This article doesn’t really live up to the headline.

I read to see why it’s worse than it seems, and the reason given is that Tesla isn’t competitive or popular.

That’s not really worse than it appears. That’s just as bad as it appears.

Which is really bad. But there’s no second shoe in the article. I want my two minutes back.

I don’t really know much about him, and I can’t dispute your personal gut feeling. But I’m not familiar with anything that gives me this feeling.

For what it’s worth, I think in general that if you say, “I just don’t quite trust <name>. I didn’t know why, but they creep me out,” about pretty much anyone in public political life you can probably find a basis for that over a long enough time scale.

He is a former Marxist?? I find that bewildering, hilarious, and doubtful.

I think it’s great when people have open enough minds to radically rethink their beliefs, but I hope I’m never so brainrotted as to somehow strawman my own former beliefs.

This meme doesn’t work because a conservative literally bought me a copy of that book and it’s infantile.

This book is titled “Basic Economics” because Sowel is a troll, and the economics in his book are largely correct but incomplete to the point of misinforming people. This is an incredibly “conservative” book through-and-through.

This is essentially what I was going to say (though more poetic).

I’m of two minds. I admit that i cringe a bit that he would even call this “good trouble”. John Lewis’ “good trouble” was nearly getting beaten to death. How Booker can apply such a label to an act of protest that didn’t even meaningfully delay any noteworthy business is frankly amazing to me.

But also, he did fucking do something. He specifically articulated that we should all be alarmed, and he declared that he intends to not cooperate with or normalize what is happening. Low bar? Yes. But we all have to start somewhere.

I actually like Cory Booker. He was my third or fourth pick among the 20-something candidates that ran in 2020.

I’ll say this: this act is not enough to convince me that elected Democrats are going to do anything meaningful in the next two years. But the absence of it would’ve made me far less likely to expect it. Good for him.

Fuckkk this is horrible.

This is really cool. I love how things like Wikipedia just show how weirdly f’d up our whole society is by doing something without extracting maximum compensation and breaking systems.

This is kind of weird timing, because “No Other Land” just won an Oscar.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/09/no-other-land-film-shared-palestine-solidarity

No offense, but that’s conspiracy nonsense.

There are plenty of real conspiracies. You don’t need to l look for the goofball ones.

Honest take? A lot in the short term, but probably quite little beyond that. Maybe Harris won and a Nazi would win after that, or Vance would win on a similarly radical platform. But this won’t pass until we identify a replacement. But there’s no simply avoiding what we’re going through.

Dude…

As the expression goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Sure, he’s a morally bankrupt wildly corrupt autocrat. But sometimes his enemies happen to be people I hate too.

Why is he doing this? I can’t say for certain, but my guess is that the military-industrial complex is on the wrong side of his kleptocracy. If they’d given the right bribes and flattery I’m sure he’d be saying that we gotta build more nukes, but apparently the CEOs of Raytheon et. al. didn’t back the right horse. Plus, Trump likes the dictator club. He’d rather he, Putin, and Xi spent those dollars on presidential yaughts and focused on locking up dissidents than having an arms race among buddies.

Even still… fundamentally he’s fuckin right. It makes no sense for us to give billions and billions and billions to these companies so that we have the capacity to exterminate the human race a fifth time or something. Killing our whole species once is fuckin stupid to begin with, but planning on doing it multiple times is just advanced levels of stupid, and it’s dangerous as hell to incentivize other countries to get into this red-queen race.

Sure, his reasons are almost certainly evil as hell. But wherever they are… he’s right that we should cut our military budget in half and negotiate disarmament.

Holy shit… I did not have that on my bingo card.

Fine. Who knows if it’ll happen, but when he’s right, he’s right. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to make me like his fascist ass, but if he cuts the military budget and sets up a new arms control treaty I’ll give him the credit for it.

We’ll see.

Can you prevent someone from setting up local instances of Deepseek? It’s open source. How would this define Chinese models?

Here is a transcript from a panel discussion on this topic held last year at Baltimore’s museum of industry.

https://therealnews.com/baltimores-co-ops-show-the-power-of-a-solidarity-economy

They have a few examples represented. One is a coffee shop that the owners closed after the workers started a union, but then the union raised the money to buy it out and the owners agreed to sell it to them.

Another is a family-owned hardware store that converted to a worker-ownership model when the owners wanted to retire because they didn’t want to ever see a subsequent owner sell to a private equity group or big corporate chain.

There’re some great insights provided. The long and short is that it’s a lot of work, but very rewarding for those who have the appetite for it.

Agreed. Avakian is fascinating because he’s so entitled in the article. If someone doesn’t want to buy his product he just rails against how unfair they were to him.

Bro: it’s business. If your product were nearly as good as you claim it is, you wouldn’t need to force people into using it.

Also, the end of the article points out that Walgreens has been terribly mismanaged and is a very low-performing company, and they’re still experimenting with screens, just not with Avakian. Hilarious.

Whaaaaaaaaaa???!? /s

I believe today is actually the sixty-fifth of the month.

The seventy-second is next Sunday.

I think what you and @mossyfeathers@MossyFeathers@pawb.social are picking up on is that youth-coded descriptors are often terms of endearment. They’re often used flirtatiously and towards people of whom you feel protective.

Conversely, adult names imply responsibility. Is it a problem to describe men in a way that implies responsibility and women in a way that implies protectiveness? Not necessarily.

I just think this stuff is linguistically interesting. I think it’s more grammatically typical to use equivalent terms to create parallel construction when comparing the sexes. Again, no judgment is intended.

Alright.

I just like words and linguistics. No one needs to be the bad guy here.

I think it’s interesting that you are comparing “men” and “girls” as opposed to either boys and girls or men and women.

No judgement. Just thought that was interesting.