WTF-Beta

Nevermind. Losing interest fast.

The New Yorker picks up the story, during a visit to the Faust Harrison showroom. https://archive.is/EyWA4

@Mik said: This smacks of an architecture issue. Indeed it does.

Yes.

So, the Republican Senators and the Acting Attorney General got into a shouting match and the Senate was shut down. Soon after, the House was shut down.

The USPS is an independent entity of the executive, not a part of the "Department of Justice" and its magic ability to interpret the Constitution (or ignore it completely). But these are the times we're living in. It will be great PR for the USPS when someone opens their package and accidently blows their brains out. I want to defend the USPS but it's getting increasingly more difficult to do when they won't defend themselves.

@daniel So I have an Instagram account dedicated to board games. Occasionally small board game companies send me games to play with the understanding that I’ll play the games and post about them. Because modern board games are a fairly niche hobby, it only takes a few thousand followers to become enough of an “influencer” for companies to partner with you. Larger accounts (many still under 10k followers but some of the super popular board gamers influencers that I follow have over 100k followers on instagram ) will be paid to make content about games, sometimes for social media or for Kickstarter campaigns. They get invited to try games before they are released and get lots of free product. And these folks definitely influence purchasing decisions amongst fellow board gamers so they are a huge part of a game company’s marketing budget. Every hobby has their own group of influencers. In niche hobbies they may only have a few thousand followers. But in areas like makeup and fashion they may have millions of views on TikTok. It’s a really bizarre landscape. There is a woman, I believe in China, who shows each product for 1-3 seconds before moving on to the next one. She’s a big deal - though I don’t really get why. But companies pay her to show their product, just for a moment.

@bernard Speaking about the global trade in oil, as I said in a different thread, our gas at the pump rose from $3.50 to iirc $4.75 in the last two weeks. They'd better do away with pennies if I'm not going to be worried about pennies. Jeez.

The anti-hooning candidate!

It's all Greek to me.

@Axtremus that was such a cool video!! Thank you for posting it!! I am going to share it with one of my friends here who teaches Chinese linguistics, I bet he can use it in with his class.

️ the video. He refuses to kiss the princess because or ostensibly because he doesn't have consent. That's great! This reminds me that for the human species, it's the females, not the males, who standout for rare beauty and for extraordinary presentation, generally. The WWI era, for instance, had "great beauties." There are still "great beauties" even though this term is anachronistic. Elizabeth Taylor was a great beauty. Diana, Princess of Wales was one. I've always said that handsome men and pretty boys (a term of art meant to describe only males over the age of consent, to be clear) are a dime a dozen.

"Trickle down economics" was proved to be a hoax a very, very long time ago now. Yet it happened when the term was coined, ans has been happening ever since. Even the sometimes vaunted (although less so now) Obama administration engaged in it. As to cuts-- they can't be "sold." They don't sell. It has to be something like bait and switch, distract, or outright lie. This why it is said that austerity is "imposed." Yes, exactly. Social Security, Medicare, etc. are overwhelmingly popular. It seems the politicians have chosen a death by a thousand cuts (sic) approach to attempting to kill them.

I saw that. I learned about it in a video and the person who made it made an argument that it would be a slippery slope like the federal income tax and would eventually tax the middle class out of their homes. I have no idea if he was right about that or not. The federal government should bring back reasonable income and corporate taxes, imo. I don't see it happening.