• 3 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2024

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  • “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” -FDR

    Also:

    Che wants to see California legislators change their approach towards entrepreneurship.

    “Make that path easier. Make it less expensive, make it more simple, streamline it. Instead of putting roadblocks in front of it, open it up. Guide people,” Che said.

    Do we think this guy got a bunch of free money from the government during COVID?

    Oh look, he did. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it was a good program and good to make use of it. But, his whole attitude during the article of complaining about how difficult it’s going to be to figure out how to use it in such a way where he won’t have to pay it back really smacks of “I have never worked in a dishroom or behind a register even a single day of my life.”

    Be grateful. You fuck. Just like you should be grateful that our economic system gives you a little squad of people to run your business day-to-day for you and you get to keep the profits, instead of complaining that all of a sudden you won’t be able to have them do it exactly the way you want them to, whether or not it can economically produce a living wage for them. With lunch for the fancy people and all. You fuck.





  • “Turned on the news in November '89
    I could not move, I could not speak
    Something was burning up in my eyes
    Something wet ran down my cheek
    All those laughing faces, all those tears of joy
    All those warm embraces of men and women, girls and boys
    Sisters and brothers dancing, all singing freedom’s song
    God, if only I could be there to shake your hands and sing along”
    -John Kay, “The Wall”

    Bro snuck across the Berlin Wall with his family when he was 5 years old and you got shot dead if they caught you trying to get across. He came to America, grew up and started a rock and roll band, and then as an adult got to watch the wall fall on television and wrote a song about it.

    People who got born here don’t know what they have.



  • FWIW, 23andme isn’t saying this just out of the blue, but to defend themselves in court from being sued by people who lost their data because of people reusing passwords.

    Honestly everyone sucks here. Don’t reuse passwords for anything remotely important. And, don’t allow people to sign in to any remotely-important web service without 2FA. (Edit: And, if you are going to be sloppy protecting your users from having their accounts broken into, don’t give users access to every other relative’s data for no particular reason.)

    Passwords aside, I’d never in a million years entrust my DNA information to some random outfit on the internet and assume that good things would happen to it, but that’s just me.



  • I’m fairly irritated at myself to report that I just wasted half an hour of my life looking through Rand Paul’s report in detail, because I was curious how he managed to arrive at $900 billion dollars. I spent some time with Google Sheets and trying to de-obfuscate his numbers. I’ll cut to the punch line. It’s:

    • $659 billion in interest on the national debt
    • $236 billion in “improper federal payments” – basically, money that the federal government erroneously paid out to people it realized it shouldn’t have ever given it to in the first place. This number is, apparently, actually real, and I sort of agree with Paul that it sounds big enough to be a problem. I will note that the number went monotonically up all through the Trump years, up to a peak of over $300 billion, and monotonically down through all through the Biden years.
    • $851 million on all the rest of this culture-war bullshit aside from those two single line items

    Or, to put it in visual form:

    Everything in any news story, about Egypt or lobster tanks or transgender monkeys or whatever, is part of the orange slice of the chart.



  • Among notable instances, the National Institutes of Health allocated funds to study Russian cats on treadmills; photos of Barbies were utilized as identification to obtain COVID relief funds; the Department of Defense lost $169 million of outdoor-stored military gear; $6 million went towards tourism in Egypt by the United States Agency for International Development; and the Small Business Administration provided over $200 million to “struggling” music artists such as Post Malone, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne.

    Oh, so it’s culture-war bullshit. Neat.

    “Who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt? Everybody,”

    Oooooh… okay, I get it now. It’s a desperate attempt to find a catchy and memorable thing to blame that isn’t “we give money to rich people by the trillions and tax them less than we do the electricians.” $6 million is like a week’s worth of lost tax revenue from any one of 500 different companies. But sure, tourism in Egypt is the problem. Everyone please remember that.