honestly this could refer to either Clinton or Harris! Yes, Clinton wrote It Takes a Village, but Harris’s 2016 Senate campaign stump speech was all about how any political outcome you care about, from crime rates to tax rates, is ameliorated by investing in early childhood

nonexistence has existed for literally infinite time, whereas existence is only thirteen billion years old, therefore,,,

SCENE: Prague, 1618. Three minions try in vain to push a burgher out a door. A fourth minion goes “aha!” as a lightbulb appears over its head, then runs at the burgher at full speed and kicks him out the window.

The minions, arriving for peace talks with Liu Bang’s forces: burble burble XIANG YU burble burble? Bwee!

Liu Bang’s advisors: you serve Xiang Yu? We thought you served Fan Zeng!

Minions, in unison: [shocked gasp]

SCENE: river gorge, China, 204 BC. Xiang Yu roars threats across the river at Liu Bang. A group of minions scurry up next to him carrying Liu Bang’s family, who they’ve taken hostage

also lolsob @ “waking up tomorrow to find an apartment next door”

how fast do they think an apartment could get built with no permitting process whatsoever?

Be warned: the picture in the post below contains a grisly scene of a four-story apartment building between two houses. Will the horrors never cease? Surely images like this should be flagged as sensitive content!

WebMD deliberately made the Symptom Checker less useful/less user-friendly due to pressure from doctors, who didn’t trust patients to use it

The thing is I would feel fine and even proud of this state of affairs if the US didn’t have a ~50% chance of getting four years of fascism every election!

I think the most useful definition of the term to speak to what people want from it is “a social space, often but not necessarily physical, where you are extended the presumption of belonging, even by people who don’t know you personally” which makes it pretty rare!

when politicians use the word “community”, they usually mean a group who can semi-plausibly claim to represent a bundle of votes

when pollsters and the public sector use the word, they often just mean “municipality”

when academics use it, they usually mean “marginalized demographic”

ugh i used the phrase “business community” without even considering alternative phrasing, even though it, like “intelligence community”, is a dumb phrase and i hate it

i have a lot of negative feelings about the overuse of the word “community”

There’s something disturbing in the fact that foreign democratic governments have mostly been treating Trump the same way the domestic business community has. The US seems to still be the indispensable nation [derogatory]

Ranavalona I - Wikipedia

never not thinking about the 19th-century queen of Madagascar who allegedly killed off half the country

I’m not sure whether this still holds true, but as of her 2018 reelection, it’s possible Betty Yee had received the most votes in one election of any statewide elected official in US history (she had the widest margin of victory of any CA statewide candidate in that election, at least)

meme image of a timeline of sports fandom where there’s a brief period of “oh boy am I excited to watch my favorite team play” a long stretch of “I’m going to kill myself” and a tiny moment at the end of “nice we won”

every primary process in California is this meme

one thing this administration has been teaching us is it’s extremely easy to break things irreparably very fast even if you later get a court injunction telling you that was illegal

I think a sufficiently motivated Democratic administration could totally wipe out Palantir, and I want them to do it

I’d also like to see a strict sunshine ordinance for SCOTUS that would require them to disclose all their meetings and would not just require filmed hearings but would prohibit any two of them from meeting without it being a properly noticed public hearing (like California’s Brown Act)

so no more than 10% of small apartment residents don’t host anyone, is what I’m getting from this

a lot of hosting going on!

“I can heal Tsarevich Alexis”

fundamentally, many Americans just don’t know what “freedom” is; it’s been a truism that “America is free” for so long that many people don’t have a concept of freedom other than bald eagles and fireworks on the Fourth of July

Calling something “Orwellian” is overused, but “freedom is found not in the absence of structure but within structure” is unsettlingly close to “freedom is slavery”

looks to me like he’s been unfailingly polite, while YOU have been nothing but RUDE

he’s just trying to have a civil discussion about your statement!

I don’t know if this explains why sentiment decoupled from traditional economic metrics in 2021 specifically, though, since it’s ultimately caused by the internet

I think this is also relevant to why dating feels so bad btw

another metric I think is relevant to people’s economic sentiment is “absolute number of rejections received in the course of the median job search (inclusive of self-rejections where you seriously consider applying but decide you don’t have a shot)”

tfw the first time you encountered Canva was when you were reading a history of the Ottoman Empire and now you have a hard-to-shake sense it’s supposed to be pronounced “jahn-va”

The basic dilemma of no constituency in American society caring enough about climate change to actually make it their priority does feel especially vividly illustrated in how virtually all the groups ostensibly dedicated to climate change instead focus on other stuff now

I’m stuck on the idea of someone who uses the word “sportsball” watching a football game in person