ShittyBeatlesFCPres

I don’t have any desire to defend hedge fund or VC billionaires so I’ll concede the point. There’s a reason San Francisco has NIMBY policies and New York City can’t elect mayors for shit.

I’m pretty sure like 80% of North Korean defectors start in China. Obviously, a top diplomat with resources wouldn’t necessarily do that since China wants to keep up appearances (even if they sort of hate North Korea). But “most” “defectors” fare about as well as “illegal immigrants” in the U.S. or Europe.

As cynical as it may be, it’s in South Korea’s, China’s, and North Korea’s interest to ignore most of it. If it gets media attention, maybe South Korea or a Western country accepts them as asylum seekers. A few times, people got into western embassies in Beijing and it was global news. China was not happy. But most people who leave North Korea end up working in a Beijing noodle shop or whatever.

And South Korea, while often proclaiming to want reunification, doesn’t actually want the headaches. It’d probably be 1,000 times more complex than Germany and East Germany reuniting.

The richest places in America are pretty solidly blue. A lot of rich people like good public schools and colleges, clean water, the arts, etc. and understand that taxes and charity are how those things are paid for.

Other rich people like gated communities and stopped reading books^1^ when someone stopped assigning them. They’re the Republican rich people.

^1^ Some will read a book about war or some shitty airport bookstore thing that’s 80% out-of-context quotes about how to be a leader.

That’s not what models say. It’s pretty much 50/50. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/

And all the fashion models I hang out with are saying the same things. The models agree.

I wish I had a $1 billion scheme. sighs forlornly

This is something Apple got right. OS X 10.0 was good and they’ve made lots of incremental changes but didn’t just arbitrarily change the whole “centered application dock at the bottom and menu bar at the top” situation. When new form factors emerged, they just made a new interface and didn’t try to hot glue a mouse/touchpad OS and touchscreen OS together for the fuck of it.

Ultimately, everything is in an indefinite transition period. It’s the essence of existentialism, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and Hyrule.

When I was in high school, I wrote a TI-86 program in BASIC to do geography/physics formulae. Like “find the volume of a cube” and then it would ask you for the variables and solve for whichever one was missing.

My teachers found out and actually ruled it not cheating because I wrote the program myself and hadn’t shared it with everyone. (I eventually became a computer programmer so they were probably right.)

So, I’d say by that precedent, as long as you gave yourself the tattoo and learned a new trade, it’s fine. But looking at a friend’s tattoo would be cheating.

A shot grazed his fucking ear. Every teen goth girl has taken more direct hits to their ear.

Plus, he doesn’t listen to anyone anyway. The only more useless part of his body that they could have hit is his hair.

This presupposes he believes in anything. I haven’t read it because everyone said it was garbage but I’m pretty sure he wrote his memoir about “Appalachia” when he grew up near Dayton, OH.

In so many ways, Kagame is one of the rare “benevolent dictators” but one of the reasons that concept is often used sarcastically is because no matter how benevolent, any autocratic leader makes it nearly impossible to build up civil society and institutions — including opposition parties — that need to be in place for who (or, potentially, what chaos) follows.

If you told the world that Rwanda would be stable, safe, and relatively prosperous after arguably the most brutal modern genocide, everyone would have taken that deal. Maybe this is the only way it would have happened. But autocratic leaders have a tendency to stay on too long at the expense of long term stability.

For the most part, it’s probably better for me. I never really got into the big subreddits that make the front page anyway. It was mostly a place for me to nerd out on small, more academic or hobby subreddits anyway. (I’m a Linux user and software developer so that all pretty much transferred over here fine.)

I find the quality of posts/replies here to be better in terms of quality but, obviously, sometimes there’s fewer (or, worse, zero). I like Voyager as an app (or web interface if your instance supports it). And I’ll pretty much always accept the less and the more to support open standards/communities/software.