Dick Cheney’s death should be a reminder that we must fix the process of politics whatever content we would advocate for. Cheney is, as much as anyone else, the godfather of Donald Trump. As Jonah Goldberg put it, Trump is kind of his “Frankenstein’s Monster.”
I might become a decent writer if I put as much effort into composing and finishing prose in private as I did in venting it off as stream of consciousness to a couple of poor victims I portray as friends. Instead, it gets vented there (and sometimes cribbed for here) and I don’t feel the urge to revisit and work it further.
What happens when we all put our heads in the cloud
Yesterday’s AWS outage reinforces an old truth: the cloud is—oversimplified but not wrong—someone else’s computer. This isn’t an argument against cloud adoption. It’s about trust distribution and control boundaries. How much faith do you place in a single provider, how much can you afford to take advantage of their redundancies—or can you afford not to? What’s beyond your control regardless of SLAs? What do those SLAs actually mean? Are you hedging those bets?
I am a technologist but a morning like this encourages my Luddism (understanding technology’s impact, valuing autonomy, adopting it intentionally). I had cash; while Venmo was down, our visit to the PTSO coffee table outside school happened anyway & The Childe did some practical math.
A couple of photos from the No Kings rally in DC
I appreciate the ecumenical critiques. Not to “both-sides” it: there are significant differences and fairly one-sided undemocratic reasons for the complete deadlock, but the clippy sign could very well stand the test of time. I had my ear out for process and not just content critiques from the stage.
I have to wonder, with Donald Trump’s particular enthusiasm for McDonald’s, and his self-aggrandized narrative about his role in real estate, does Trump play their Monopoly game?
I took Metro this morning. Got on a Silver Line train in the direction of Ashburn. Operator pronounced it ASSburn.
Yeah, we’re all on the train to ass burn these days.
Paul Clement pretty much said it out loud
This morning I’ve been listening to SCOTUS arguments (rather than public radio pledge drive pleas) and heard conservative lawyer (and former Solicitor General under the end of the Bush II administration) Paul Clement admit Republicans have a hard time finding voters who want to join Republicans in court to have standing to support Republican complaints about (what in my mind amounts to) voter enfranchisement. This was all as an aside in the arguments being made this morning in Bost v. IL Bd. of Elections.
"Snake in the grass"
Am I missing something good?
Having taken a break from certain social media platforms in recent years, I might be missing the valuable content amidst the trolling, spam, and slop I imagine having to continued to fester. However, I don’t feel compelled to give any fucks on the news about Sora 2, except those which I give for all of generative AI (some of which I use): concern for its energy consumption, as a source of societal and civic distraction, and potential to cause confusion. Is there truly any art or communication being created with it or similar tools that was impossible or significantly more valuable than before its existence?