In my opinion, it's quite similar to Brexit: maybe you can get a majority coalition to disapprove of the status quo, but good luck getting them to actually propose a more popular alternative. Much less proposing an actual procedure for getting that alternative onto ballots.

Structurally and functionally, our political systems are not set up to run anyone other than the person who won the primary. Changing a presumptive nominee this late in the cycle is fraught with potential complications, but can be done if there's sufficient support for a specific alternative candidate. Realistically, it's Biden or it's Harris. There's no feasible way to get someone else at the top of the ticket.

Singular "they" is older than singular "you." And note, of course, that the pronoun "you" is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.

Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.

But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don't think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn't quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he'd been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.

So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.

Hmm, is this a new take on the "Stop Doing Math" meme?

I remember reading an article or blog post years ago that persuasively argued that the danger of AI is not going to be that it ends up doing things better than humans, but that it causes a lot of harm when entrusted with tasks it actually isn't good at. I think that thesis seems much more plausible now, watching people respond to clearly flawed AI systems.

The Twitter deal got canceled, so the interview was posted to YouTube instead. Which, honestly, is the better service for long form video.

I don't think that's right.

The way we operated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had much, much more consideration to the humanitarian toll on civilians, compared to how Israel is currently running their military operation. Even before either invasion, too, the US military knew there was going to be complex and difficult "nation building" afterward.

Take, for example, the way the US and UK troops cleared out Fallujah: leafleting and warning of the assault and specifically letting the civilian population leave before aggressive bombardment. There was controversy about whether military aged males were improperly identified as combatants, but women and children made it out.

The controversy about a cease fire in Gaza is exactly that: letting civilians avoid the places where fighting is happening. The US devoted resources to making that possible, but Israel isn't protecting those goals to the same degree or manner.

Most of these shows pay residuals to actors, writers, directors, and production companies based on formulas of how many subscribers the service has. Notably, none of the services are willing to publish detailed viewership statistics, even privately to creators, so the shows have to pay the same amount regardless of whether 1 person is watching or 1 million people are watching every day.

Rather than throw good money after bad, the services would rather take the show off entirely and not have to pay any residuals going forward. Then, with the show/movie making no money going forward, they get to write down the fair value of that intellectual property, which also saves the parent company on taxes.

Young people tend to be more persuadable before 30, and tend to bake in their political views around that age. So big events in one's 20's tend to lead to lasting partisan affiliations for life after that.

FDR's presidency won over a lot of people to the Democrats in the 30's and 40's. Eisenhower's presidency shifted people over to Republicans in the 50's. Nixon pushed people away from Republicans. But by the 70's Democrats were losing a lot of voters, and then Reagan won a bunch of people over to the GOP. Then 9/11 won people over to Republicans, while the Iraq war pushed them away.

But each of these things had an outsized effect on those under 30. So Boomers who remember getting fed up with Democrats in the 70s and crossing over for Reagan (and then voting Republican in every election since) just thought it was the effect of age, rather than the effect of that particular political moment in 1980.

And even though this data and the analysis is mainly for Americans, it's probably reflective of how people shape their own political beliefs everywhere.

The article alludes to this problem, but Amazon has basically forfeited the consumer goodwill they used to have. It used to be that their reviews were trustworthy (and relatively hard to game), and ordering products "sold by Amazon" was a guarantee that there wouldn't be counterfeits intermingled in. Plus they had a great return policy, even without physical presence in most places.

Now they don't police fake reviews, and do a bad job of the "SEO" of which reviews are actually the most helpful, they're susceptible to commingling of counterfeit goods (especially electronics and storage media), and their return policy has gotten worse.

It basically makes it so that they're no longer a good retailer for electronics, and it's worth going into a physical store to avoid doing business with them.

It's kinda liberating to peek under the hood and confirm that society, like the internet, is mostly held together with figurative duct tape, that someone put there as a temporary fix that became semi-permanent. The concept of technical debt for software and technology projects exists everywhere, including in the backlogs of what our government agencies, court systems, and corporate organizations are doing (and what they simply haven't done yet).

But the whole thing is still pretty resilient. The individuals who make the decisions that feed into the unimaginably complex web of interdependent relationships and rules might not actually understand every detail, and mostly aren't even benevolent actors who want the best for everyone, but the system as a whole still trudges along, mostly making life better than if the system didn't exist at all. And once you learn how at least some parts of it work, you can make some changes here and there for the better, either for yourself or for the people/issues you care about or for the entirety of the system.

Sounds like most people commenting in this thread are going through some challenges right now. I'm hoping things turn around for everyone soon.

I've been having a great week.

• I got myself a working install of Linux on my laptop. I still have things I need to fix, but I've made it further than I actually expected in just 2 evenings after work.
• My kid is making great progress with learning how to swim.
• My job remains stressful but I had a few little victories that will make my September much easier than expected (or at least clear the plate a bit so that even if some things happen, they won't pile onto an existing shit sandwich).
• I just bought some really awesome tomatoes at the farmer's market, and can't wait to incorporate into sandwiches starting tomorrow (tonight I gotta go buy some fresh sourdough to really complete the entire effect of a delicious sandwich). I love tomato season!
• I made it back to the gym for the first time in a month. Lots of travel in July (mostly work, but also a family vacation in the middle) put me in hotels without room in my schedule to do any real workouts, although I guess I walked way more than I normally do while traveling (one day I hit 15,000 steps almost entirely in airports). I feel better when I'm working out regularly, so being home is helpful for resetting that part of my routine.

I'm feeling pretty great! Sending good vibes to everyone else in this thread, whether they're having good weeks or bad weeks.