At this point, I don’t think Russia could win a conventional war with France, much less one they attack France first and it triggers Article 5. I might not have thought that before Ukraine but once you start relying on North Korea for bullets and personnel, you’re down bad.

Toyota had small, fuel efficient cars and that’s what people wanted during the oil crisis.

Probably more like “Elon Musk tells some manager to tell an engineer to delete the posts and then gives hazy, contradictory instructions while in a K-hole.” It’s not like he does stuff besides raise money and be a mascot.

I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.

And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.

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.

We did that in New Orleans for confederate traitors and everyone under 60 adjusted within a few weeks. Older people still fuck it up but whatever. You forgive grandparents for calling street names by the wrong name. They call half the buildings in the city some name I never even heard of because it changed before I was born. And the building names aren’t even offensive. It’s just whatever company owned it in 1970 to them.

I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.

It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)

Super Soakers were invented there.

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.

There should probably be a tax on anything that can be described as “ultra-orthodox” of any kind. I’m not a theologian but I’m pretty sure the concept of “plastic” isn’t banned in any faith tradition’s holy book.

Even while embracing cryptocurrencies?

I’m not saying they’re not an annoyance sometimes. But they’ve been in Louisiana (possibly a different species as ours are fully black in color with the same big orange noses). But we have termites, mosquitos, and probably everything else. And the birds, lizards, frogs, etc. have learned to eat them so they probably keep the population in better balance than if they were new to town.

They’re pollinators that don’t sting, bite, or eat your house. They’re not locusts that ruin the harvest or whatever. And in Spring/Summer, it rains basically every day here around 4pm. That probably mostly cleans them off cars and stuff. They’re just part of the ecosystem. If you want birds, you need bugs.

For real. Love bugs are harmless and kind of cute. The main problem is that if you drove anywhere when it was mating season, you had to get a car wash. As bugs go, they were amongst the least annoying. I don’t want to call them “the best” bugs because some butterflies and lightning bugs are pretty cool but love bugs don’t care about us and we don’t care about them. They don’t bite or try to get in your house and birds and other animals have a feast.

They might be the best behaved bugs. They’re just trying to get their freak on.

The sterilization part is what I was concerned about. People who make jam the first time don’t necessarily know how critical that is. You really cannot take shortcuts and be like, “I just washed it. It’s fine.”

It’s just WeChat. It’s basically like Venmo. It’s been that way for awhile. Even rural farmer’s markets and street vendors and stuff took WeChat last time I went and that was 7 or so years ago. It’s not a digital currency.

It should be noted that WeChat is very much more expansive in China than in the West where it’s just a chat app. An American friend lived there for awhile for work reasons so I’d go visit her. My WeChat was just a chat app and hers was the “everything app” Elon Musk dreams of making X into. (Which I seriously doubt will work in America because we have different apps that do all that. China didn’t and WeChat filled the void.)

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.

On the one hand, I’m against censorship. But on the other, every bit of content on Facebook and X should be removed and all their hardware run through industrial shredders. It’s quite the conundrum.

We keep acting like Netanyahu isn’t going to jail as soon as there’s no war. He’ll bomb the Seychelles before he goes to jail.

Every spy in my vicinity is going to be dancing to The Meters - Cissy Strut.