Complex stuff (talks, projects, brainstorming, etc): The notes get taken on paper. Some things stay there, because the act of writing them down is enough. Some things then move to my “second brain;” for personal stuff, that’s currently on Notion (I’m contemplating migrating it to Obsidian or something similar). For work stuff, that’s a Slack thread, or (if it’s really important) Confluence.

Todos go into Google Tasks. I used to use Todoist, but I got frustrated by how inflexible the notification system was.

Shopping lists (and a few other similar lists that need to be shared) go into Google Keep.

Oh, interesting! I stand corrected.

“Can I borrow that VHS?”

20 years ago it would have been DVDs. But even before that, we didn’t call them "VHS"es. We called them tapes, or video tapes if we wanted to distinguish from audio tapes.

The problem is that the people who can get votes are the ones who would break away, but the people who control the money are the ones who would stay. You need both to get anyone elected.

Splitting the party would be a hail mary; you’d be betting that you could make enough in small-dollar donations from individuals to run successful campaigns and get people into office. And if you were wrong, you’d be leaving the second-most-powerful party in the country in the hands of people like Pelosi, Clinton, and Manchin–and burning the bridge behind you.

It’s not an impossible idea. In fact, it’s happened before (remember the Whigs?). But it’s a really tough road. I get why they’re leaving it as the last choice.

He’ll issue an executive order directing every American to just move to Florida.

Yeah. I mean, I get it. Communities are formed around shared values and beliefs. If they weren’t, those communities would fracture and fall apart and they wouldn’t be communities anymore; and humans die when they’re alone. So changing your belief systems or admitting you’re wrong has an actual, measurable impact on you–on a biological level–making you feel like you’re going to die alone and your genetic line will end. It feels like an existential threat. It’s scary.

But it’s worth it; and in this big, diverse world, it’s possible to find a new community now, where it hasn’t been for most of our species’ history. We’ve grown to the point where we don’t have to follow that deep-brain worry anymore.

Some people don’t agree.

When a populist says, “all X are evil!” and you think, “wait, I know an X, that person’s not evil!” you have two options.

Option 1: “…therefore the populist must be wrong!”

Option 2: “…therefore that X I know must just be one of the good ones.”

#2 is short-sighted. Seriously? Of every X in this country, you just happen to know one of the good ones?

But #1 would mean that you were wrong for ever listening to that populist in the first place. So obviously #2 is the choice.

That would be awesome. If elected, she would be the first president younger than me. And since she’s undoubtedly smarter than I am, I’m cool with it.

WereAllTryingToFindTheGuyWhoDidThis.jpg

Like a modern J. Edgar Hoover.

True. But that doesn’t excuse someone’s decisions when they are presented with the consequences of their actions. Even if it doesn’t affect anyone you know, you can still make moral decisions about how to treat them.

No, I believe it. The problem with capitalists isn’t that they have no empathy; most of them do. They just define very narrowly who that empathy applies to, and mostly that narrow line is drawn right around their immediate vicinity. He was probably great to those in his orbit. He just didn’t see his customers as human.

In order to get a similar experience to Twitter, you need to follow a lot more people on Mastodon than you did on Twitter, because you never get that algorithmic backfill (and, in fairness, because there are fewer people using it).

• There are a lot of people on it, it doesn’t feel empty like I have often found Mastadon.

Mastodon isn’t empty. People just have to follow folks to actually get any content. Now, Bluesky definitely does the onboarding better in that regard, but this almost certainly comes down to people not knowing that they have to follow accounts to get content.