Well, the way we “went back to normal” after an intense election campaign in 2015-2016 was just…not. Not letting it end for the last nine years. This is essentially still the same campaign that started with the stupid escalator ride. I hope it actually does go back to some semblance of normal in a few months, and we can see how that works then.

I usually go with the last three. The mnemonic, “xcq, link stays blue” helps.

• What color was the ball?

I didn’t see a color in my visualization, but I know it was red.

• What gender was the person that pushed the ball?

They were genderless; more of a concept of a person than an image of one.

• What did they look like?

Like…an area of visual space that my mind attached the identifier “Person” to.

• What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?

A little smaller than a tennis ball, but bigger than a ping pong ball.

• What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?

I didn’t see either property in my visualization, but it’s wooden and round.

And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?

Lol. Well, I guess I botched that one. Obviously I did not know before being asked these questions, for most of the answers.

That they’re everywhere. I have uBO on my browser and actively choose against places and experiences with advertising whenever I can, but it still feels like it’s everywhere. Hey, that’s a nice mountain. Can you not with the billboard? It’s like sponsored vandalism.

Every time I’ve ever tried it I get a droplet of water stuck in the crevice where the lens meets the frame and have to go get a towel anyway.

Firefox is not eliminating MV2 extensions. You can stick with Firefox.

Skip the sharp blow and use a microfiber. You can get them in packs of like a million from Costco and they work way better than anything else.

Yep, this is what I go with. Yeah sure, my insurance doesn’t cover them and they’re a little less durable than the ones I get from the optometrist, but I can buy four pairs and still have not equaled my deductible.

My midwestern US schooling taught me almost nothing about African or diaspora history beyond the slave trade. When I learned that there was a whole big huge continent whose history I didn’t know, I was fascinated. Simultaneously, I was awakening to the systemic injustice that Afro-folks experience in the United States, and wanted to learn as much as I could about their background and context.

Actually, as someone whose company has been working on updating extensions from MV2 to MV3 for the past four years, the timeline has changed. A couple of times, I think. Originally, MV2 was supposed to be entirely deprecated by the beginning of this year, but they’ve pushed it back twice and extended enterprise support even further.

There’s a guy on the internet who does videos comparing Vancouver real estate with literal European castles of a similar price. “Not livable” money in Vancouver can get you “has gardens and outbuildings with servant’s quarters” in some parts of Europe.

Ah, the ol’ Reddit switch-a-roo. Hold my relevant topic, I’m going in!

And my axe!!

The profile picture says “We’re Fake News” on it. It’s almost certainly a parody account.

The profile picture says “We’re Fake News” on it.

Yes, but since it runs automatically every day and emails my team the results, I don’t have to remember to do it on my own. I don’t even have to be working that day. Taking “my ADHD memory” out of the system is always a win.

So this is true (and increasingly so recently), but a lot of that overhead is technically unnecessary for the message to be sent and received; a lot of it is information about transmission and DKIM validation, spam protection, sender verification, etc; and then a TON of it is HTML for display. For a known receiver to send a message to a known recipient, I believe that a text-only email that’s cryptographically signed for identity validation could potentially be a tiny fraction of the size of a big huge HTML email.

YES, absolutely! Sam and Dropout are an excellent success story. They make a thing ethically and charge a fair price for it, people who want it pay them for it. If we can normalize that again, the world will work a lot better.

There are a lot of examples recently of respected legacy companies being turned into hollow husks of their former selves (or even going out of business entirely) due to finance bros. Sears, Paramount, Toys R Us, Warner Bros, Red Lobster, Twitter, Reddit (ok maybe stretching the definition of “respected”), and now Boeing, among many, many others.

Will it change anything among that class of people? Probably not. The spectre of Jack Welch still looms large over the business world, incentivizing short-term slash-and-burn flash over long-term productive smolder. The type of person who’s inclined toward this kind of con will still pursue it, and there are enough people of low scruples who will get the dollar signs in their eyes.

But with any luck, it will take the luster off enough that people will stop playing along; and they’ll run out of money sooner or later.

It’s already starting to happen. The Onion was bought back from private equity earlier this summer, and the new owners are taking a lot of steps that no PE would ever consider; essentially they’re just looking to stay afloat, not trying to cancerously pursue unchecked growth.

Partially yes, but there’s an even more mundane reason; with nuclear weapons, if the other side has 5, you need 6: five to destroy their five, and one to destroy their capital. But when they discover that, they’ll decide that they need seven: 6 to destroy your 6, and one to destroy your capital. Add in some uncertainty to that feedback loop, and an arms race immediately becomes an exponential curve moderated only by the amount of time production takes and the amount of resources each nation is willing to commit at any given time.

There’s a very real way in which the proliferation of arms is, itself, an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.