Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@qoto.org

Can the UK really still afford to maintain a bunch of rich, privileged, lazy assholes who serve no one's purposes but their own? But enough about the Conservative party, let's talk about the Royals.

"B-b-b-but he's a patriot!!!"

Why is it that right-wing radicals who openly seek to destroy at least some aspects of America are patriots, but left wing radicals of any stamp are the opposite?

When I see the sort of replies that high-follower-count people get in immense numbers, I'm really not envious. Imagine getting hundreds of these in response to *everything* you say:

[obvious, trite and/or massively redundant unpunctuated thing] lol

It'd set off my misanthropy something awful. In fact it does anyway.

In other words, "the tens of thousands of people who have completely unwarranted access to highly sensitive information need to be more trustworthy" is not even remotely the correct problem statement.

Everyone's angry at what this 21 year old in the Air National Guard did. And that's certainly reasonable.

But as ever, the real problem is that he was able to do it.

For some reason I'm starting to notice a lot more native Douglas squirrels in my neighborhood. Wish I knew of a benign, best wildlife practices way to encourage them. Usually it's just the invasive gray squirrels.

If I were in a position to routinely encounter Clarence Thomas, I'd just live for the day when he got grumpy with me so I could say, "Man, who put a pubic hair on _your_ Coke?"

How I would reform the Supreme Court

1. No lifetime appointments. Eight years and you move on
2. Increase the size to > 22 members, but only 11 sit on any given case.
3. President may only nominate from a pool of candidates selected by a committee consisting of the chancellor or provost or other designated faculty member of each of the country's top 30 or so law schools, plus a few members appointed by the National Bar Association.

If we've entered the age of AI, how come Amazon, the world's largest cloud computing provider, can't filter out all the "I don't know" answers from its product Q & A sections?

Just rewatched Nolan's "Dunkirk" the other night. It's an astonishingly good film considering it gets everything -- EVERYTHING -- completely wrong.

I remember thinking it a bit hyperbolic when Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" described an infosphere in which runaway artificial disinformation and noise ("bogons") overwhelmed valid data by orders of magnitude. I don't think that so much now.

Switching back and forth between local pastured eggs and relatively conventional supermarket eggs carries a certain risk. Trained by the concrete-like toughness of the pastured shells I simply smashed the egg into the edge of the pan and it just went everywhere.

There's a tall, lean old man with a white beard who occasionally walks briskly down my street with a tall pair of walking sticks. I've decided he's a Mythago of The Long Man, and any such sighting is a good omen. If I'm ever lost, I feel confident that he will emerge from the woods to lead me home.

I just unfollowed someone because I noticed they didn't follow anyone. You can't be all mouth and no ears.

The original paintings from Rod Serling's Night Gallery.

https://www.nightgallery.net/the-paintings

Somehow, Britain is still the world's 6th largest economy per GDP.

And yet its poor are among the poorest in Europe. We really need a different way to represent economic rankings. Having a handful of the billlionairest billionaires doesn't make your country a good place to live.

It's startling how bad #Apple's usability has got since Steve Jobs passed away. My latest, and favorite yet #WTF:

The phone displays a "missed call" notification on the lock screen, but no other information, reasonably enough, because the phone is locked. I tap the mesage. It gives me an unlock keypad (I'm masked). I type my PIN to unlock it, and it immediately .... wait for it ... CALLS THE CALLER BACK. It doesn't show me the detail and offer to to do it, it just does it. (Naturally, it was a mystery-meat 866 number. I stopped the call, of course).

Imagine anyone thinking that should be the default action on tapping a missed call notice with no visible phone number.