Month: August 2025

Tray Table

Chill Political Economy

Why do people say they feel “betrayed” when they get laid off? What is going on their heads?

I’ve only ever seen my relationship with a company as a business one. I provide labor. They pay me. I try to do good work, be honest, and deliver what I promise but I have zero emotional attachment to my role or company. It’s merely a service I provide in exchange for money. In a sense, a company subscribes to me. When they cancel the subscription I am out.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t understand the emotional component. It’s a business relationship and should remain one.

Perhaps that’s why I do well day-trading and the like.

Chill Links

Google will require developer verification to install Android apps, including sideloading. Clownish but expected. And the noose tightens….

Climbing catfish filmed scaling waterfalls.

US retail giants raise prices and seek new import sources due to tariffs. Inflationary depression on the way.

What is a color space?

The CTO Was ChatGPT.

Trump’s Attack on Data Has ‘Dangerous Trickle-Down Effect’ for America’s Most Vulnerable.

FTC Warns Tech Giants Not To Bow To Foreign Pressure on Encryption.

Politico Management Insists “AI” Shouldn’t Be Held To Any Sort Of Human Editorial Standards Because It’s Built By Coders, Not Journalists.

No country for young families.

How Pakistan pulled off one of the fastest solar revolutions in the world.

Adults Are Going to Sleep-away Camp to Make Friends. It Seems to Actually Work.

Tent

Chill Evil

It’s not great becoming a man and being told that no matter your intent, you definitely have malicious intent. What you actually do, say, or how you act do not matter. If you do anything as a man, especially if it involves a woman, it must be terrible or some subterfuge to get someone to sleep with you.

Why don’t men get all the benefit of the doubt that women invariably do, which they receive still by the buckets even when they actually do something horrible?

Fclown

Chill Annoying, Clowns

It is insane. Culture wars make people utterly brainless. I do all the things that work and avoid the things that don’t. And these work: lifting weights, healthy eating, GLP-1 agonists1, and creatine. Also, mRNA vaccines are awesomesauce and vaccines in general are hugely beneficial to everyone.

Believing or doing anything else is fucking clownish.

  1. I have never taken this, but not opposed to it.

Our Zone

Chill Evil

The US was more dangerous for her — and for many people — than an actual war zone.

The Dem/Lib current approach to crime just doesn’t work. Not in reality, and not to win votes.

Big Stop

Chill Cool

777 Stopping.

So that’s a maximum-energy landing test. That means flaps down, but no thrust reversers.

In that test, the plane takes off, climbs, and then comes back around to land at a chosen high landing weight and velocity. It touches down at a speed near the maximum operating landing weight and then the pilots apply full braking. The purpose is to simulate the worst-case kinetic energy the brakes must absorb after a heavy (can’t dump fuel, full cargo), high-speed landing.

If I remember right, it must sit there for a certain number of seconds before the brakes are allowed to catch fire. And they absolutely 100% will catch fire after a landing like that.

A lot of factors matter here (temperature, speed, etc.), but a plane like the 777 should be able to stop in about 4,000 feet.

But it fucks up the brakes, tires, and potentially other things too.

Chill Links

Is 4chan the Perfect ‘Pirate Bay’ Poster Child to Justify Wider UK Site-Blocking? It was never about porn; never is.

Trees on city streets cope with drought by drinking from leaky pipes.

NASA’s Juno Mission Leaves Stunning Legacy of Science at Jupiter.

The Bubble That Knows It’s a Bubble.

OneDrive even silently reinstalled itself and moved one customer’s data to the cloud, all without consent. This is by design, as are all the Windows user-hostile features.

Both vaccines and antivirals cut the risk of Long COVID with more doses equaling more protection. Paxlovid especially reduces the odds by about 95%.

Recent CT college grads frustrated by lack of jobs, AI and tariff-shy employers.

A third of the U.S. economy is already in a recession or at high risk, and another third is stagnating, Zandi warns.

Palantir’s tools pose an invisible danger we are just beginning to comprehend.

How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes.

Fed Chair Warns the Economy Is Even Worse Than We Realized. Well, duh.

International Paper shutting down Savannah, Riceboro mills, impacting 1,100 jobs. Just the very, very beginning of what’s on the way.

Econ BS Preemption

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Political Economy

Yes, yes, houses were smaller in 1960, insert the usual economist blah blah bullshit here. The point is that it was far easier to buy a house in 1960. And I can’t buy part of a fucking house. No matter what the econs say, it’s just a more difficult time for younger people.