He says he’s not dead yet …

I think it was created as a markup to explain why they thought the ambiguous tattoos were problematic, I hope they would have assumed no one would be stupid enough to think he literally had tattoos that managed to be flat perfect text in pure black in a photo.

But it turns out Trump is literally that stupid. Or it is convenient so he doesn’t have to field answers like “where’s some corroborating evidence to back up the claimed meaning”.

Of course all of this is almost beside the point. We shouldn’t be doing this in the court of public opinion, it should be in front of a real judge and if deported it should be in compliance with orders that he be deported to anywhere but Salvador, and even if someone deports to El Salvador, we shouldn’t just directly deport straight to a prison that may not even have anything to do with country of origin.

Note I’ve seen the “protecting me from a meeting” backfire so hard.

One time for lack of headcount I did a bit of double duty as project manager including executive meetings. Then management found a project manager and instead of knocking out my part of those meetings in like 5 minutes, I suddenly had generally hour long prep meetings so my new project manager would be confident enough to engage in whatever random topic the execs tended to go into. After a quarter they demanded I swap back in to do the meetings instead, which I was happy to do.

Also, those meetings are my best chance to cut through some confusion so I don’t end up with a mess of crap in the tracker.

Another problem is when management somehow manages to make a simple project into a crazy complex project.

I see two drivers of this: General empire building, more headcount under me == I am more important

Trying to use unvetted, low quality labor to do something being their abilities and trying to make it up with volume because corporate leadership declared it should be possible and anyone who says otherwise it’s a bad fit for the company.

Yeah, the zwave/zigbee options tend to be more barebones on the local display, so I very carfeully looked at the wifi options to find the best of both worlds.

Of course my opengarage is wifi based too, but that’s fine.

Nothing against wifi, just it’s so difficult to tell a ‘local wifi’ from a ‘cloud wifi’ device.

Approval ratings get weird, someone with a lower approval rating can beat someone with a higher approval rating.

So relatively fewer people are “excited” about a democrat candidate. If they have to pick between that candidate and Trump, they may still pick the candidate as the best practical option available, but they don’t necessarily “approve” of the choice they are making. People have a hard time mustering “approval” for a milquetoast candidate, even if that person is the least objectionable to a broad set of folks.

Meanwhile Trump is making a particular sort of folk very happy, in a way no other modern politician has dared to do. Most people may find it highly objectionable driving a lot of disapproval, but you will have the die hard MAGAs ecstatic about stuffing those brown people into vans and locking them up in El Salvador without any due process.

Yeah, I got some z wave thermostats for home.

I got an Emersonl “homekit” thermostat for my in-law and managed to get it on wifi without “cloud”. Unfortunately you have to be careful because the follow on model requires their cloud service for online control.

It’s a real shame that most every house is well equipped to do standalone hosting for remote access, but most of the investment has gone toward cloud connected to force the recurring revenue opportunity.

Well you can do that today. Find a tree out in the middle of nowhere and sit under it without any electronic devices. Then you are oblivious to all that stuff. You may be bothered by the fact that the things are still happening, but there are also plenty of horrific things happening in that time period you went to, you just won’t be keeping track of them.

I corrected my typo, it was supposed to be no need.

Talking about him falling asleep can undermine his undeserved tough guy image, I don’t think mocking his blue suit does anything but make it look like we are grasping at straws.

They are supremely loyal but relatively few enough to be outvoted by the other voters that more casually voted for him. It’s harder for me to grasp, but there are folks that voted for him that wouldn’t be going to his rallies or anything.

There’s a lot of folks who are either.:

Vote republican by default, but a shock could change them.

People who vote for or against the status quo based on how the feel things are going. Trump lost in 2020 in part due to people voting against whoever was in office. Hilary Clinton probably would have lost in 2020 had she won in 2016. Trump won in 2024 in part due to similar sentiment to vote out the current party after the inflation that was likely unavoidable consequence of not collapsing from COVID.

Yes the MAGA cult is unwavering, and they are a huge factor in the GOP primaries and certainly an asset in the general election, but they are not enough to assure an election.

The thing was that they resorted to the tan suit and terrorist first bump bullshit because Obama gave them so little to work with. For Trump you didn’t need to waste everyone’s time when his administration is ignoring court orders, arresting judges, declaring warrants and due process unnecessary, and tanking the economy.

The tan suit stuff may have helped energize the base by preaching to the choir, but everyone else found it ridiculous and made them skeptical of conservative media. When you are inundated nearly daily with real terrible stuff, no need to undermine credibility by latching into this sort of fluff.

I agree, the third big single powerful person is certainly Xi. I suppose one can say the “sociopath” is more evident with Netanyahu than Xi, because for now China is able to sit back and let Russia and USA self sabotage to a weaker position while mucking with the rest of the world, while China gets to play comparative good guy in foreign policy. This is of course grading on a curve, they aren’t saints either.

I mean, a date can be a pretty safe and tame event. It’s how you might get to know someone.

You shouldn’t expect anything romantic out of such a date, and certainly makes sense to meet at the venue and the venue be very open and visible. But to say you can’t even offer a chance to get to know each other without getting to know each other is a bit over the top.

Better chances in interest themed events and activities to have a promising match of course, but there has to be some opportunity to get acquainted.

So while RFK Jr. is dangerously and stubbornly doing some wrong stuff, this at least conceptually wasn’t a horribly dangerous idea, though perhaps uselessly naive.

It was proposed as a voluntary sort of facility that someone could go do if they chose, and from how it was described, ability to leave whenever they felt like too.

Generally speaking, I view RFK Jr as dangerous due to his convictions, naivete, and belief in some gnarly conspiracy thearies, but not intentionally malicious.

I find that’s a fairly reasonable assesment of ‘science’ versus ‘magic’ sensibility, but the main thing for me is that the arc concept due to the modern “binge” sensibilities is rough.

When Babylon 5 and DS9 did arcs, they did so carefully embedded in generally episodic series (people couldn’t “binge”, maybe you would tape it if you felt like it, but people weren’t always that engaged, so you catered to people that may miss some of your airings). So you had nice, digestable pieces and the underlying big thing plays out a bit at a time sometimes taking over for 2 or 3 episodes, but generally letting other smaller stories take the foreground for the episode.

But with “binge mentality”, there’s an inclination for showrunners to go nuts. Picard and Discovery produce a season that is pretty much just one story. The story doesn’t have enough meat to really drive that much runtime, but they make the pacing pretty torturous to fill the time. Also, with episodic, if you don’t like a particular story/execution, you kind of forget it because there’s a whole new story with new execution the next week. When you have a season you don’t like, well that’s harder to overlook.

Agriculture probably hurts a little. China could not care less about American digital services ( they largely banned them anyway) and if it comes down to it, they can totally ignore patent protection. They do have some issues with actual chip design and manufacturing, though that will likely see them improve if they have to.

Don’t know that China is a better place to be for the citizenry or anything, but the government and business leaders are in a better supported position than American counterparts in an economic split.

It might have been one thing if the US had continued to fixate on China and maybe isolate China, but he is simultaneously screwing with everyone in the world and tarnishing our image as comparatively “good guys” on human rights undermines our position. China may still be viewed as a bad actor, but our bad behavior might make them the lesser of the few evils.

I’m not sure.

We are here mainly because the business leaders sold out the core of our economy to enrich themselves thanks to cheap labor of an at the time backwards China. They had the hubris to think the workers replaceable but the leadership somehow magic.

Now they increasingly see China business leadership clearly emerging as an independent force that puts pressure on them.

They spent decades helping China gain independent capabilities and it’s too late to claw that back

About the only thing they are really hurt by are the export controls on chips and chip manufacturing technology, but they are getting there. Yes there’s a crunch in their export business that will hurt, but it’s easier to cope with that than just not having the facilities to build the stuff you want or the expansive labor force.

returns are only from miscalculations by the federal system,

Well, not really. More like incomplete calculations, erring on the side of overpayment because people are generally extra upset if they have to pay in at the end of the year, even if they technically made more money as a result. People are used to and kind of ignore the tax portion of the paycheck they never get, but they feel the taxation of actually making an active payment. So people get happy about the zero interest loan they give to the government because in the moment it feels like “free money”

My employer has to do withholding without knowledge of other potential household income, credits, or deductions, though that last is pretty much given for everyone given how high the standard deduction is now.

From what I’ve read Roddenberry wanted someone with hair, so they tried to compromise with a hairpiece, but Roddenberry thought the hairpiece looked bad and preferred him without the hairpiece and was talked into Patrick Stewart anyway.