Questionable coffee
I bought a new coffee on Sunday and did not care for it, but I’ve been continuing to drink it because my parents grew up in the Great Depression, and they would rise from their graves and admonish me if I threw out perfectly usable food.
But it occurred to me yesterday that if I put the coffee in the chest freezer, that would not be throwing it out. And that’s what I did, and I bought a couple of bags of our usual Sumatra, which we like.
And now the bad coffee will live in the freezer forever, slowly working its way to the bottom, like deep-sea creatures sinking to the ocean depths, where the coffee will spend eternity with other foods we have no use for but can’t bear to throw out, such as the bread pudding I bought a few years ago, not realizing I was buying a whole loaf of bread pudding, and foolishly put in the freezer before I had cut the loaf into individual portions. (What the hell am I going to do with a massive loaf of frozen-solid bread pudding? It wasn’t even good bread pudding.)
One day, hopefully in the distant future, Julie and I will both be dead, and the Questionable Coffee will be our heirs' problem.
Things that don’t bother me that seem to bother other people:
- Apologizing when I’m wrong. Just do it and get it over with. It’s a lot more trouble to twist yourself up in knots justifying bad behavior. Everybody fucks up now and then. Apologize and move on.
- Going bald. When I was young, I had long, thick hair. If there were an inexpensive, low-hassle way to get that hair back, I’d do it, but no such treatment exists, so that’s that. When I had a full head of hair, it was wild, and I had to beat it into submission every day. This way is more convenient, and I look ok as I am.
- Picking up dog poop.
Today I’ve been messaging folks I haven’t communicated with in years, and it’s been interesting to see what the last messages we sent each other were, three years ago or whatever.
Maga’s boss class think they are immune to American carnage: They’re in for a surprise. pluralistic.net/2025/08/1…
Cory Doctorow:
… The Maga base wants a bunch of stuff that the Maga elites would never tolerate, but that’s OK, because the Maga elites are pretty sure they will never have to suffer under the laws they pass for others. Peter Theil is happy to support a political movement whose dominant factions would like to put him – and every other gay man – in a concentration camp, because he’s pretty sure that only applies to the poor gays, not the billionaire gays.
Financiers who back Trump know that they can afford to transport their daughters, wives, mistresses and the housekeepers, babysitters and teenagers they impregnate across state lines (or national borders) to get an abortion should the need arise. Their participation in Maga was a bet that after victory was attained, the base could be made to settle for performative cruelty against people other than them.
MAGA’s boss class are counting on so-called moderate Democrats to bail them out when the bubble pops, as happened in 2008, Cory says.
Or they will count on that bailout. For now, I don’t think they’re thinking that far ahead. They’re thinking the hell-bound train will never arrive at its destination.
Here’s something that I’m thinking about: The subprime mortgage bubble in 2008 looted the financial sector. That was catastrophic, but the feds dipped into the rest of the economy to bail out the financial sector.
Today’s looters, led by Trump, are pillaging the entire economy. When they’re done, will there be anything left to bail them out with?
Civilizations fall. It could well be our turn. And that turn may come within a few years, or even months.
No, these thoughts don’t keep me up at night. They’re too big to contemplate. I just go along living my day-to-day life, not too different from how I lived it in the 2010s.
Sorry, the optional AI is mandatory. www.jwz.org/blog/2025…
Scams And Bribery Are Becoming the Foundation of Our Economy. “The United States government taking steps to deliberately introduce cryptocurrency into the heart of our nation’s economy is kind of like a healthy person deciding to pick up a syringe and inject an unknown, harmful virus into themselves. Stick it right in the heart there!” www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/scams-a…
Cybersecurity “red teams” tell the UK government that AI is rubbish, and they don’t think much of quantum computing or blockchain either. pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/1…
Events that mark the passing of the year: New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, my birthday, buying another year’s supply of dog poop bags, Labor Day, Julie’s birthday, etc.
“One way to think about AI’s unwelcome intrusion into our lives can be summed up with Goodhart’s Law: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'” — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr pluralistic.net/2025/08/1…
Our two elderly cats, who previously hated each other and couldn’t stand to be in the same room, now lay companionably next to each other on the bed or on the floor.
They seem to have grown fond of each other. For now. It may be leading to a whole “whatever happened to baby Jane” situation.
Also, they were both terribly afraid of the dog, and kept to the back of the house, but now they are conscious of which room the dog is in, and will roam freely around the other rooms.
Seriously, I am confused by these changes. If they were acting badly, I would attribute it to feline dementia, but what accounts for this sudden outburst of more well adjusted behavior?
ICE arrested a mother outside a Chula Vista, San Diego, elementary school for overstaying her visa. They arrested Kyungjin Yu, an immigrant from South Korea, as students were arriving for class. www.kpbs.org/news/bord…
Trump has said America was at its richest 1870-1913, a time when the average life expectancy was about 48 and many children died before their fifth birthday. Trump wants to go back to that. By Molly Jong-Fast. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/1…
The A.O.C. Deepfake Was Terrible. The Proposed Solution Is Delusional. By Zeynep Tufekci. Some clown distributed a deepfake video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denouncing the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad as racist. Andrew Cuomo denounced AOC. But it never happened. AOC never said it. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/1…
A unvaccinated teen-ager brought 2025’s first case of measles to San Diego County. He may have exposed others in Scripps Clinic Torrey Pines Urgent Care and Rady Children’s Emergency Department. timesofsandiego.com/health/20…
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth resposted a video of a self-described Christian nationalist pastor whose church doesn’t believe women should be allowed to vote. “Doug Wilson, senior pastor of Christ Church in Idaho, said during the interview with CNN that, ‘Women are the kind of people that people come out of.’ … In the CNN interview, Wilson also defended previous comments where he had said there was mutual affection between slaves and their masters. He also said that sodomy should be recriminalized….. In his repost of the interview on the platform X, Hegseth added, ‘All of Christ for All of Life.’….
“Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told NPR in an emailed statement on Saturday that Hegseth is a ‘proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches,’ which was founded by Wilson.”
Dave Pell: “As crazy as you think these guys are, they’re crazier.”
AOL is discontinuing dial-up internet service after 34 years. Though AOL says the number of dial-up subscribers it has is in the thousands, the US government estimates that about 265,000 people still depend on dial-up Internet. I am more surprised to learn AOL is still around than I am to learn dial up is still around. www.techspot.com/news/1090…