Pricks

You can tell Walz was a good veep pick because it’s causing the Republicans and conservatives to engage in even wilder and weirder conspiracy theories and attacks. This time, though, the Democrats won’t let Walz be swift-boated. That was one of the most dishonorable events I’ve seen occur in the history of US politics and if there had been any justice in the world, the Republican party would’ve been disbanded from the inside after that.

But swift-boating won’t happen again — the Dems are smarter this time. Walz was a solid choice that pricks the Republicans where it hurts. They froth at the mouth when he is brought up even though he is a middle-of-the-road Democrat. But their bizarre reaction doesn’t have anything to do with his policies or politics; it’s all about the fact that Walz represents and is what they pretend to be but in fact are not: normal, loyal, duty-bound, humble and patriotic.

That’s why he deeply offends them, as there’s no one hated more than someone who is what you wish you were.

ChatGPT unexpectedly began speaking in a userโ€™s cloned voice during testing.

The New York Times Is An Arm Of The Trump Campaign.

Tim Walz. Hell yeah. The electoral math made Shapiro look like the safer pick. But Walz better communicates the story and stakes of this election.

Type 2 diabetes can be prevented by diet and exercise even in individuals with a high genetic risk. What remains of the Fat Acceptance movement is probably crying into their ice cream.

JPMorgan Chaseโ€™s Plan to Charge 80,000,000 Customers for Basic Checking Accounts and Services Is โ€˜Outrageous,โ€™ Say US Senators in Blistering Response to Banking Giant.

With US Chips Act Money Mostly Divvied Up, the Real Test Begins.

Ukraineโ€™s Kursk Offensive Blitzed Russia With Electronic Warfare And Drones. Great, and also I love things that make Ian Welsh types sad or have cognitive dissonance.

How Algorithms Keep Workers Under Their Control. Who wrote and put in place the algorithms?

Bump

People are really bad at updating their initial assessment of you, even when it should change a great deal.

It was like he couldnโ€™t shake his image as the young, inexperienced salesperson whoโ€™d joined the startup in its infancy, he says. Eventually, he left to launch his own company, GetDynasty, an online provider of trusts.

That is extremely common. Nearly all of the time, people see you as you were when they first met you, no matter how much you’ve progressed or improved yourself. It’s true in in personal life and in roles at companies. This is why most of the time the only way to get promoted or get a significant pay bump is to go somewhere else.

In one of my early IT roles I worked with a manager who insisted on seeing me as level one helpdesk, even though in the four years I worked there I went from being helpdesk (though my skills were always far above level one or even helpdesk) to having a CCNA and an MCSE and being asked for by name to troubleshoot difficult server problems. But she never updated her view of me at all. I went from working there straight into being US IT manager for a medium-size company at 26 years old. Was very proud of that, making such a big jump.

And I bet if we’d stayed in contact she’d still see me as helpdesk, some 24 years later.

Intelโ€™s Immiseration. The long, seemingly inevitable decline of an icon.

Appleโ€™s sheer size as a buyer puts this into perspective. In 2022, Apple bought $67 billion of semiconductor chips, a full 11% of the global market for chips across all industries.

Unsurprisingly, workers who are able to work from home are happier at their jobs.

Maybe It Should Be Illegal To Instantly Delete A Websiteโ€™s Archives.

Covid fell to 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. last year, down from 4th. The disease represented less than 2% of deaths in the U.S. in 2023.

TSMC Arizona struggles to overcome vast differences between Taiwanese and US work culture. Worker treatment that’s acceptable in Taiwan simply won’t be tolerated by US employees.

Ukraine presses offensive inside Russia as Moscow scrambles to respond.

โ€˜Soullessโ€™ gray vinyl floors have infested L.A.โ€™s rental market โ€” and tenants hate them. This is true everywhere now.

Customers didnโ€™t stop spending. Companies stopped serving. Exactly right.

Why many American seniors are forced to work in retirement.

The Olympics’ Hostile Architecture Is a Preview of What’s to Come.

Not a Feminist Or an Ally

I think when I first started tuning out of modern feminism was on a feminist blog in 2010 or so when the main poster and the commenters (all women) were talking about how hot and sexy 16-year-old Justin Bieber was and how much they wanted to bed him. Tellingly, the same posters and commenters were eager to condemn any relationship among grown-ass adults with even a 2-3 year age gap.

That told me all I needed to know. They had no principles. And were also creepy af. Their feminism was all about dating/mating competition elimination among their cohort while their being “good” in their eyes gave them permission to do whatever they wanted to do — up to and including sexually abusing a minor.

I don’t want a thing to do with any of that kind of feminism. And it was already on the ascent, but is now the dominant strain of infection.

Loss

As of August 1, 2024, Russian combat losses amount to 579 490 troops, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

That’s probably accurate. It also matches the US and UK estimates. Note that “combat losses” include killed and injured enough to not return to combat. Probably 120-200K KIA. I’d put that on the high end, probably 200K or even more.

So much for that 30 day special military operation Ian Welsh insists Russia is handily winning!

To MARS

Ukrainian HIMARS Strike on a large Russian convoy.

Don’t be deceived; those are all hits. The missiles that the HIMARS fires* have a very, very large shrapnel radius. It’s classified but it’s probably around 600M for likely significant damage. Those things seriously fuck shit up in other words. Here is the battle damage assessment. Note that there is no gore, but a lot dead Russian soldiers and/or mercs in the backs of those trucks.

By the way, that is an remarkable feat; those missiles cannot be guided in flight. They can only hit a spot provided by GPS in advance. That means the Ukrainians had to do all of these things very, very quickly:

1) Have recon and drone overwatch in place and ready.
2) Determine the convoy’s current location.
3) Determine its likely continued path.
4) Determine its likely forward speed.
5) Get the launch coordinates dialed in and confirmed.
6) Launch missiles at the spot the convoy would be in the future.

To do all that and hit a convoy in motion it had to have been done in about five minutes. In military terms, that is insanely fast.

*The HIMARS system can fire various munitions. Those were probably M30A2s.

All [eye] cones contain a pigment molecule consisting of a curved chain of amino acids. When this molecule absorbs a photon, a double bond snaps, causing the chain to straighten and the molecule to change shape. This seemingly trivial incident, lasting just 200 millionths of a billionth of a second, underpins all human vision.

James Fox, The World According to Color

Curly

Never thought curling could be this intense.

I love curling. In fact, it’s the only winter sport I like or would want to participate in. I happened to catch it on ESPN in the middle of night when I was 8 or 9. The announcers never said what it was called and I didn’t know because I’d never found it in any books (my only real source of knowledge then).

Later on, I tried describing it to my parents so they could tell me what it was but they thought I was making it up. (“And there were people with brushes on ice with round weights and they clean the ice ahead of the weight.”) It all sounds like utter nonsense when you tell someone about it.

I eventually found out its name when I caught it again on ESPN and the announcer happened to say it.