We should switch to a base-12 number system.

In other words, Star Wars is for kids, and that's fine, until you realize you're living it and not Star Trek.

We are surrounded by Anakins who became Darth Vaders. We thought there were good people with power (Jedi) who would protect us, but we were wrong.

This is both a universal experience, and, it turns out, one that you can navigate either by learning to master yourself and act like an adult, or you can fail at life. And if you have enough money or power, the second path means a lot of suffering for other people.

Oh, you have some feelings about being misunderstood? You want to do your thing, but people wiser and older than you keep telling you to reflect before you act? Their message is delivered in a completely wooden and stilted way and doesn't speak to your actual immediate concerns, so you ignore it?

But even more than that, the arch villain being an angsty teen who grew up but never matured because he has too much power turned out to be so on the nose that I now think Star Wars' moral vision has been redeemed as much as its political sensibility.

As many have observed, the intervening years have made the prequels' extremely simplistic and almost nonsensical vision of politics feel prescient. Oh, it turns out Jar Jar Binks going on TV to praise the evil Sith lord is like, what actually happens, and then suddenly you're in the Empire.

I've come to appreciate Star Wars even as I've lost my childhood love for it.

When the prequels came out, my first reaction was intense disappointment. I wanted Anakin Skywalker to be an interesting, tragic character, not a stupid, angsty teen who never matured because he had too much power.

beep beep whirrr

If we allowed billionaires to exist, but capped their wealth at $10B, confiscating anything additional for the public good, would this in any conceivable way harm them?

It seems at least possible it would do them good, by forcing them to find better ways to distinguish themselves in the "endgame".

Our whole business model depends on Bruce. Without him, we are nothing. Tourists don't even know what gooseberries are!

But now, no, he will see a "street closed" sign and get confused. He will say to himself, "I have no choice, now I must drive to Fred Meyer in Ballard to buy my gooseberries." And the gooseberry guys will be like, where's Bruce? He always parks right there and then buys a pint of gooseberries.

So I guess we're meant to imagine our guy driving so so slowly down a crowded tourist pedestrian street in the middle of the day, waiting for the crowd to part long enough for him to see that there is nowhere to park. Every day, just driving slowly in circles for hours to buy overpriced fruit.

In all seriousness, I guess the response to my snark would be, "We're talking about GROCERS, not clam chowder stores!"

And now that he would have to park a block away, he will never have delicious clam chowder ever again and the clam chowder store will go out of business.

And like, I guess I am supposed to believe he was consistently able to find parking on this very busy, tourist-area street right in front of the clam chowder store?

This just cannot possibly be true. They expect me to believe there's some 70-year-old man who's been DRIVING down a brick street thronged with tourists to buy clam chowder every day for the last 20 years or something?

Considering doing April fools by shipping a commit that makes the > relation intransitive for "Excel parity".

At this point in her life, my daughter's only experience of Google and Amazon is of interacting with basically non-functional software (Google Maps voice interface and Amazon Music, both in the car). Whenever she hears "Google", she says, "Try again!!"

It's certainly not the only thing. But in college, during the Dominion war, my friends and I were like, "We better not have missed that space battle because they blew the effects budget on making Odo ooze into the founder lady."

And yes, I judge each and every blogger who succumbed to this temptation and stopped writing legible posts.

Twitter has a lot of sins to answer for. But right up there is the post that's just a screenshot of text.

Honestly shocked that this hasn't already caused Schumer and Jeffries to give Trump unlimited funding for ICE and illegal wars

a mind-blowing thing is that humans developed pretty accurate maps of Earth's coastlines and rivers and such BEFORE we were able to take pictures from the sky

I will never in my life say that something is "based" without following it with a preposition.

I know that is a function of my age. Which is less than 54.

I remember booting our apple ][+ with an MS-DOS 2.0 floppy as a child. Although I learned POSIX systems eventually, I've used MS-DOS or Windows my whole life on my personal computers. But I think I'm finally done.

it is done. i am now an arch linux guy

Ballard Link light rail when?

...

too soon?

a screenshot of bus arrival estimates. the bus scheduled to arrive 2 minutes ago is 20 minutes late. the bus scheduled to arrive in 13 minutes is only 3 minutes late (so far), for a minimum wait time of 16 minutes

I should really stop walking home along the bus route and hoping maybe a bus will pick me up before the steep hill.

Which is all to say I think sometimes you should support people who are really good at comms but inexperienced at governing, and sometimes you shouldn't! It's complicated and depends on the specifics of the case.