Trump sees the stock market as an indicator of his value and a sinking market makes him angry. And what really makes him furious is that he has figured out how to punish newspapers, media companies, law firms, and universities, but he hasn't figured out a way to punish the stock market yet.
Reblogged bluegreywilde
I don't think those of you under the age of I'd say 25 really understand what bizarre times we're living in.
Just a decade ago, claiming that scientists were turning frogs gay made you the laughing stock of the internet.
Now the President of the United States, behind the Seal of the President, can claim that scientists are turning mice transgender in a nationally televised address to Congress and have half the country believe him.
Just in case you see anyone over 30 just rocking back and forth in a corner repeating "how the fuck did we get here" over and over.
Reblogged
The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page on Tuesday whacked President Donald Trump for handing Democrats what it said could be a winning campaign message in the 2026 midterm elections.
In particular, the Journal took aim at Trump for professing indifference to the price increases his tariffs are likely to inflict upon American consumers when he said that "I couldn’t care less" if car manufacturers raise prices in response to his tariffs. He further added, "I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars."
The Journal did not take kindly to this economic analysis on the president's part.
"Mr. Trump also ignores that U.S. car makers are also likely to raise their prices," the editors contended. "If Hyundai raises the price of an export model made in South Korea, then Ford and GM may at first try to capture market share. But over time the U.S firms would be foolish not to raise their prices to increase profits, perhaps by some margin less than the increase on imported cars. That’s what happened after Mr. Trump raised tariffs on washing machines in his first term. Washer prices rose nearly 12%, according to a 2019 study, and it didn’t matter where the machine was made."
I know most people don't care about anything unless it has to do with the U.S. but can we please start talking about the Canadian election.
Please don't vote for Poilievre. He's basically the Canadian Trump and plans to put in place laws that harm trans youth, and lots of other shit.
Please vote istg this is the only way anything will get better. Poilievre has been kissing millionaires and billionaires asses. He'll make life even harder, and he loves Trump.
Reblogs are appreciated, especially if you aren't Canadian.
Reblogged
Librarians have a bone to pick with President Donald Trump.
On Monday, the Institute of Museum and Library Services placed its entire staff on administrative leave at the Trump administration’s behest ― a move that comes two weeks after the president proposed eliminating the IMLS as part of his ongoing efforts to slash the federal government’s workforce and funding.
That matters to local librarians because the majority of libraries’ federal funding comes from the IMLS. Of the agency’s $290 million budget, about $160 million goes directly to the nation’s libraries, where it’s used to develop literacy programs, workforce training and civic engagement initiatives. Museums and archives get a cut of IMLS funding, too.
As The New York Times reports,the IMLS ― which employs roughly 70 people ― also provides competitive grants directly to libraries of various type: Recently, that’s included things like $250,000 to the Seattle Public Library to support teen mental health and $150,000 to the University of South Florida to develop library resources for autistic patrons.
The American Library Association called the proposed budget cuts “short-sighted” and an “assault” by the Trump administration that would be deeply felt throughout local communities.
“By eliminating the only federal agency dedicated to funding library services, the Trump administration’s executive order is cutting off at the knees the most beloved and trusted of American institutions and the staff and services they offer,” it said.
Reblogged saywhat-politics
I'm so proud of Senator Booker (and his staff) for breaking the longest filibuster record by speaking for people's rights for over 24 hours, not only because I support his message but because the record he broke was Strom Thurmond's filibuster against civil rights in 1957. The fact that a person of color broke a record held by a racist man by speaking on caring for all people
Reblogged boreal-sea
I know it’s really hard to be hopeful right now, and I’ve shared a couple big-picture articles about “hey, people are doing things, people are fighting back, but legal and political shit takes time.” But if you want some small hope, some personal experiences of things changing, I can tell you about my FB timeline right now as someone who comes from a conservative Christian, southern background (and who typically avoids FB at all costs unless I’m looking to buy something on Marketplace).
People are angry. Trump voters are angry. About government layoffs that impacted people who they KNOW were performing their jobs with distinction, about the removal of support for their disabled kids in their schools, about the halt of cancer research, about food prices and recalls and the spread of disease, concerns about national parks’ longevity for future generations, about the suspension of aid.
People are angry. The same people that voted for Trump, or stayed silent about their political leanings until this point, are posting videos of Trump and Elon and calling them liars. They’re posting videos of impacted workers talking about the important, widely overlooked, jobs they do that contribute to the underlying foundation of American’s health and safety. I’ve seen reposts of Methodist, Baptist, and Catholic church statements condemning Trump’s actions and reminding him of the “moral imperative to assist those in need” that all humans should have regardless of faith.
People are angry and they’re saying “this isn’t what I voted for,” or, if they were of the quieter minority in these deeply republican communities, they’re saying, “Hey, look what you voted for. Look what you’ve done.”
This is a big deal. People are angry. And while I wish that this recognition could have come sooner, it reassuring to see that people are, at least, admitting that shit is on fire. Recognition is the first step.
I’ve found out recently that there are antivax conspiracy theorists who are recognizing that this is a hostile coup. They’re… mixing weird conspiracy theory speculations in with the things that are verifiably happening, but they can see this shit too, and they are ready to fight it with all the fearful gusto they’ve been fighting medical care.
This is a good time to remember that people cannot be neatly categorized. This is a good time to make alliances with people who are not your friends, but who are against fascism. That’s a lot of people.
This is a good time to remember that people cannot be neatly categorized. This is a good time to make alliances with people who are not your friends, but who are against fascism. That’s a lot of people.
Reblogged crazyworldhuh
“Even Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) faces a progressive challenge for the San Francisco seat she’s held since the eighties. While it’s a longshot—unless the 85-year-old retires—former Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti is running promising fresh ideas, new energy and a break with the Democratic Party of yesteryear. Chakrabarti is 39 years old—even though Pelosi has been a member of Congress for the past 37 years—and says it’s time for new Democratic leaders. “I don’t understand how D.C.’s Democratic leaders are so paralyzed and unprepared for this moment after living through President Trump’s first term,” Chakrabarti said in his February campaign announcement. “I respect what Nancy Pelosi has accomplished in her career, but we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics.””
—
It’s almost like too many Democrats are old as fuck, entirely comfortable and insulated from the consequences of their inaction, and determined to hold on to power and lobbyist money as long as possible, our Democracy be dammed.
I’m serious: replace them all.
Source: rawstory.com
Reblogged
When she was working as an election official in Arizona years ago, Tammy Patrick encountered voters who supported what was then the state’s new “proof of citizenship” law for voter registration — only to realize that they had been disenfranchised by it.
“They’d say, ‘I voted for that!’” she recalled of the voters, many of whom were “snowbirds, older people, who didn’t have the wherewithal to get [the correct documents] because the documents didn’t exist anymore.”
“It was heart-wrenching,” Patrick said.
At the time, Arizona was the only state in the nation with a documentary proof of citizenship requirement for voters, and thousands of people have since lost out on the right to vote in state elections. Kansas, which later also tried its own citizenship requirement for voter registration, saw similar results.
This template to detain and silence pro-Palestinian speech will be used for every other issue they disagree with, whether it’s LGBTQ rights, racial justice, reproductive rights. Whatever it is, they will use this approach to silence people.
Source: Slate
From the March 31, 2025 interview with Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School :
:The SAVE Act would require a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers to register to vote in federal elections, which is a vote suppression measure that could block millions of eligible Americans from voting. Just over half of Americans actually have a U.S. passport. To the extent that the act allows birth certificates or other documents to vote, we’ve run studies with the University of Maryland and other data analysts and found that more than 9 percent of voting age citizens—that’s 21.3 million American citizens—don’t have a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers readily available.
Seventy-nine percent of married women change their names, so their current names are not going to match the names on their birth certificates. So to the extent that a passport or a birth certificate are required to register to vote, it’s going to be especially harmful for married women.
In addition to disenfranchising up to 21.3 million people, the SAVE Act would also completely upend voter registration. It would end mail registration. It would end voter registration drives. It would end online registration and make it much harder to do automatic voter registration, because it requires voter registration to happen in person. You need to show those documents in person to an election official, you can’t mail it in. So rural voters, voters with disabilities, older voters are also going to face special burdens, in addition to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have these documents readily available.
Source: Slate
My state is banning "obscene depictions of minors in content (or someone that looks like one)"
It's safe to say that they don't care about protecting real kids. If they did, child marriage and child beauty pageants would be outlawed.
More than likely, they're using this to conveniently label LGBT content as obscene and then ban it, regardless of context. But of course, if I question this, I'll be called a pedophile.
remember: They say a word like "obscene" and you think "Oh, when they say obscene, that means obscene. As in, you know, really bad things. Well, I definitely am against really bad things. This sounds like maybe a good idea."
Except the thing is that the are not using words in good faith. When they say "obscene", they mean the things that are obscene to *THEM*, not the things that are obscene to you.
Some things that conservatives find obscene: Queers existing anywhere. Women having the right to vote and medical control of their own bodies. Anyone having sexual autonomy. Interracial marriage. Equal pay. Immigrants breathing near them (anywhere within a 2500 mile radius). A Black person making eye contact with them. People speaking a different language where they can hear it.
By the definition they are thinking of, an "obscene depiction of a minor" could be a photograph of an interracial couple on their wedding day, smiling together with their daughter, the flower girl. You think this is a joke? Nope. This is Fascism 101, baby.
Your "obscene" and their "obscene" are not the same thing.
Reblogged
About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code
Posted to Facebook by Tim Boudreau on March 30, 2025.
About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.
Some time in the early 2000s I was doing some work with the real-time Java team at Sun, and there was a huge defense contractor with a peculiar query: Could we document how much memory an instance of every object type in the JDK uses? And could we guarantee that that number would never change, and definitely never grow, in any future Java version?
I remember discussing this with a few colleagues in a pub after work, and talking it through, and we all arrived at the conclusion that the only appropriate answer to this question as "Hell no." and that it was actually kind of idiotic.
Say you've written the code, in Java 5 or whatever, that launches nuclear missiles. You've tested it thoroughly, it's been reviewed six ways to Sunday because you do that with code like this (or you really, really, really should). It launches missiles and it works.
A new version of Java comes out. Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you? Because you could blow up the world 10 milliseconds sooner after someone pushes the button?
It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.
There is zero reason to ever do that, and to anyone managing such a project who's a grownup, that's obvious. You don't fuck with things that work just to be one of the cool kids. Especially not when the thing that works is life-or-death (well, in this case, just death).
Another case: In the mid 2000s I trained some developers at Boeing. They had all this Fortran materials analysis code from the 70s - really fussy stuff, so you could do calculations like, if you have a sheet of composite material that is 2mm of this grade of aluminum bonded to that variety of fiberglass with this type of resin, and you drill a 1/2" hole in it, what is the effect on the strength of that airplane wing part when this amount of torque is applied at this angle. Really fussy, hard-to-do but when-it's-right-it's-right-forever stuff.
They were taking a very sane, smart approach to it: Leave the Fortran code as-is - it works, don't fuck with it - just build a nice, friendly graphical UI in Java on top of it that *calls* the code as-is.
We are used to broken software. The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life - and the industry is rife with "agile" methodologies *designed* to churn out crappy software, because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy (and if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way).
It's ironic. Every other form of engineering involves moving parts and things that wear and decay and break. Software has no moving parts. Done well, it should need *vastly* less maintenance than your car or the bridges it drives on. Software can actually be *finished* - it is heresy to say it, but given a well-defined problem, it is possible to actually *solve* it and move on, and not need to babysit or revisit it. In fact, most of our modern technological world is possible because of such solved problems. But we're trained to ignore that.
Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.
Rewriting stuff - especially things that are life-and-death - in a fit of pique, or because of an emotional reaction to the technology used, or because you want to use the toys all the cool kids use - is idiotic. It's immaturity on display to the world.
Doing it with AI that's going to read COBOL code and churn something out in another language - so now you have code no human has read, written and understands - is simply insane. And the best software translators plus AI out there, is going to get things wrong - grievously wrong. And the odds of anyone figuring out what or where before it leads to disaster are low, never mind tracing that back to the original code and figuring out what that was supposed to do.
They probably should find their way off COBOL simply because people who know it and want to endure using it are hard to find and expensive. But you do that gradually, walling off parts of the system that work already and calling them from your language-du-jour, not building any new parts of the system in COBOL, and when you do need to make a change in one of those walled off sections, you migrate just that part.
We're basically talking about something like replacing the engine of a plane while it's flying. Now, do you do that a part-at-a-time with the ability to put back any piece where the new version fails? Or does it sound like a fine idea to vaporize the existing engine and beam in an object which a next-word-prediction software *says* is a contraption that does all the things the old engine did, and hope you don't crash?
The people involved in this have ZERO technical judgement.
Source: facebook.com