America needs more "bureaucrats," not fewer

https://www.slowboring.com/p/america-needs-more-bureaucrats-not

The problem is that contracting-out core government functions is really bad.

To be clear, it’s not universally bad. There are many situations in which the government really should just to go buy something. The government uses a lot of computers, for example, but it doesn’t make computers. Because generally speaking, the best time to contract something out is when a robust private market exists for the thing you need — the government buys lots of computers, but so do companies and private individuals all across America. In these cases, it’s easy to verify whether the price is fair, and buying things that private buyers also buy to some extent guarantees the quality of goods.

But over the past generation, there’s been a strong trend toward contracting-out basic government functions.

At worst you end up with, as Alon Levy observes in mass transit construction, “consultants supervising consultants” because even the ability to manage contractors has been lost. The more common problem, as John Gravois wrote way back in his 2011 Washington Monthly article “More Bureaucrats Please” is that the contracting paradigm leads to ripoffs. Indeed, government contractors arguably have an obligation to their shareholders to rip the public off. [...]

Over the longer-run, though, this dynamic leads to selective exit of a lot of the best civil service employees to higher-paid contracting roles, and eventually the loss of the ability to supervise the contracts effectively. And because there’s no private market for what you’re buying, there are no checks on quality or price. I think this all mostly starts from a well-intentioned place of sincere frustration with civil service rules that create real problems. But there is a serious time-consistency issue around state capacity. In the moment, it’s always easier to work around the lack of capacity rather than try to address it. The longer that goes on, though, the more state capacity decays and the greater the reliance on hacks and workarounds, until one day someone tosses out the idea of arbitrarily firing half the civil service with no regard to quality or job role. What we need to do is actually fix the problem.

How the Gas Turbine Conquered the Electric Power Industry

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-the-gas-turbine-conquered-the

This then points to a fundamental challenge of technology development. Technology improves in incremental steps over many decades (or centuries). There needs to be some way to fund that development over that period of time. In many cases, the market can address this, but if the technology is competing with an existing, superior solution, this is more challenging, even if the long-term prospects of the technology are brighter.

A TAXONOMY OF TECH DEBT

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt

Hi there. I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, and I’m the engineering manager for the Champions team on LoL. I’ve worked on several different teams on League over the past years, but one focus has been consistent: I’m obsessed with tech debt. I want to find it, I want to understand it, and where possible, I want to fix it.

When engineers talk about any existing piece of technology - for example League of Legends patch 8.4 - we often talk about tech debt. I define tech debt as code or data that future developers will pay a cost for. Countless blog posts, articles, and definitions have been written about this scourge of software development. This post will focus on types of tech debt I’ve seen during my time working at Riot, and a model for discussing it that we’re starting to use internally. If you only take away one lesson from this article, I hope you remember the “contagion” metric discussed below.

/u/Lapsed__Pacifist: “Do you ever tire of War?”

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/comments/1altle5/do_you_ever_get_tired_of_war/

Over a decade later the world isn’t any safer or peaceful than it was during the summer of 2011. The US and allied militaries are embroiled again in another conflict in the Middle East, poised to spiral into a regional war if not carefully and diplomatically managed. Three US Army Reservists were killed just last week at their base in Jordan. If anything, the worlds gotten worse since then. Wars rage in Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, Syria, and Palestine and more.

I think of that brave Hazara Soldier, who likely spent his entire life in a conflict that he and generations of his ancestors could not escape. I look at the wars that rage today in Ukraine, Palestine, and Yemen, fueled by greed, hate, ideology, fanaticism, and fascism. The men who started these wars will never smell blood, or gunpowder or dust or fire. They will never hear the screams of the wounded and dying. For them it is all a game.

I’ll soon be receiving orders for another overseas deployment, which will be my sixth.

I feel like that sad, pitying young Afghan, asking the same weary question to the leaders of the nations who started and prolong these conflicts.

“Do you ever tire of War?”

Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs Gave America a Rare Gift: Harmony

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/arts/music/tracy-chapman-fast-car-grammys.html

When a beloved artist who has not performed live in some time returns to the stage, we often expect them to appear fragile, unsteady, ill at ease. But during Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, when the camera first pulled back from a tight shot of a woman’s fingers picking a familiar riff on an acoustic guitar and revealed the face of the great, elusive folk singer Tracy Chapman, what you noticed was the joy radiating from her face. Her contented smile. The unwavering tone and rich steadiness of her voice.

It was a genuine moment of warmth and unity, the sort seldom offered these days by televised award shows — or televised anything, really. Singing her rousing 1988 hit “Fast Car” live for the first time in years, duetting with the country star Luke Combs — whose faithful cover of the song was one of last year’s defining hits — and taking in the rapturous applause of her musical peers, Chapman gave off the feeling, in the words of her timeless song, that she belonged.

The high cost of Uber’s small profit

https://disconnect.blog/the-high-cost-of-ubers-small-profit/

As Uber has been fighting those battles, it’s also been rolling out a new way to further empower itself. Surge pricing is nothing new — it increased prices during periods of high demand — but in the past few years Uber rolled out dynamic pricing to take it to a whole new level. Dynamic pricing makes rider fares and driver pay much harder to predict by causing prices to shift according to more factors that are hidden from everyone but Uber itself, and it divorces the amount drivers are paid from the amount customers pay for the ride. Further, as part of its upfront pricing policy, Uber also removes any context on the fare — or pay, for a driver — that it offers: whether it’s high or low, what a base fare would be, and why it’s made that calculation.

Drivers compellingly argue that upfront pricing is designed to reduce their pay, as has been painstakingly detailed in a column by Columbia Business School professor Len Sherman for Forbes. Long-time Uber driver Sergio Avedian told him it was “the latest in a long line of earnings reductions” because it ensures “a collapse of my personal Utilization Rate if I refuse to accept lowball offers, or a collapse in my hourly earnings if I do.” Drivers feel the company is testing to see how low of a payment they’ll accept for a trip and it will penalize them if they refuse too many rides.

/u/vacri on "What is something that Americans are (actually) very good at?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1au4h00/what_is_something_that_americans_are_actually/kr328vj/

Talking to strangers. As a tourist in the US, I had so many people in public just randomly start talking to me, just to pass the time. On a bus, crossing a car park, whatever. Just chatting to folks. They'd then hear my accent and the conversation would steer that way, but they still broke the ice first.

I did mention to someone that it was only men doing this, and they said that American women do it as well, just not to solo males (for obvious reasons). But with other women or a mixed couple, they'll break the ice with strangers as well.

I haven't encountered that in any other English-speaking country I've been to. Not at that frequency, anyway.

The Money Is In All The Wrong Places

https://defector.com/the-money-is-in-all-the-wrong-places

Writers are paid less now than they were 50 years ago, for the same work. Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That's more than $21 per word in today's dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn't exist. You could be the most popular novelist in the world and not make $21/word to report. You could argue that no writer today is as good or popular as Hemingway was at his peak, but no writer today is even making half or a quarter of what he made, and writers only ever get so famous. If someone were paid $5/word in 2022—which is something I have never heard of happening and is a full $2 more than than anyone I know has ever been paid per word—that would be a quarter of what Hemingway was paid. That writer would be able to pay their rent and health insurance premiums and tuck some money away in savings off a standard-issue story per month, but again, that lucky writer does not exist.

What this means is that the door a writer could step through to make a career 50 or even 20 years ago, the one opening onto a life where someone who works hard and does well could buy a house on the strength of that work alone, has been slammed shut.

That's not because there isn't money to be made in any of these industries, either—not just Sydney Sweeney's, but mine, too. Some people are making very good money in these fields, and have been for a long time. They just aren't the people making the art—the product, if you want to think about it like that. They aren't the people whose names you know, whose lives can upend overnight because of the attention and lack of privacy that fame brings. They are people who profit off art without actually making it.

What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools

https://huyenchip.com/2024/03/14/ai-oss.html

Four years ago, I did an analysis of the open source ML ecosystem. Since then, the landscape has changed, so I revisited the topic. This time, I focused exclusively on the stack around foundation models. [...]

I think of the AI stack as consisting of 4 layers: infrastructure, model development, application development, and applications.

The Moral Economy of Tech

https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm

Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard because they involve politics. But they should involve politics. Politics is the thing we do to keep ourselves from murdering each other. In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise democratic control over that software.

Second, the surveillance economy is way too dangerous. Even if you trust everyone spying on you right now, the data they're collecting will eventually be stolen or bought by people who scare you. We have no ability to secure large data collections over time.

The goal should be not to make the apparatus of surveillance politically accountable (though that is a great goal), but to dismantle it. Just like we don't let countries build reactors that produce plutonium, no matter how sincere their promises not to misuse it, we should not allow people to create and indefinitely store databases of personal information. The risks are too high.

I think a workable compromise will be to allow all kinds of surveillance, but limit what anyone is allowed to store or sell.

More broadly, we have to stop treating computer technology as something unprecedented in human history. Not every year is Year Zero. This is not the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.

There is also prior art in attempts at achieving immortality, limitless wealth, and Galactic domination. We even know what happens if you try to keep dossiers on an entire country.

If we're going to try all these things again, let's at least learn from our past, so we can fail in interesting new ways, instead of failing in the same exasperating ways as last time.

One Approach To Leadership Reflection

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-approach-leadership-reflection-aliya-bhatia

This fall, I’ve had several requests to share my leadership reflection practice. I felt it couldn’t hurt to write it down, for my own benefit to examine where it stands and for the benefit of others looking to refine their own reflection process.

There are 2 important premises to this exercise that are far more essential than any specific reflection approach.

First, the reason for these journals is that my memory (like that of most humans) is short, selective, and quite revisionist. These journals are designed to let me capture in short-hand various big picture ideas, personal histories, and readings. When starting a new project or a new job, I have my reflections at my fingertips: Checklists about how to launch a new team, strategies to harness the brilliance of a diverse group of people, and a glimpse of how I have handled (or, mishandled) similar situations in the past.

The window for great-grandmothers is closing

https://memoirsandrambles.substack.com/p/the-window-for-great-grandmothers

But even more interesting is that this “age of great-grandmothers” as I like to call it not only is ending, but it hasn’t been here for long either.

Now, I won’t dig too deep into the numbers but this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022. One can extrapolate it was even lower in the 1900s, and before then too.

What that means is that there probably weren’t too many great-grandmothers before the 1900s either. Indeed, people had children even earlier, but it was hard to get old enough to have grandkids even in that case.

So all in all, it seems that the window in history during which there were probably the most great-grandparents is kind of around now, and it’s seemingly about to end.

'Lose the Romney': Inside Ronna McDaniel's Long Fall

https://theankler.com/p/lose-the-romney-inside-ronna-mcdaniels

McDaniel led a secret and willful resistance (as did, with futility and not in secret, her uncle Mitt Romney). Trump wanted her to cancel the debates and she ignored him. Whatever Nikki Haley represented, whether meaningful resistance in the party or just a thorn in Trump’s side, was only possible because McDaniel, in spite of Trump’s ire, let the debates go on. 

Then, as it became obvious that nothing would interrupt the Trump march, McDaniel herself seemed to go on administrative strike. The RNC’s fundraising efforts, one of its key functions, providing another money spigot for the general election, seemed to dry up. McDaniel blamed it on the constant call for money to pay Trump’s legal bills, leaving nothing left over. But, in truth, the RNC, under McDaniel — who had assembled a national committee of Trump foot-draggers — stopped working. Passive resistance. Finally, Trump fired her — though in typical Trump disorganization, this probably came too late with the fundraising hole too deep to make up. 

McDaniel may have actually wounded him.

SOCIAL MEDIA, AUTHORITARIANISM, AND THE WORLD AS IT IS

https://lpeproject.org/blog/social-media-authoritarianism-and-the-world-as-it-is/

The world would be better if these platforms were dismantled and their revenues shared with the people, professions, and communities whose livelihoods and public spaces they’ve worked to foreclose, and if a more localized variation on digital spaces for deliberation, discussion, and discovery could be constructed in their wake. But we’re not even close to this. 

Standing in this moment, with platforms that exercise outsized control over our information ecosystem going nowhere, we need to weigh our choices and define what we’re actually fighting for. The right is fighting to take control of these platforms, while liberals and some on the left are fighting to expand vectors of platform control, without thinking hard enough about who will wield this power and who is likely to get hurt. We can’t treat these factors as “outside the scope of this paper.” We need to map and sit with the implications of this conjuncture — a complex endeavor I barely begin here. My hope in offering this analysis is to open up a larger conversation among those invested in dismantling the dangerous centralized power of the tech industry, and to do the work of mapping and thinking together. 

Judge rules Georgia Republican Party vice chairman voted illegally

https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-judge-rules-that-republican-brian-k-pritchard-voted-illegally/M4A27QQNQJDW7MTI66MRF5B4EQ/

A judge ruled Wednesday that the Georgia Republican Party’s first vice chairman, Brian K. Pritchard, violated state election laws when he voted nine times while serving probation for a felony check forgery sentence.

Pritchard, a conservative talk show host, must pay a $5,000 fine and receive a public reprimand from the State Election Board, according to the decision by Administrative Law Judge Lisa Boggs.

The Islamophobic Smear Campaign Dividing Democrats

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/opinion/islamophobia-democrats-adeel-mangi.html

On paper, President Biden’s nominee to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Adeel Abdullah Mangi, is an archetypical candidate for a federal judgeship. Mangi has a sterling legal education, which he followed with a distinguished career at a high-profile private firm mixing corporate litigation with important pro bono work. He also has a classic American story: He grew up in a poor country dreaming of a career as a lawyer and immigrated to the United States, where he ascended to the heights of his profession.

The candidate has another quality that was especially appealing to Biden, who has made diversifying the federal bench a key priority: Mangi would be the first Muslim American federal appellate judge in the United States.

When Mangi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in December for a hearing about this lifetime appointment, Republican senators did not ask him about his legal background or judicial philosophy. “Do you condemn the atrocities of Hamas terrorists?” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas demanded of Mangi, a Pakistani American with no connection to Hamas or Palestinians other than the fact that he is Muslim, along with 1.8 billion other people across the globe. 

I’ve been studying congressional emails to constituents for 15 years − and found these 4 trends after scanning 185,222 of them

https://theconversation.com/ive-been-studying-congressional-emails-to-constituents-for-15-years-and-found-these-4-trends-after-scanning-185-222-of-them-225618

In recent years, this practice has evolved into sending constituents email messages from House members’ and senators’ official email accounts. The rules still apply: Members of Congress who want to send campaign material or partisan political messages must do so from their campaign accounts or personal accounts, not email addresses ending in “@house.gov” or “@senate.gov.”

In 2009, I began collecting all of the official messages as a part of dissertation work, with the hopes of creating an archive for researchers to use and to answer my own questions about how legislators would “look” ideologically if all we had to go on were the votes they decided to communicate to constituents. At that time, I had to manually enter my email address into the website of every member of Congress. Now it’s easier to keep up, because I just sign up for new members’ lists after every election.

For years, I’ve shared various insights, analyzing word usage, trends in geographical terms and finer bits of information such as how many members of Congress talked about COVID-19 on a given day during the pandemic.

From this work, I have developed a few major insights into how members of Congress use this free perk, offering a better understanding of contemporary political communication tactics. Here are four important points I’ve learned.

Organizing Aid to Gaza Led Me to a Harsh Truth: Biden Is on Board for Ethnic Cleansing

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/23/biden-israel-gaza-aid-ethnic-cleansing/

In the short term, Biden’s aid policies won’t deliver any meaningful relief for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The latest effort involves the U.S. military constructing a causeway off the coast of Gaza to deliver as many as 2 million meals per day. The process implicitly accepts Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings. The causeway is expected to take two months to implement, a timeline guaranteeing famine for Gaza’s most vulnerable populations.

I’m Begging the Courts to Stop Citing My Work

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/courts-junk-science-forensics-evidence/677739/

But the Nevada decision the reader flagged for me was something different—and “frustrating” doesn’t quite capture what’s going on. Maddening is more like it, because in this case my work was used to justify an ongoing injustice.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve written at length about how, despite near-universal agreement in the scientific community that matching marks on human skin to a suspect’s teeth is forensic quackery, the courts have continued to allow this sort of analysis to be used in criminal trials. Dozens of people convicted or arrested because of this “science” have been exonerated.

The maddening part of the Nevada opinion, which came down in December 2022, is that the justices appeared to agree with what I’ve reported, and went on to argue that the defendant should have noticed my reporting years ago. Because he failed to do so then, he is prohibited from using it in his appeal now.

That’s all bad enough. Here’s the punch line: While the Nevada Supreme Court says that criminal defendants should have been aware of the reporting I and others were doing on bite-mark analysis back in the mid-2000s, some defendants did notice it then, and begged the courts to do something. The courts ignored them—including the Nevada Supreme Court.

The Feds Can Film Your Front Porch for 68 Days Without a Warrant, Says Court

https://gizmodo.com/feds-can-film-your-front-porch-without-warrant-1851352414

Law enforcement in Kansas recorded the front of a man’s home for 68 days straight, 15 hours a day, and obtained evidence to prove him guilty on 16 charges. The officers did not have a search warrant, using a camera on a pole positioned across the street to capture Bruce Hay’s home. A federal court ruled on Tuesday that it was fine for law enforcement to do so, in what’s potentially a major reduction in privacy law.

“Mr. Hay had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a view of the front of his house,” said the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its decision on U.S. vs Hay. “As video cameras proliferate throughout society, regrettably, the reasonable expectation of privacy from filming is diminished.”

Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/march-web-only/ned-flanders-douglas-wilson-russell-moore-character.html

Do these norms keep people of bad character from ascending to high office? Not at all. Hypocrites and demagogues have always been with us. What every generation of Americans have recognized until now, though, is that there is a marked difference between some leaders not living up to the character expected of them and leaders operating in a space where there aren’t expectations of personal character. You might hire an accountant to do your taxes, only later to find that he’s a tax fraud and an embezzler. That’s quite different from hiring an open fraud because you’ve concluded that only chumps obey the tax laws.

That’s because no leader of any community, association, or nation is an abstract collection of policies. We select leaders to make decisions about matters that haven’t happened yet, or that might not even be contemplated. A dentist who screams profanities at opponents and promises a practice built around “revenge and retribution” and the tearing down of all the norms of modern dentistry is not someone you should trust with a drill in your mouth. How much more so when it comes to entrusting a person with nuclear codes.

When Experts Fail

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/experts-failure-covid-19-pandemic/677816/

At the time, the medical guidance was clear that people should not gather in large groups or be in proximity, and certainly not while singing and shouting. If doctors believed that the risks of such gatherings could be mitigated with masks or by being outdoors, they should have already been pressing for the lifting of the strictest measures everywhere, with the same advice they gave protesters. But if they were still holding to the theories that underpinned the lockdowns—and especially the school closures—then their approval of the demonstrations meant they were consciously setting aside those concerns in the name of a political cause with which they agreed.

Either way, they were acting as advocates rather than scientists. In the words of the environmental journalist Peter M. Sandman, they “clearly damaged the credibility of public health as a scientific enterprise that struggles to be politically neutral.”

The Long Haul

https://www.switchyardmag.com/issue-2/thelonghaul

From the beginning, one thing was clear: the majority, around 80 percent, of long-haulers are women (and people assigned female at birth), often in our 30s, 40s, and 50s. In the United States, an outsized portion are women of color—but it would take nearly three years for the federal government to start to minimally acknowledge this fact. (Stats on race and long Covid are still estimations, but the Census Bureau has found Latinx, African American, and Indigenous people are most likely to develop long Covid.) Early in the pandemic, women of color were denied care during acute Covid infections, with hospitals calling security or the police on them in emergency rooms. As long Covid set in, they were disbelieved or ignored.

The official story has been that long Covid is a new, mysterious, and therefore still incomprehensible illness—all of which is simply untrue. More than a century of medical science has told this same story, of the unlucky few who never recovered from viral or other infectious illnesses. It happened after the 1918 flu and after polio. It happened following Ebola, West Nile virus, and SARS in 2003. The narrative has always been that some sufferers are too weak, or simply too weak-willed, to return to their former lives. The truth is much more complicated.

[...]

The local beach was less than a mile away, but my wheelchair cannot handle sand. I walked from the parking lot to the water but felt winded and lightheaded. I couldn’t stand in the surf and didn’t dare try to swim. On the hottest days, I sat on large boulders watching the waves roll in, dipping my feet in to keep cool. I had longed to be near the ocean, but the struggle just to get to the water’s edge left me alternating between sorrow and fury.

Later, I would remember 2022 as the summer when people stopped caring. The Washington Post interviewed Americans taking flights while knowingly Covid positive, and CDC research later showed that 81 percent of airplane bathroom wastewater samples had Omicron RNA. Friends who were very careful about Covid in 2020 and 2021 now posted photos on social media of themselves traveling or crowded inside public spaces. Unmasked. As if they couldn’t be reinfected, couldn’t get long Covid. Did it only ever matter to protect themselves?

The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-war-on-the-woke-trumps-the-truth

It isn’t that all the heterodox types have gone full MAGA. It’s just that they seem to loathe racial and social justice activists much more than they oppose Trump, or favor reform. So any time a counter-narrative emerges, they tend to ditch their avowed skepticism and latch onto it.

In the end, despite heterodoxism’s claims to be a tribeless, iconoclastic way of thinking that gives it some special powers to get to the truth, it’s really just a different sort of ideological tribe, with the same biases, preconceptions, and vulnerability to audience capture as any other.

Once you’ve let your opposition to orthodoxies define you, you’re just another orthodoxy.

Photo Booth Camera Effects Fun

Vision Pro is an over-engineered “devkit” // Hardware bleeds genius & audacity but software story is disheartening // What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right // Why Meta could finally have its Android moment

https://hugo.blog/2024/03/11/vision-pro/

Friends and colleagues have been asking me to share my perspective on the Apple Vision Pro as a product. Inspired by my dear friend Matt Mullenweg’s 40th post, I decided to put pen to paper.

This started as a blog post and became an essay before too long, so I’ve structured my writing in multiple sections each with a clear lead to make it a bit easier to digest — peppered with my own ‘takes’. I’ve tried to stick to original thoughts for the most part and link to what others have said where applicable.

Some of the topics I touch on:

• Why I believe Vision Pro may be an over-engineered “devkit”
• The genius & audacity behind some of Apple’s hardware decisions
• Gaze & pinch is an incredible UI superpower and major industry ah-ha moment
• Why the Vision Pro software/content story is so dull and unimaginative
• Why most people won’t use Vision Pro for watching TV/movies
• Apple’s bet in immersive video is a total game-changer for Live Sports
• Why I returned my Vision Pro… and my Top 10 wishlist to reconsider
• Apple’s VR debut is the best thing that ever happened to Oculus/Meta
• My unsolicited product advice to Meta for Quest Pro 2 and beyond

A Minneapolis cop told Somali American teens (in 2015) he was proud U.S. troops killed ‘you folk’ during Black Hawk Down.

blogger.com/blog/posts/3710883320079265557

A moment later, the dashcam recording stops. But two Minneapolis Park Police officers, responding to a backup call, had their cameras and microphones running to capture what Weber said just seconds later. 

“Do you remember what happened in Black Hawk Down when we killed a bunch of you folk? I’m proud of that,” Officer Weber said.

“We didn’t finish the job over there, ‘cause if we had finished the job, you guys wouldn’t be over here right now,” Weber added.

Trump campaign insider recounts failed hunt for 2020 fraud in new book

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/03/10/trump-ken-block-campaign-fraud-book/

Block writes in the book that it has disturbed him to see so many Republicans embrace Trump’s false claims, including in his home state of Rhode Island. And he says he fears that even more claims will come this year from Trump and those who follow him.

“It’s important to understand why the claims of fraud that were made were not just wrong but were demonstrably wrong. We have a narrative that’s false that the election was stolen,” he said in an interview. “The election wasn’t stolen, and you can prove it.”

u/Namtara on Jenny in Forrest Gump

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/18lvwe/who_is_the_most_misunderstood_character_in_all_of/c8g4njy/?context=3

TL;DR: Jenny thought she was molesting Forrest because he couldn't understand what love is, so she either suppressed her feelings or ran away.

Pluralistic: Sympathy for the spammer (15 Jan 2024)

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting reallyrich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?