It’ll be just like 2020: react after the damage is done and pretend they weren’t complicit.

You’ve been waiting for this moment…

One of the best feelings I ever felt was laying in bed the night after a car accident earlier in the day. It was enough of an accident that I was glad to reflect on it not being any worse, but it also wasn’t bad enough to injure anyone.

When I climbed into bed that night, I was seriously doing that thing dogs do when you take them outside and they flop and wallow around on the grass with their feet flailing carelessly in the air. That bed felt so damn good that night, and I try often to remind myself that it’s the same comfy and safe bed now that it was that day.

This is exactly how I used to see things when I grew up in a conservative echo chamber.

And now that I recognize a person’s right to choose and tend to think capital punishment should probably* not be legal, I’ll add that it’s not that my underlying beliefs changed, just how I now understand things. Some people do deserve capital punishment. And innocent people should be protected. But personhood doesn’t start at conception, a person conceiving has a right to decide what happens to their body, and the state can never be trusted to administer capital punishment.

*I say “probably” because I also think it might be necessary to allow it in extreme cases. My reasoning is that if people don’t believe the justice system will adequately punish, they have incentive and no ultimate detergent for taking justice into their own hands.

I want someone to project that map onto a globe to illustrate how ridiculous it was. The elegantly circular arcs of the north sides of those storms would look bizarrely teardrop-pinched, if I’m not mistaken.

Are there still places that legally mandate car refueling operators? That seemed like a job that literally only existed to give some people a job.

Might have just found out about another?

Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-explosives-hezbollahs-taiwan-made-pagers-say-sources-2024-09-18/

Fuck is wrong with you?

Yeah, good point, but that article isn’t talking about what’s in this picture.

Store-bought sandwich bread usually can be kept in the fridge without much change in texture. That’s because it often contains additives and preservatives that keep it fresh longer.

That’s a big motivation for me, too, but I’d say it’s about equally that I want archival of the best stuff for when rights holders pull their catalogs from the services I stream. I used to think that was mainly for the more obscure stuff, like local bands’ early albums that I can barely find anymore, but recently I’ve noticed albums missing from main services (Tidal and Spotify, in my case) for bigger acts, too.

Data can be beautiful. I just found a similar but maybe clearer example from 2016 with a nice write-up about it.

Teaser from that article:

I think the common term for these is “cartogram”.

For me, it’s helpful to remember what the underlying reality is.

Skewed for population and colored on a red-blue scale to reflect vote mix.

When those votes are counted, the resulting electoral votes align to those votes, which results in maps like what you showed. When strategists tune their messages to target demographics they can divide (e.g., rural vs. urban), they’re playing a game of inches and shades on this map of purple goo, and that’s still the reality behind the ultimate electoral vote, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Keep voting, everyone!

edits: So much autocorrect.

1. Granola and plain yogurt
2. An Italian-ish sandwich (ham, salame, lettuce, tomato, cheese, giardiniera, oil+seasonings, and mayo, on wheat) with peperonicini-flavored kettle chips/crisps
3. Pork carnitas “street” tacos with borracho black beans

“Incomplete paper and online applications will not be accepted,” Evans said in the statement. (Parker’s [demonstration] cancellation request would have lacked a driver’s license number.) The Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to individual questions about what testing the portal underwent before launch, the system’s security procedures, what happened to Parker’s cancellation request…

Yeah, that tells us we just don’t know if this was a problem after all. Evans’s statement basically claims it wasn’t a vulnerability. If that’s correct, then the worst thing might be if someone’s browser tripped on the validation JS and allowed them down a blind alley execution path. If the claim is correct and if the page’s JS never shits the bed, then in that case the only negative outcome would be someone dicking with the in-browser source could lead themselves down the blind alley, in which case who cares. The only terrible outcome seems like it would be if the claim is incorrect–i.e. if an incomplete application submission would be processed, thus allowing exploit.

Short of an internal audit, there’s no smoking gun here.

I haven’t given up on being a stick in the mud keeping Austin a little different from other parts of Texas. The loudest idiots in this state rebuke Austin as something un-Texan, but I’m not going anywhere and am continuing to live and vote the way I do. I know it’s a little easier for me to say this, not having to worry about kids, so I don’t expect others to make the same choice, even if they feel the same way.

username checks

Mine is easy enough to turn down the water to keep a smaller flow to maintain comfort and water temperature while soaping, so I do that.

Source code escrow is a thing, too. I’ve only seen it in the context of (as I understood it) protection against going out of business, but perhaps it could apply to discontinued products, as well?

This one, including all text from the justices (including dissents) is over a hundred pages. That’s doable for many people, though not all, and it should be important enough to prioritize for those who can. But I think this one falls into the category of sticking my head up a bull’s ass while most people will just see what the butcher has to say.