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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • I will accept passive aggression. A lot of people don’t bother with the passive.

    I don’t know what our reputation is globally but I live in a tourist city (New Orleans). A lot of people don’t even bother with the passive part. Most “tier 1” conference cities are huge but we’re a relatively small city. We have a population of about 350,000 (compared to over 8 million in New York City) but enough hotel space and a conference center, stadium, whatever able to host a global event. The Super Bowl was just here and Taylor Swift had three shows. Those were known events but there will be weekends where you go downtown and meet 20 exterminators or something before you realize the exterminator convention is in town. (This actually happened to me. There are so many more exterminators than you could ever imagine.)

    We host a lot of events and, as a result, even people who can’t afford travel meet people from everywhere. My high school friend is a bartender and he’ll have random hatred of places and professions because they’re obnoxious or don’t tip or whatever. To this day, he loves Hawaii residents because they had a football game here once and everyone was chill and nice.

    Anyway, I say all that to say: Canadians are more than welcome to be passive aggressive here. South Louisiana in general is more aggressive than passive.

    https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2007/10/08/edsbs-road-trip-baton-rouge


  • I think long term, the changes in scientific research will be the big story. They made it so grants can only request something like 15% of facilities funding. Some universities can eat the cost of a lab but 95% can’t. So, it’s going to destroy any sort of research that’s mostly done in labs.

    To give a hypothetical example, you could imagine a novel battery chemistry that really only needs a few humans to run the experiments but an expensive lab to just run the battery through 10,000 charge/discharge cycles to see if it degrades. That research probably won’t be done in the United States.

    The executive order allows wavers so maybe it won’t be batteries — Elon Musk needs those — but a lot of basic science research will be done in Europe, Canada, China, etc. who are more than happy to accept brilliant scientists and fund their research. It’s basically pocket change in the context of a national budget and the payoffs are potentially huge.



  • We’re aware. People who get all their news from Fox or ignore politics in general probably aren’t but even my conservative family members are embarrassed about the threats to Canada and Greenland. Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans so pissing them off crossed a line. Even apolitical people probably know the U.S. National Anthem is being booed at sporting events.

    There’s elections in several states today that will provide some data to know more. Louisiana had an election on Saturday and rejected 4 constitutional amendments supported by Republicans. None even got 40%. Louisiana is an oddball state so I’m not sure it’s a harbinger of today’s elections but if voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere vote like Louisiana, it’ll be very telling.





  • I’m less worried about the closure of offices than Musk thinking he can modernize the SSA administration’s computer systems in 3 months. None of his lackeys have ever worked on anything of this scale/complexity and I’m pretty sure none of them know COBOL since they’re apparently mostly around 25. (And retired COBOL experts likely don’t know more modern languages well enough to translate.)

    Don’t get me wrong, the public and private sectors should modernize aging, critical systems that use code written in languages almost no one under 60 has learned, much less mastered. But 3 months probably isn’t even enough time to get through the planning and hiring stage of a project like this. If it were cheap and easy to update those systems, it’d have been done already.






  • France is an interesting choice as the first ones to threaten. They might be the country most willing to tell America to fuck off and spend an evening lighting Teslas on fire.

    DEI initiatives don’t really exist there like they do in the United States. Their constitution already bans employers from making distinctions based on race, gender, religion, etc. The closest thing France has that I know of is a requirement for corporate boards to be 40% women. They aren’t going to change that law because Trump threw a hissy fit.

    Plus, DEI doesn’t even really mean anything specific in the United States anymore. It’s just a dog whistle (like “woke”) Republicans use to signal that they’re racist and sexist and stir up racial animus. They use it when it doesn’t even make sense. Trump blamed “DEI hires” when an ARMY helicopter crashed into a passenger jet even though all the pilots and the air traffic controllers were white men. He blamed the LA wildfires on DEI.







  • Well, I guess the mission was successful if you don’t care about civilians. The 23 year-old pilots were apparently very competent. Houthi leadership gets no sympathy from me and I hope they go home and be family men.

    I wouldn’t have made that trade-off, though. I don’t care if there’s 40 of my worst enemies holed up at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I wouldn’t bomb it, much less treat it like a game. That’s sociopath behavior.

    For the record, I’m from Louisiana so I hate Texas. Especially Texas A&M. There’s a small part of me that wants to bomb anyone wearing a cowboy costume who lives in a suburb and has never even touched a cow. I hate all their sports teams. But if they catch a hurricane, we go help them. They help us when tragedy strikes. That should be the maximum level of hate people have toward each other. I hope Texas A&M explodes with no civilian casualties. (The students who cosplay as fascists are fair game. Grow up.)