For some reason I am picturing Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall, awakening to this unintentionally-funny dystopia as he tries to traverse port security.
>the administration has weakened tax enforcement ... as more people cheat on their payments ... the effect could be worth an additional 0.25% of GDP.
Here is the first beneficial side effect of firing and defunding all of those federal workers and agencies, especially the now-hobbled IRS. Who says "cheaters never prosper"?
We have an economic forecast of national prosperity through perdition.
This is just another cynical game of "pin the tale on the donkey". The current administration hopes, once again, to blindfold the American public, spin us around in circles, and get us to stick it to a leading opposition candidate.
I'm not saying there's no fraud in Minnesota.
I'm saying this tale is a developing political story in which all the forces of the party in power are aligning to attack the image of the man they have identified as a not-so-far-future threat.
In this episode, there's no need to make a "perfect phone call" to a distant foreign leader to ask for a little favor.
Deploy the influencer troops; get the once-legitimate agencies to blow some smoke under the color of authority. Invite the public to join in, incite outrage with a tale that swipes at the face of the whole state. Bang the same drum as always, outrage over peon cheaters, stoke fury at lower class fraud.
But make sure to stick that pin in the governor.
Make that ass bray, just in case we let the peons vote some day.
I whole-heartedly agree with your recommendation and join in encouraging more adopters of this philosophy and practice.
Life online without javascript is just better. I've noticed an increase in sites that are useful (readable) with javascript disabled. Better than 10 years ago, when broken sites were rampant. Though there are still the lazy ones that are just blank pages without their javascript crutch.
Maybe the hardware/resource austerity that seems to be upon us now will result in people and projects refactoring, losing some glitter and glam, getting lean. We can resolve to slim down, drop a few megs of bloat, use less ram and bandwidth. It's not a problem; it's an opportunity!
In any case, Happy New Year! [alpha preview release]
We are all of us in the gutter. Some of us are looking at the stars:
For me, Brigitte Bardot will always be an iconic memory of love, a pre-Sixties sexual liberationista who was invented and mythologized by society, then clubbed to death by paparazzi (like the baby seals she made famous in her campaigns against animal cruelty).
The negative regard towards BB is well represented in other comments here, so I choose to focus on the positive. Like, here's a musical mention that illustrates all that I care to know about Brigitte Bardot:
Translation of English is often problematic because of the multiple valid interpretations of simple words, and concepts that have many synonyms.
The solution here is to use arithmetic to supercede English. It may then become apparent that what is meant is x as a denominator.
Translate x into 'times', and then think of 'times' not as strictly multiplication but instead as an iteration (which, after all, is what multiplication is), and that might get you closer to what is meant, which is a standard arithmetic inversion of multiplication to division.
> Saying something is 2x smaller or 2x shorter or 2x cheaper doesn’t make sense
It does, if you do the inversion. Something 2 times smaller is half (1/2) as big.
Two ways of saying the same thing is half the fun of learning English!
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Careless People. The unexpected peek into the author's personal childhood and family ethos was really interesting. The look at Facebook from within was a cautionary tale.
I also liked I Am Not Your Enemy by Reality Winner.
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