Link. I have met eternal travelers. Members of a fascinating and ephemeral culture.
Author Archives: jgordon
Learned from House investigation of Trump insurrection: “Hutchinson told the committee that Passantino urged her not to tell what she knew, prodding her to say she didn’t recall events she clearly did.”
Link. “And then you’re going to be taken care of.” Good summary of the new details. The Trump insurrection was a serious project.
“The fall in house prices in September 2022 was almost as steep as the fall in house prices in the months right before the Great Recession officially began in late 2007”
Link. Lots of natural experiments in macroeconomics. “Basic Keynesian macroeconomic intuition still looks pretty good in the 2020s, just as it did in the 2010s.”
“ I.R.S. failed to audit Mr. Trump during his first two years in office despite a rule that states that “the individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to mandatory review.”
Link. Corruption.
GOP Rep George Santos has an entirely invented history.
Link. May have fled prosecution in Brazil. “Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name “
Traditional GOP trying to quit Trump.
Link. Trump playing cards was such a dumb move even the craven sense weakness.
Configurable Mastodon UX with Steampipe running against Mastodon API.
Link. “simple control for boosts that enables me to see my home timeline with or without boosts”. I want option to also show only root posts.
Ghana gone bad: “Ghana’s leaders have become addicted to the cycle of debt and bailout — this is the 17th time the IMF has helped them out of debt”
Link. Government made very bad investment decisions.
Where to send people with Twitter Files delusions.
Link. Caveat: I am following Musk’s Twitter Files ravings from a distance and only scanned this article. Sharing it because I think it’s a good reference to have at hand.
“WordPress Plugin that allows you to embed Block Protocol blocks into posts on your WordPress sites just as easily as you insert any other block.”
Link. 1990s style semantic markup automation with human readable structured descriptions.
“former president Donald Trump planned even before the 2020 election to declare he had won even if he actually lost, and how he executed that plan”
Link. He’d been good about making each small step seem possibly undirected.
“In contrast to the ‘Native American elevated alcohol consumption’ belief, Native Americans compared to whites had lower or comparable rates across the range of alcohol measures examined.”
Link. Alcohol is abused widely.
“Internet America. … more real to most Americans than all the stop signs, livestock, and boarded-up storefronts.”
Link. I’d expected this ever since Asimov’s Solaris, but it became true so gradually it went unremarked. “Internet America is the place where our myths become dogma.”
“Within 48 hours we were getting threats in email and on other platforms as well as on Twitter”
Link. Musk aimed his minions at them. Because they hurt his feelings.
Scholars agree – the Roberts SCOTUS is an imperial court.
Link. Way beyond recent courts.
Paul Krugman is on Mastdon: (@pkrugman@mastodon.online)
Link. For at least two weeks. Already 31.9K Followers. I’m amazed I didn’t know.
Disabling AWDL (AirDrop, etc) to Work Around Ventura Wi-Fi Issues.
Link. I’ll go to Ventura in Feb 23 or so.
Epic Settles With FTC: 500+ million.
Link. Their statement translated: “everybody did bad sh*t but we got caught and we will maybe stop some”
“long article defending Mr. Xi’s pandemic strategy as “totally correct.”
Link. China only has pooled PCR testing and that doesn’t work at high positivity. Idiot leaders supremely confident in their talent rule Russia and China; happily our current idiot savant only rules Twitter.
macOS safe mode primer: “you can check that it really is in Safe mode by opening System Information. Click on Software at the left, and the line Boot Mode should say Safe rather than Normal.”
Link. A useful ref.
Alzheimer’s disease‐like neuropathology in three species of oceanic dolphin.
Link. “amyloid-beta plaques and hyperphosphorylated tau” in dolphins dying of stranding. It’s been often said only humans get AD.
Linktree sort of explained.
Link. Since Musk banned it I went looking for what it was. I think popular with Only Fan market.
Tiling Conjecture proved false: “[Tao] and Greenfeld didn’t compute the dimension of the space it lives in; they just know it’s massive … “
Link. “higher-dimensional geometry is just nasty” by which he means 10^100^100 dimensions and how does anyone writer about this?!
“We are destroying the multilateral trade system that we took leadership in creating. But we also don’t have the guts to openly repudiate past policies or to actually withdraw from agreements we signed.”
Link. China is justly upset. But they are likewise hypocrites.
“Back in 2016, Musk used a sham product launch to convince Tesla shareholders to acquire SolarCity — a solar-energy company that at the time was helmed by Musk’s cousin.”
Link. This piece has the goods.
Memory and perception use the same neural networks. So how do we know which is which?
Link. We don’t know yet.
Elder warns the young: It’s hell to get old.
Link. I sincerely don’t think they need to know. There’s nothing to be done except to die. Enjoy it while you got it.
“the reason we have so many diaries from Confederates in the early 1860s is that they imagined they were the Founders of their own new nation.”
Link. They though they were the heroes. The reason why Trump’s people implicated themselves. (He’s not that dumb.)
Mastodon query tool gives information rich overview (dev).
Link. Some instances have API disabled due to abuse potential. The chattiness is a design challenge.
“It has become increasingly clear, week by week, that Musk is unstable and erratic … he’s an erratic huckster, a liar, and a low-grade (at least) sociopath.”
Link. Noteworthy only because Gruber was once optimistic about Musk Twitter. Tesla P/E has a long way to fall.
WordPress/Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg: “We had to do a lot of cleanup when we bought Tumblr. There was a lot of hate speech on the platform, and they were behind on content moderation.”
Link. Mullenweg is the anti-Musk.
“The Times investigation found a stunning cascade of mistakes that started with Mr. Putin … convinced of his own brilliance…”
Link. In depth investigation of how Russia walked into a catastrophe. Partly made by Russia and especially by Ukraine.
Jesse Squires Mastodon review: “I’ve only been using Mastodon for a few days so far, but wow — I’m impressed”
Link. “you can edit posts — something Twitter could not be bothered to implement. Mastodon also allows you to opt-out of search engine indexing.”
Is Elon Musk evil or simply a fool?
Link. “The answer, as so often with these things, is “both.””
MacStories Is on Mastodon with Its Own Server (multiple accounts)
Link. This is what WaPo and NYT should do – their own server. Can also follow via RSS.
Publishing an RSS Feed to Mastodon.
Link. I’m hoping to implement IFTTT version today.
“Contacts on the Mac encloses all phone numbers in two zero-width (and thus invisible) Unicode characters: U+202D (LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE) and U+202C (POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING)”
Link. Screws up copy-paste into web forms. Has messed me up but I did not know why until now.
“Barbarella is quite possibly the most 1968 movie ever made.”
Link. I saw it in 70s and was nostalgic even then.
Regulatory fix for market failure in antibiotic development.
Link. Bipartisan but is an admission markets can fail so GOP sensitive.
“DeSantis is increasingly making himself the face of vaccine conspiracy theories”
Link. Remember Republican war on Science?
RIP Donald Trump Republican.
Link. “A giant “fuck you” to Musk, to his party, to everyone but the people in on the joke.…. but MAGA knows that Trump is a silly man. They love it.“
“Musk (whose reported affinity for booting accounts who annoy him is now a regular theme) suspended competitor Mastodon’s Twitter account.”
Link.
WaPo on Elon going after his journalist critics.
Link. People who stay are empowering Musk
China’s vision for manned moon (before 2030) and mars (nuclear propulsion) missions.
Link. The telescope sounds exciting.
A Winter Biking Gear and Tips
Link. The zip tie thing is wild. I’d not seen bar mitts for road bars before, that’s neat. Doesn’t address really cold gear though.
Who Are the ‘Never-Coviders’?
Link. Emily is one. Somewhat careful but not especially. Lots of exposures. Nothing.
“The Keystone Pipeline ruptured Wednesday night near a creek in northern Kansas, spilling what its operator, TC Energy, says is about 14,000 barrels of oil”
Link. Cheaper to pay cleanup than to stop leaks.
“Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49”
Link. More than accidents?
“September 2021 poll showed support for interracial marriage at 94%.”
Link. I’d like to know the race/gender/culture background of the 6%.
On wokeness: “To focus on the scholarly contributions of some European leftists is to ignore the much richer veins of Black thought that have been in America for centuries.”
Link. Be woke to own the cons.