. They strategize. They make multi-step plans that take them out of sight of prey. And some people keep them as pets.

Amazing specialization. I was wondering the same thing. Cave glow worms cast a "fishing line," and this is similar-ish. I wonder if N million years ago, a couple of fishing-line-like spiders started anchoring their lines, and the ones with a more conic shape anchor may led to more success over time. And the anchor may have only worked on territorial prey. Fun stuff to imagine.

Speed is part of fluency. Fluency and understanding feel related

As described in court filings, from at least December 2022 through December 2024, Mazulina conspired with Russian freight forwarding companies and others to unlawfully ship controlled items, including industrial oil and gas equipment, from the United States to Russia, through intermediary countries. At one point, in June 2023, Mazulina told colleagues that her clients were paying through bank accounts in third party countries because “[m]ost of [her] clients [were] currently sanctioned with USA.” Mazulina attempted to conceal the unlawful scheme by submitting and causing the submission of false export documents to the U.S. government, which omitted the information that the goods were destined for Russia.

That feels materially different than a software program released in the open domestic market.

And while it feels different, the government would apparently disagree: https://exportcontrol.lbl.gov/training/export-control-overvi...

Distribution of software to a foreign national within the US is an explicit proviso of the law. That is a wild law and I am surprised it stands.

its about who can track you and why. I'd much rather a list of times I access a site that required age verification being stored by the government, than every single fucking page I looked at tracked by google/meta.

It is about what abuses can happen from that info. Google could sell your data. The government can imprison you. You don't think Trump wouldn't try to collect info on his opponents and weaponize the DOJ against them?