2e2 whooping cough cases currently in my part of Washington state. There’s been a vaccine for that for 80 years.
There used to be a story about turkeys being so dumb that they would stand in the rain, looking up, until they actually drowned. Now I believe that the turkeys were taking a principled stand for their personal freedom.
… just because you’re on their side, it doesn’t mean they’re on your side. They don’t want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it’s their AI slop puts you on the breadline.
— Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights., Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Blue states should play “constitutional hardball."
Provide succor to “medical professionals, teachers, doctors and anyone with a trans kid,” says Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.
All over America, families are despairing of their lives in red states. Whether you’re worried that you or someone you love might need to terminate a pregnancy, or you’re worried about gender-affirming care for you or a loved one, you can put your worries to rest in a blue state. Same goes for nurses and doctors who are worried they can’t do medicine unless it accords with the imaginary dictates of Bronze Age prophets as claimed by pencil-neck Hitler wannabe Bible-thumper with a private jet and a face from Walmart. Fill the blue states with great schools, libraries and hospitals, and invite everyone who wants to do their job in a free country to come and work at ‘em. Line every state border with abortion and mifepristone clinics, and set up billboards advertising the quality of life, the jobs, and the freedom in blue state America.
…
Dems have to get over their fear of “states’ rights” and start playing state-level hardball. This doesn’t mean escalating cruelty. Quite the contrary: every cruel measure enacted as red state red meat is a chance for blue states to extend a kindness, and capture even more of the best, brightest and kindest of the nation, creating a race to the top that Republicans can only win by abandoning their performative cruelty and corruption.
During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and spent years living in the Polish forest and fighting the Nazis) expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”
Surgeons are wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets into the operating room. $3,500 is wicked expensive for a consumer device, but it’s dirt cheap for medical equipment. Other vendors are making specialized devices.
A delightful series of life lessons from people just turned 30, 40, 50 and 60, along with a 74-year-old. A selection:
30:
— don’t work for startups, they’re always one ‘innovative idea’ away adding ‘sell your kidneys on the black market’ to your job description.
…
— those little single-use glasses cleaning wipes are 1000% worth the money
— overly self-depreciating jokes just make people uncomfortable, wean yourself off of them
40:
— never get down on the floor without an exit strategy for getting back up
50:
- “loving yourself” is less of a feeling and more of an action. you can start doing it any time and it will make your life better and better as you go on
- this will happen incrementally - be patient
- along those lines, if you haven’t started making an active effort to quit shit-talking yourself, suck it up and do it
- no, shut up. do it. “but it’s haaaaard!” don’t care. do it.
…
- at some point you will encounter people much younger than you arguing passionately and incorrectly about history you personally remember and experienced
- this will be infuriating and annoying
- otoh, most other things just… will not matter to you as much
- at some point you will shift from wanting to go out to being like “eh” and deciding to stay in. this is okay.
- you will have absolutely no idea what The Youth are talking about and you will not care
- but if you keep your mind open to new ideas you’ll never be irrelevant
…
- get a fucking hobby, especially a hobby that involves physically creating/handling something and/or moving your body in physical space. it will do you more good than you can imagine
Trump plans to rule as a dictator, unchecked by Congress, courts, the law or the Constitution. He intends to put millions of American citizens, residents and visitors in prison camps. None of this is secret. He has promised to do it publicly.
Jamelle Bouie: There is no precedent for something like this in American history.
Trump’s campaign rests on an explicit promise to govern as an autocrat. He has announced, repeatedly, his intent to abuse the authority granted him as president to essentially terrorize millions of Americans, immigrants and native-born citizens alike.
If many Americans, from ordinary voters to political elites and the press, seem paralyzed with inaction, unable to accept what is plainly in front of us, it might just be because the stress of the situation has taken its toll on all of us. Faced with the truly unimaginable, many Americans have defaulted to the notion that this is an ordinary election with ordinary stakes.
If only that were the truth.
A school disciplined a student for using AI, and his parents sued.
The parents say there was no policy forbidding the use of AI, but the school points to several policies — and those policies seem reasonable. You can use AI if your teacher says you can, but you must show all your work, including chatlogs and prompts.
The school also says the kid basically just got a slap on the wrist, and he and his parents should stop being crybabies.
In the 20th Century, you could stroll up to a newsstand, see a newspaper with an interesting headline on the front page or a magazine with an interesting article on the cover, and just buy that one issue for pocket change. No subscription, easy transaction.
We need the equivalent on the internet. As we’re all learning the hard way, quality news needs to be paid for, but fake news is free; a decent micropayment system could help mitigate that terrible problem.
Is it possible to globally disable Cmd-P to print in the Mac?
It seems like an artifact from the 20th Century to have a valuable keyboard shortcut like Cmd-P set to “print.” Are there still people who print things out so frequently that they need that keyboard shortcut? Do they stand around the printer waiting for the printout to extrude while smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes and doing other 20th-century things?
Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over Wordpress chaos. Mullenweg’s supporters are comparing him to Musk and Trump, which is not the flex they think it is.
On foreign policy, economics and law-and-order issues, I could possibly be persuaded to support the Republican point of view. It’d be a hard sell, but I’m a middle-aged, middle-class suburban white dude, so it’s possible.
But I have at least one trans friend, several gay and lesbian friends, and I support bodily autonomy.
So the harder the GOP pushes on those issues, the harder they push me to the Democratic side.
I expect I am far from alone.
I was blocked on Threads for most of the day. Whenever I tried to log in, I got a notification that one of my posts was deleted for praising or supporting an organization Meta deems as dangerous. This is the post.
I often see front yards covered in artificial turf around here. Is that common elsewhere, or is it particular to southern California?
I dislike it. Just put down indigenous plants, or (if that’s too much bother) gravel is fine, too. Artificial turf makes me wonder why you thought it was a good idea to carpet your yard?
I didn’t even notice how common this is here until I shared a photo online, and people who live elsewhere in the US commented on how weird it is. They’re right — it is.
[@MitchW](https://micro.blog/MitchW) The most true and accurate and wise words on the internet:
don't Google “Goatse"
My 20-year love of RSS
I’ve been using RSS virtually every day for more than 20 years. My current favorite is Readwise Reader, which is a little pricy, but it combines RSS, newsletters, read-it-later, reading PDFs and ebooks, highlighting, note-taking and building a document library into a single, powerful application.
I’ve recently been struggling to find a decent news portal—something I can glance at and see if there’s any major breaking news, such as when hurricanes threatened Florida. I decided to add feeds for the NYTimes, Washington Post, Guardian, etc., to my reader, on the theory that if news is major and breaking, it’ll show up in the feeds when I glance at them.
I divide my feeds into folders: one for high-priority items, where I want to see every headline, and another for work-related news.
But mostly, I treat the RSS feed as a “river of news” and don’t even try to read every item. I read headlines every few hours. Often, I just mark an item to read later (tap the “L” key in Readwise Reader) and move on.
I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser on the Mac for about six months, and I quite like it. My two favorite features:
- You can switch between vertical and horizontal tabs. I use vertical tabs with page thumbnails on my ultrawide display, and normal, horizontal display when the MacBook is detached.
- Command palette for commands and opening bookmarks and bookmark folders.