Tale as old as time.

Progressive voters view progressive politicians as unreliable because they regularly abandon principles in favor of victory.

Progressive politicians view progressive voters as unreliable because they regularly abandon victory in favor of principles.

Dude already said he reigns Hell. How much more clear does he have to be?

Next Iran consulate account to get banned for trolling too successfully

Yeah, inertia is baked into the legislative process here. It’s silly.

The purple line is the bottom 90% of the population by income.

So basically, public opinion does not impact policy in any statistically significant way.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

Here’s a chart of how likely a policy is to become enacted (Y axis), based on public support of the policy (X axis):

This line of reasoning was already perfectly captured in Office Space: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yZjCQ3T5yXo

But if they had tried to put his name on the policy: “Sorry, can’t insure someone who doesn’t exist yet”

zooms out a bit

Ah, so it’s like a mini pandemic?

zooms out a bit more

…or like a normal day in the few years leading up to 2008. That’s a good sign…

You might wanna check out what immigration looks like on the easiest setting: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/

This is a photo of my second O-1 (“Alien of Extraordinary Ability”) visa application. It’s 800 pages long:

The next one was 1200 pages long.

I was gonna say… “no internet connection required” is not the key attribute of AirDrop. AirDrop doesn’t even require a network connection. It’s a weird comparison.

Aaaand he’s being investigated by the DOJ for being an enemy of the state anyway

One project that can help with this is the OUI-SPY, a small piece of open source hardware. The OUI-SPY runs on a cheap Arduino compatible chip called an ESP-32. There are multiple programs available for loading on the chip, such as “Flock You,” which allows people to detect Flock cameras and “Sky-Spy” to detect overhead drones. There’s also “BLE Detect,” which detects various Bluetooth signals including ones from Axon, Meta’s Ray-Bans that secretly record you, and more. It also has a mode commonly known as “fox hunting” to track down a specific device.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice

“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

That is wild.

The vending company factors this into the prices they charge for the items, the amount they spend on the machine to ensure accuracy, and the amount they pay the people who stock the machines to do it properly.

If you take it upon yourself to unilaterally re-balance the equation, you’re not being noble, you’re just a fool.

The cruel irony of our situation is that we have:

• An anti-democracy faction, that claims to believe that majority rule and bureaucracy are ineffective, and need to be replaced by a powerful dictator… but has only been able to gain as much ground as it has, because of a multi-decade effort to persuade regular people, build consensus and coalitions, and dive deep into procedure and obscure case law in order to move their agenda forward, one sub-sub-sub-clause at a time
• A pro-democracy faction, that seems to believe that it’s impossible (or immoral) to try to change people’s minds, and that if an action won’t result in radical, comprehensive, overnight revolution all at once then it’s basically not worth doing

GDP is an arbitrary metric anyway, but yeah.

iPhone’s design is more secure than Android (partly because of OS+hardware integration that just isn’t practical in a multi-vendor space), but they still have plenty of zero-days in their implementation. iPhone 7 is old enough that official security patch support is EOL, though Apple has still shipped some critical fixes past EOL.

Yeah, we need to be careful about distinguishing policy objectives from policy language.

“Hold megacorps responsible for harmful algorithms” is a good policy objective.

How we hold them responsible is an open question. Legal recourse is just one option. And it’s an option that risks collateral damage.

But why are they able to profit from harmful products in the first place? Lack of meaningful competition.

It really all comes back to the enshittification thesis. Unless we force these firms to open themselves up to competition, they have no reason to stop abusing their customers.

“We’ll get sued” gives them a reason. “They’ll switch to a competitor’s service” also gives them a reason, and one they’re more likely to respect — if they see it as a real possibility.

Nothing more American than a company that guzzles down taxpayer funds via police budgets and exploits brown laborers abroad, all to build a product that’s primarily used to harm brown laborers domestically. I think I hear a red-tailed hawk screeching in the distance.