I didn’t realize anyone earned anything on Twitter ever. Is this just video views? Is this new?

Also, fuck Musk, etc.

Practical answer: because they haven’t installed concrete wheel stops on the ground in that parking lot. If that’s a used walkway, they should.

I know, people are assholes, etc. I’m just mentioning a solution that is actually available, where unassholing everyone isn’t.

How do you declare war on a state you don’t recognize?

On the other hand, one can understand why Google doesn't want to continue to pour resources into an ancient platform just to keep it on life support.

Bullshit. “Pour” my ass. Issue a legacy build of the app that controls them and walk away. What horseshit. This is shameful. The only reason it won’t blow up into a huge debacle is that these products targeted wealthy early-adopters in the first place and those folks can afford to upgrade, and most probably already have.

I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.

The Verge has been covering the shit out of the Reddit death spiral and I’m so here for it. Good for them.

I make and restore wood furniture. I have taken plenty of “all wood” furniture apart, repaired it, or just salvaged whatever actual wood scraps I could find.

Whatever idiot wrote this has no idea how expensive true wood furniture is. There is hardly ANY actual wood furniture in the market, PERIOD. You think it’s wood, but it’s veneered ply or fiberboard. That is the state of the entire industry, not just IKEA. This is a simple fact of life in a world that has already been heavily deforested even before all 8 BILLION PEOPLE currently living were born. Wood is precious. You also don’t need solid wood for your fucking nightstand. So maybe you should buy a nightstand made out of the particleboard that is waste product from milling lumber for other uses, like construction. That’s called using everything, wasting nothing. It’s sustainable.

There is nothing wrong with IKEA furniture for most people’s everyday needs. And you are not going to get a 150-year all wood piece for the same price. LOL fuck no. When you are in your 40s and have made it big time you can go to a craft furniture maker and get a solid oak bedroom set. It will cost more than your first car did.

IKEA furniture does not fall apart in 3 years, either. I’m about to go get my pajamas out of the IKEA dresser I’ve had since 2001. It won’t last centuries like a real craftsman made wood dresser. But it’s not 3 year garbage either, and looks and works like the day I bought it, despite me using it daily for 22 years and moving it between at least 4 houses in that time.

IKEA furniture is good for what it is and very cheap. One of the reasons it’s cheap is that it is flat packed for efficient shipping. Assembly by the customer also saves cost. And seriously, if you can’t figure out the IKEA instructions, you must not be trying very hard.

I decided to look up some numbers and do some math.

So the CEO earns 362x the average employee at GM. Basically if they took the CEO’s pay and redidsteubuted it, they could double the pay of 362 lucky workers at GM. Or take twice as many workers as that and increase their pay by 50%.

But how many workers are there and how far will this CEO’s pay go?

GM has 167,000 employees. Collectively, their pay totals 167,000x the salary of the average employee. Very basic.

Now let’s add the CEO’s pay to that sum: we are now up to a sum of money equal to 167,362x the average salary.

And if we distribute that amongst all the employees, that’s:

167,362/167,000

Get out your calculator and you’ll see that this would fund a two-tenths of one percent raise for all employees. That’s 0.002%

The pay is very unfair. But we should be realistic that the CEO is one person and their fat salary doesn’t actually go very far in terms of worker raises.

Let’s do the math in reverse: to give all GM employees just a 2% raise would cost 9.2x the CEO’s salary. And the workers want a 40% raise over 4 years.

I hope they get it. I believe that money is there and currently going to the entire executive layer, the board, and shareholders. But when anyone tries to oversimplify and it make it all about the CEO’s salary, I cringe a bit because it really isn’t that meaningful a sum of money, unfair as it may be.

We should be looking at profit or better EBITDA and showing how easily it could be used to raise worker pay.

That takes guts. Good for him.

I felt that was necessary to say at least once amid all the grim comments about how welp he’s fuckin dead. I mean there’s truth to that but it shouldn’t be the sum total of our reaction to this.

Well they made the smartest possible decision in letting us hear from the other humans at LMG. The last thing they needed was another smug non apology rant from Linus himself. These folks seem like actual humans, and they made some very frank admissions of error.

Of course, Linus has to come in at the end and minimize, deflect, and ultimately fail to show an ounce of real contrition, learning, and growth. I feel the most pity for him in this because he’s clearly trapped in his deficient little mind, unable to grow through a major challenge like this. He’s passed beyond his ability to just rant back, but he doesn’t have any other pages in his playbook. The best he can do is rely on the adults around him. I hope he does more of that.

The Democrats’ plans for the working class are tweaks. A little tax credit here, a little minimum wage bump there.

But the working class in America have been experiencing long term systemic structural changes that permanently disadvantage them, globalization being one of them.

Between shipping manufacturing jobs elsewhere, and allowing in immigrants who do menial work, people at the low end of the economy are pretty pinched for work. People will say “Americans don’t want to pick fruit” and there’s some truth to that. But there definitely are Americans who want to mow lawns for a living and they’re constantly undercut on price by guys from Mexico who sleep 10 to a room so they can send a few dollars back to family in the old country. I love and admire those guys, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no question that people at the low end of the economy feel pinched from both ends, and one side of that pinch is the commodification of unskilled labor due in part to an unbounded supply of immigrants.

Trump voters see his policy on tariffs and they don’t think “hm economists say this could lead to a drop in GDP.” They see a structural policy shift aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the US. However ill-conceived it might be doesn’t matter. It’s big, it’s bold. It is a fundamental reordering. Economists flap their hands and Trump voters say “good - run scared, you Wall Street pimps.”

If I sound like I’m defending Trump voters, I’m not. But I absolutely believe that the Democrats have to offer more than tweaks and handouts to address the working class.

America spends huge amounts of money to project power abroad. We’re the richest nation by far. Why isn’t that benefitting the working class? These are real questions. Trump has all the wrong answers, but Democrats don’t have any answers. And frankly they are a bunch of moneyed elites, and I don’t throw that term around much. Look at the personal net worth and residential addresses of top Democrats and you’ll see rich people. They have a lot to lose in Bernie’s revolution and they don’t believe in it.

Part of being “white” is getting to decide who is “white.” This is only possible because “white” is a completely made up category. We shouldn’t even engage with the term.

Yep the fight for Reddit is lost. All we can do is make an example of them.

Gen Z Americans were three times more likely to get caught up in an online scam than boomers were (16 percent and 5 percent, respectively).

Does this control for the fact that Gen Z are simply online a lot more than Boomers?

I can’t tell what these are percentages of. 16% of scammed people were GenZ? 16% of GenZ have experienced a scam? Because both of those would be skewed if, for example, 100% of GenZ use the internet daily and 20% of Boomers have never used it.

Once again, a journalist doesn’t know how to present statistics in a meaningful way. They do this 72%!

Let me summarize the core of the argument.

California: “You know what - we’re banning Nazis and Naziism.”

Elon: “This will lead to murdering kittens.”

Oh wow Andrew Tate is one of them.

Gee, when you look at all these manbaby assholes who cry about being canceled, one thing starts to stand out. They’re all manbaby assholes. Maybe if every canceled person is a manbaby asshole, then getting cancelled is actually about not liking manbaby assholes? And not about killing freedom of speech? It’s just… the pattern is undeniable.

I was once employed by a startup that was about to go under, but got a last minute acquisition offer. The CEO pulled me aside at one point and made an observation I’ve never forgotten.

He said “You know, when it looked like the company was going to be a total loss, everyone was really great about it. The VCs told me not to be discouraged, that we’d given it our all. No bitterness or blaming at all. But once the buyout offer was on the table, everyone’s knives came out. Everyone wanted to take the money from everyone else, and get away with as much as they could even if it meant shafting literally everyone else. You’d think people would be at their worst in a time of deprivation but it’s when there’s something to be had that people really show their worst.”

OpenAI is a golden goose right now. I’m not surprised if there’s a lot of knifing happening in its vicinity.

If you have heard the word “intersectionality” but didn’t know what it meant, this gives us a good example.

Feminists will say that women are not treated fairly overall, BUT if you’re a white woman, you might actually have it better than a black man. And if you’re an extremely wealthy white woman, you might even have it better than most men. All the factors combine.

It also works in reverse. Basically a gay black woman might not feel anything in common with Mrs. Walton, despite them both being women, and might easily see her as an oppressor.

I quit smoking years ago and I really felt like the world wanted me to quit. Indoor smoking at restaurants was being banned. No more smoking section on flights. Movies were no longer depicting everyone with a cigarette in their mouth all the time like they did in the 60s. Many hotels stopped offering smoking rooms. Nicotine patches and gum were available to help.

I felt like trends in the world were behind me and it helped.

Alcohol is a totally different story. Alcohol is not being banned. It is still something almost everyone does. It is allowed at restaurants and virtually everywhere else. Everyone I know drinks. They haven’t cracked down on advertising in the same way. Hotel rooms have booze in the room for you. Airlines bring you drinks. There are no OTC quitting aids.

If someone has an alcohol problem and needs to quit, they’re really going to have a much harder time than quitting smoking.

In the 19th century all kinds of “snake oil” mixtures were sold as pain killers and energy tonics. The vast majority were just something suspended in alcohol. Alcohol dulls pain and makes you feel a rush of euphoria. So people thought it was “medicine.”

It continues to this day. My wife was convinced that a certain kombucha was benefitting her gut microbiome in some profound way because it made her feel so great to drink it. Turns out the brand got in trouble - their process was letting through 1.5-2% alcohol (yes my wife is a lightweight).