Beaver [he/him]

Atomization and immiseration are more effective than any temperance movement.

The only way this could turn out good is if Mamdani forces Obama to bend the knee.

They will destroy your life for even the smallest amount of resistance.

We were supposed to have a Mars colony by now, but instead we have penis inspections at bee dubs.

Yeah, he’s got his own personal hangups with drugs, along with a lifetime marinating in drug war propaganda. Just seems he’s saying it to make his annoying staffers shut the fuck up about it.

The average Briton had to contend with the question evil for the first time

Do you even know who my dad is?!

All of these guys are such liars and scammers that I assume this story is mostly made-up

Toy Story is about panpsychism

It’s a funny pic, but it’s definitely pretty normal “boomer doing home renovations” behavior.

Whenever I start a new job, I make a little text file called “acronym soup” that I fill in with everything. Then I can ask someone later what it stands for. It’s always funny how many people use regularly without knowing what they stand for.

Feels like AI is the only growth sector and maybe not the best ground to build a sound economic foundation on.

WSJ with an interesting piece this morning about how we are basically pouring our entire productive capacity into building data centers

In the handful of interviews I’ve had these past months, the hiring managers have very excitedly talked about how their products get used by AI data centers (even if tangentially). In one of them, I pointedly asked what their plan was if the bottom fell out of the AI market, and I got a very hem-haw answer.

It’s frightening how much the commanders of capital are betting the farm on AI being as transformational as the hype artists are claiming it’s going to be. This is getting way beyond the territory of even the late 90s tech boom.

I haven’t heard a good explanation. People keep saying that all the ghost listings are “data gathering”, but I’m not sure what kind of a data would be gathered or why it would be valuable. I also can’t quite figure out what the point is of spamming job listings with applications that are fake or very obviously not suited for that job. It’s not like they’re going to get hired, so there’s no payday for the recruiter even with high volumes. It seems like job seeking and hiring for are just fundamentally broken right now.

I don’t have the heart to tell my SO that I’m learning to garden in earnest because I’m worried about our long-term food security.

I was laid off in 2008, 2020, and now again in mid 2025 (I work in industrial equipment manufacturing). Anecdotally, the job search process is feeling somewhat worse than 2008. Part of that seems to just be the absolute degenate state of job boards, but I think it’s mostly just the collapsing availability of real job openings.

I was employed for the first half of 2025, and so I got to be privvy to my company’s Q1 and preliminary Q2 results. They were… really bad, like sales dropped almost in half from an already kind of weak 2024. But I think the kicker was that a lot of people ended up getting pulled into tariff-mitigation work because of parts availability issues, so it’s not like we were even working on cost-reduction projects or anything.

I think we’re seeing a relatively slow crash because the 2020 COVID shocks were not that long ago, and so everyone got some practice with handling sudden unexpected supply chain shocks. But as I’ve said before, a lot of companies simply don’t have a plan for what to do if Trump doesn’t TACO on tariffs.

I “only” read about half of them, but I feel this in my bones

I’ll let other people run defense for them. I enjoy pulp military sci-fi, but I’m not going to pretend like they’re good, or a worthwhile use of time.

Australia had people before western Africa?!

What if we fought two land wars in Asia?

Like am I going to have to declare that I’m carrying an $18 t-shirt and 3 euros in cash if I’m returning from a trip? And customs is going to process that?

That would be a pretty funny outcome. A lot of countries already have awkward and inconsistently applied enforcement for people who are simply traveling with expensive equipment that is subject to customs duties. Imagine if the distinction between market goods and personal property was simply eliminated, and everyone had to pay duties on everything they brought into the country.