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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • No. Katrina was a colossal fuck-up for Bush. His aides had to make a DVD of the news coverage to get him to realize the severity of the situation and that he needed to deploy significant resources. It was a huge embarrassment for the administration.

    And then several Republicans in Congress were questioning whether the city should be rebuilt at all. People had to sit them down and explain that it’s important to have a port that basically every navigable river east of the Rocky Mountains is a tributary and the Port of New Orleans is critical national infrastructure. A lot of agricultural exports go through it. It was so stupid.

    There were mistakes by the mayor and governor but a lot of the federal government was just oblivious (aside from the Coast Guard, who saved hundreds, if not thousands of stranded people.) And that’s just New Orleans. Katrina was massively wide and Mississippi and Alabama were having issues too.


  • You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)

    If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.



  • The Blackberry era was my favorite. You could do all the important stuff and even check sports scores or breaking news or whatever. You couldn’t really doomscroll because no one had done that yet. Even Facebook — which was just for college students at that point and was legit useful. You could find people in a class you were taking and lived in your dorm and get notes from them if you missed class. And you could just download any song you wanted on Kazaa or whatever. No one’s boss emailed them outside of work hours and expected a response.

    Probably 2003ish? I don’t know what year it all went to shit. But the Internet seemed like a world of possibilities then.

    I’d have also advocated to heavily restrict tlds. Like .org only for real, recognized non-profit organizations.


  • Tariffs basically never help except in a few select situations. For instance, “infant industry” situations where a country needs time to scale up some industry and there’s real promise that once they do, it’ll be competitive. If a country is trying to corner some critical market by dumping, targeted tariffs can be smart. But mostly, tariffs are stupid.

    There’s a legit national security argument for steel and probably aluminum but a better solution for materials used to make things would be to just subsidize those companies for domestic sales so you don’t screw over every industry that uses them. Steel definitely isn’t an infant industry. We have the technology.

    An even better solution is to not piss off all your most reliable allies and trading partners. But I guess that cat’s out the bag.



  • Not anywhere close, in my opinion. People have these ideas that only right wingers have guns and red state vs. blue state but my conservative relatives who live in the country and hunt are afraid to go to cities. They ask me all the time if I’m nervous living in one and there’s a school bus stop by my house where kids get dropped off.

    A related point is that in the last Civil War, there was a somewhat blurry but pretty clear regional divide. Now, it’s an urban vs. rural divide. I live in Orleans Parish (aka county) in Louisiana and we went 82% for Harris/Waltz, roughly the same as Manhattan. I’m pretty sure California had more Trump voters than Texas. If a gun brawl breaks out, it’s going be local and contained.

    Also, what’s Meal Team Six gonna do in a real battle? Most Trump voters are like 60+ years old and watch Fox News all day. Nobody wants the smoke.




  • I like it but I’ve always been a very restless sleeper so I’m ultimately happier if I don’t. Like, I put my glass of water far enough from the bed that I’d have to sleepwalk to knock it over. It’s obviously nice to fall asleep cuddling but I (apparently) roll around and throw my arms around. And getting into a (very minor) argument about something you literally can’t consciously control is not fun.

    So, I’d rather cuddle (or “cuddle”) and then go somewhere I can fling my arms and roll around randomly.


  • You can just freeze them for smoothies. Everyone is saying jam and that’s a good idea but it’s a whole process and has to be sanitary. It’s not super hard, obviously, and it’s worth learning how to do but the first time can be a bit daunting and you really have to follow every step. A smoothie is easy.

    Another pretty easy thing is to make ice cream and freeze it. A restaurant I cooked at had fig trees that would go nuts once a year and we’d have buckets of figs. We basically made vanilla ice cream and added figs. That was delicious and ice cream obviously freezes well.


  • Rolling Stone has been doing surprisingly good work too. I don’t know how Teen Vogue and Rolling Stone became more reliable than all the other legacy media but come the fuck on. I guess they just had to reinvent themselves sooner because of their younger readership but I don’t know.

    For non-Americans and you’re wondering about bias, they lean left but in a youth way and not a “we’re trying to spread Marxism” way. They’re just able to say, “Fuck that old bigot.” and that’s kind of the real divide in the country right now. But they were rarely overtly political when I was young.