“At a moment of great global instability – with war raging in Ukraine, conflict between Israel and Iran, and authoritarian regimes testing the boundaries of international order – the United States has chosen to gut its frontline diplomatic workforce,” said a statement from the American Foreign Service Association, a professional group that represents US diplomats. “We oppose this decision in the strongest terms.”

Funny how Trump’s actions always head in the opposite direction to his “stated goal of putting America first.” Almost like the stated goal is BS.

It’s the world’s most punchable eyebrow.

Ah, didn’t notice that.

https://archive.is/O8ebO

Some of us grew up breathing in all the lead and still think guys like this are unbelievable idiots. Low-level lead poisoning may make you slightly stupider and more angry, but I really don’t think it explains MAGA idiocy. In fact, it gives MAGAs an excuse they don’t deserve. Their racist, reactionary, destructively macho attitudes are on them, not on lead.

The story that MAGAs are like this because of lead poisoning is just another version of the eternal hope that the next generation will see sense and fix things. It never works out that way. Each generation’s assholes get the upper hand under capitalism. The MAGA oldies are particularly nasty and stupid not because of lead but because of how they lived most of their lives during capitalism’s prosperous heyday of post-WW2 reconstruction, but the world is changing and they want to hang on to their privilege at everyone else’s expense, even if it means fascism. It’s their own selfishness, narrow-mindedness and wilful ignorance. We don’t need to divert the blame to lead.

They perceive others having things as a failure of their ability to have it all. So they probably don’t like each other.

This is exactly what these fascists believe in. Except then they muddy it with a belief that they are divinely ordained as the fittest ones who deserve to survive. And they have no understanding of actual evolutionary theory, nor any interest in it.

Even then they hate you, but they’ll kiss your ass.

It can be that or it can be the satisfaction of doing useful work well. Venture capitalists don’t do useful work so they don’t know that satisfaction. And they don’t know what else to do but chase money because they lack the capacity to appreciate life as it is and are probably scared to just stop, in case they have to face the void in their heart. Hence their unstoppable, narrow-minded craving for more money.

Did Carney’s caving on the Digital Services Tax achieve anything? Or did it, as many predicted, just tell Trump that Canada is weak and can be pushed around?

In any case, Trump’s constant week-by-week improvisation of policy should tell everyone that there’s no point making “deals” with him when he’ll just tear them up after a few days or weeks.

This seems short-sighted. You want to hire enough people and give them what they need to grow their skills as they work. Invest in your employees a bit. Then you get the quality without the burnout and mental crises, plus you get a company that feels good to work for.

Stebbings, founder of 20VC, a firm managing $650 million in funds, advised founders on LinkedIn last month that “7 days a week is the required velocity to win right now,” to compete with startups in Silicon Valley and China.

Just from that sentence you can tell the guy leads an impoverished life in ways that won’t be fixed by money. But he’s going to spend his life chasing money because he can’t imagine what else to do with it.

They’re not anti-pedophile, or they’d be going after a number of prominent Republicans. They live in a fantasy world where Republicans can do no wrong and everyone else does all and only wrong. The pedophile fantasy is part of that, not an attempt to address real-world child abuse.

That’s the “deep state” according to MAGA, because they don’t have the first clue how actual government works.

I know it’s an awful headline. I’d still be interested in what people think of the content, because there’s something legit in there it seems, but this article (which is published on a number of websites and may be a fairly unedited press release) doesn’t explain much. The headline writers seem to see the word “battery” and run with that, even though it’s misleading.

Trump seems to use the same tactic.

Who are “you guys”?

He’s only saying it so we subconsciously associate the words “Ted Cruz” and “human”.

I tried to dictate some documents recently without paying the big bucks for specialized software, and was surprised just how bad Google and Microsoft’s speech recognition still is. Then I tried getting Word to transcribe some audio talks I had recorded, and that resulted in unreadable stuff with punctuation in all the wrong places. You could just about make out what it meant to say, so I tried asking various LLMs to tidy it up. That resulted in readable stuff that was largely made up and wrong, which also left out large chunks of the source material. In the end I just had to transcribe it all by hand.

It surprised me that these AI-ish products are still unable to transcribe speech coherently or tidy up a messy document without changing the meaning.

“Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.”

This whole industry is so full of hype and scams, the bubble surely has to burst at some point soon.