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My Facebook is honestly nice, it’s the most relaxing social media for me.

The promoted posts are books and artists and occasional gym content. Ads are relevant or at least not annoying (SuitSupply seems to think I’m their ideal customer, and I don’t mind looking at their handsome models in this season’s knitwear). The people I know post mostly about meaningful or harmless stuff.

But it’s probably like this because I joined over ten years after everyone else did. I didn’t activate my Facebook account until 2018 when I got a job at FB and it was mandatory. Then I found out that it was actually a good way to curate a set of people from my youth that I genuinely wanted to reconnect with.

That’s probably what made the difference compared to many whose FB social graphs were built up early and never pruned.


Wow they make you use facebook at facebook? That's twisted. That would be like.. idk.. Phillip Morris making you smoke a pack a day.

I believe it was somewhat like that at large cigarette companies in the heyday of smoking.

An ashtray on every desk and throughout meeting rooms. Free packs of cigarettes you could grab anywhere in the building + a certain number of packs given to you weekly, with your preferred brand recorded. Some amount of social compulsion to smoke at work and during work related social events.


I hear it still largely is that way, though apparently they do try to avoid smoking in the presence of their pregnant coworkers these days. Progress! :-)

I laughed out loud. "I found that I loved Big Brother from my youth." Genuinely no offense meant, it was just funny.

Almost all legal experts said from the start the Trump’s approach to tariffs was unconstitutional.

So who else could be to blame for the flip-flopping?

The executive is supposed to uphold laws made by Congress, not throw spaghetti at the Supreme Court’s wall and see if it sticks.


There are many countries that have functioning constitutions that are regularly revised.

It’s not impossible for the USA to get there one day.


We still haven't fixed things caused by putting chattel slavery into the Constitution almost 150 years after a civil war.

Well, that's why I wrote "not impossible" rather than "likely"...

These things can be fixed even though it's difficult. Sometimes the pressure just boils over. Americans are a lot more defeatist about their politics than in many other democratic countries.


Hell, we deliberately left it in.

> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.


it is impossible and it is great that it is impossible because you need one party to basically run everything at the federal level and vast majority at the state level which means that any changes to the constitution would be heavily politically motivated to one side of the isle.

Looking at the results, it's obviously not great that there's no reasonable process to update the constitution. It's the most dysfunctional democracy in the West.

Change that seems inevitable in retrospect often feels like a surprise in the moment. France its on its fifth republic. A second American republic is not impossible.


>there's no reasonable process to update the constitution.

Au contraire, a Constitutional Convention of the states to define the way they can all agree to be united.

Just like the first time.

There weren't that many states back then anyway.


You talking theoretically or in practice. Theoretically we could have Constitutional Convention of the states to define the way they can "all" agree to be united (just like the first time). In practice there is a higher chance of me marrying Beyonce

If you don’t think the president did anything wrong, then whose fault is it that those businesses are suffering from flip-flopping policy?

Directed by fashion photographer Bruce Weber. A tremendous artifact of the late 1980s transitioning to the Nineties.

Official HD version is available too:

https://youtu.be/NVC-jusXGno


> “The AI handles the scale. The human interprets the meaning.”

Claude is that you? Why haven’t you called me?


But the meaning has been scaled massively. So the human still kinda needs to handle the scale.

Smart contracts? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

The article is painfully obviously AI-written.


> I have reviewed your generated article. [Discombobulating] After review we have decided a second pass to ensure its not obvious AI slop is not required; Marking task as Complete

> [X] Review Article for tells that it is AI.

> Bash(git commit && git push && post2hn)


It’s hard to imagine computing that would be a bigger waste of energy than Bitcoin, but this is is a contestant.

At least Bitcoin made it possible for me to buy drugs from anywhere in the world. Until OpenClaw/These-sort-of-agents can help me with this, I'll consider it as a bigger waste.

But they seem to also believe in heavy-handed government intervention to prop up failing businesses. For example Trump's recent announcement that he'll require the military to buy coal power on long-term contracts:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/trumps-latest-plan-t...

So on the one hand they're saying government shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand they love having the government put its finger on the scales of the market.


The common thread that resolves this apparent conflict is, of course, billionaires. 100% of Republicans and ~60% of Democrats are in office primarily to serve at the whims of billionaires. They will pursue whatever policies will give more power to billionaires, consistency and hypocrisy are irrelevant.

> ~60% of Democrats

I think you can make that ~80%, but maybe you've done the calculations more diligently than I have.


No, it is more like Reps 75% and Dems 90%, ±5%.

How could you possibly come to this conclusion? Which party literally just voted for tax breaks on the wealthy and corporations, twice in one decade?!

In before "No clearly the party that helps the billionaires the most and is mostly comprised of billionaires and is backed by all the tech billionaires are the good guys, they are the true party of the people"


So you think only one party did that??? Only one party protects billionaires??? Wow that's funny!

"So on the one hand they're saying government shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand they love having the government put its finger on the scales of the market."

Rather: They don't want the government to impede capitalist interests (greed), so they're using the government to further their corruption and greed


These hopeful incantations are a kind of cargo cult… But when applied to programming, the wild thing is that the cult natives actually built the airports and the airplanes but they don’t know what makes them fly and where the cargo comes from.

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