Good news for the nation!

How big a maintenance budget need to be for a garden like this?
How big a maintenance staff?

But “538” is not Nate Silver anymore.

Nate Silver on “Why I Don’t Buy 538’s New Election Model”:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-i-dont-buy-538s-new-election

Still cannot govern:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/16/house-republicans-government-funding/

House Republicans have been in power for nearly two years — and they’re still unable to solve fiscal problems within their ranks.

The belligerent nature of the conference, coupled with a historically narrow majority, has made it almost impossible for any GOP leader to appease each corner of their constituency when nearly every Republican vote is necessary to pass bills along party lines.

https://www.vox.com/culture/371632/raunch-republicans-sydney-sweeney-hawk-tuah-girl

... is sex for celebrating and flaunting? Or is it for regulating and decrying and shaming?

There’s a sexual ideology that holds all of these concepts together in a single place: the idea that you can celebrate Hawk Tuah Girl and use her catchphrase to degrade a female politician; the idea that a starlet in a low-cut dress is yours to objectify, while contraception and sexual education are dangerous and probably immoral and should be restricted.

A thoughtful and expansive look into the raunch culture in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how we may be retro-ing back into it now.

Long piece. Set your coffee down on it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/10/us/politics/johnson-spending-bill-republicans.html

The speaker [Mike Johnson]’s first effort to avert a government shutdown ran into a buzz saw of opposition from both far-right and mainstream Republicans.

... Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, ordered members of his party to shut down the government unless they received “absolute assurances on Election Security.”

@pique said in I designed a Kamala t-shirt:

I changed the typography just very slightly. Can you tell?

@pique said in I designed a Kamala t-shirt:

But I don't have any idea if it would be okay to do this on my own.

Just do it, even if only for your own fun. You don't expect to get rich from this, you may even opt to donate all profits to the campaign, and you can always stop if/when you get a cease-and-desist letter from the campaign. Furthermore, you can also open-source it -- put it in the public domain (or some very liberal licensing terms) and let others reproduce it.

Ironic that the prosecutor is also charging the father. What? You want the father to be responsible for the action of an "adult"?

On average a person works 40 hours a week, but "round-the-clock in-home care" means 24x7=168 hours a week of dedicated labor, more than 4x of the typical 40-hour work week. IOW, it takes four people's labor to provide for one person's "round-the-clock in-home care." Of course it's expensive!

At scale, few societies can ever afford this with human labor.

It will be a long while before robots become advanced enough to be competent caregivers. May take longer still to transfer our consciousness into machines so we don't have to age in decrepit biological bodies.

Interim solutions are centralization/statistical multiplexing like nursing homes and having most people dying quickly as to not need round-the-clock care for long once they started needing "round-the-clock care.

Centralization/statistical multiplexing means giving up "in-home" care. The "die quickly" option also has its shortcomings. From a public policy perspective, support legal euthanasia to make the "die quickly" option more palatable, especially if you want such on option to preserve some dignity.