Video of the accidental ascent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys0DOsZmr7g

I’d assume you, given that you asked.

That’s not incompatible with what they said. They’re saying that the rate of wage increases over the last year outpaced inflation. They also ran below inflation during the COVID-19 crisis.

COVID-19’s impact started in 2020.

looks at graph in article

Okay, though it looks like inflation only took off in early 2021.

They’re saying that from June 2023 to June 2024, real wages increased. But they also decreased for about two years prior to that, from a couple months into 2021 until about halfway through 2023 – you can see the dark blue line being below 0 for that period (or, equivalently, that the medium blue line was above the light blue line). Halfway through 2023, it then rises above 0, and has been above since that point. But the period of time that it was decreasing (a bit over two years) was about twice as long as the one year that it’s been increasing, and during that decrease period, was decreasing faster than it increased over the last year. So they’re rebounding, but they won’t be where they were immediately prior to the crisis.

“For whom”, and it’s an average.

putty

I mean, Windows can do the thin client side fine. I’d personally somewhat-prefer to use Linux for that, but that’s not really my sticking point. I’m normally keeping my software, data, stuff like that on the server, and just running two remotely-connected terminals and a web browser on my client. Virtually all the software can run on the server. My problem is Windows on the server side; like, it’s just not reasonable to use a Windows machine remotely via a command-line for anything other than some very basic administrative tasks, and using a GUI remotely once latency goes up or bandwidth down is just painful.

I’m not saying that that’s an unreasonable policy for companies to have, but I will bet that only a very small portion of individuals normally do that for personal smartphones.

and to remote in.

This is the approach I use with laptops domestically, and I think that there’s something to be said for it. Like, the laptop itself doesn’t store important information. A remote server does. The laptop is just a thin client. If the laptop gets lost or stolen – which I’ve had happen – I revoke the credentials. No important information is lost, and no important information is exposed.

Whole-disk laptop encryption has improved things too from an exposure standpoint (albeit not a loss standpoint), though I don’t use it myself (don’t want to spend any battery life on it). I assume that smartphones have some form of reasonably-secure storage hardware, but I don’t know if it involves encryption.

What I found irritating – and this is years back now – was an employer who didn’t care if I took a laptop in or out or what information I stored on it (as long as it was a work system), but who refused to provide remote access to the network, so I couldn’t just keep the important information on the work network. I mean, I get if they want to have some sort of isolated DMZ and require an externally-accessible server to live there, not provide VPN access in to the general network, but not having the ability to have remote network access to work systems at all is just incredibly obnoxious.

I think that some of it is that Windows is not phenomenal to use remotely. Yeah, there are solutions, but they aren’t great if you’re on a high-latency, low-reliability, or low-bandwidth link. I try to use console Linux for as much of my stuff as possible. That whole ecosystem was designed around thin-client, remote use.

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_today-vid-canonical-featured-desktop,f_auto,q_auto:best/MSNBC/Components/Video/__NEW/tdy_trending_qtips_160121.jpg

https://www.verizon.com/coverage-map/

This shows that Verizon has good coverage in part of Wanaque, moderate coverage in part, and no coverage in part.

The planning board’s decision was based on health concerns due to the possible negative environmental impact of telecommunication on the residents, especially the children studying at the school who could potentially be exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The town felt the residents would be ‘unsafe’ due to radio frequencies and rejected the company’s notion of building the tower on the land.

I mean, I think that the planning board is idiotic, but I don’t see why T-Mobile cares enough to fight it. If they don’t build it, okay. It looks like the school in question is right in the middle of town. Then Wanaque is going to have crummy cell coverage. Let them have bad cell coverage and build a tower somewhere else. It’s not like this is the world’s only place that could use better cell coverage. The main people who benefit from the coverage are Wanaque residents. Sure, okay, there’s some secondary benefit to travelers, but if we get to the point that all the dead zones that travelers pass through out there are covered, then cell providers can go worry about places that are determined not to have have cell coverage.

If I were cell companies, I’d just get together with the rest of the industry and start publishing a coverage score for cities for cell coverage. Put it online in some accessible database format, so that when places like city-data.com put up data on a city, they also show that the city has poor cell coverage and that would-be residents are aware of the fact.

I don’t really use calendaring all that much, but when I do, I use org-mode agenda in emacs, which seems to do all the stuff that he’s complaining about not having. It does a lot more than I use.

That being said, I get that that’s probably not what he’s after if he’s not an emacs user.

Ehh. I mean, if they were just banning sex toys, I could believe something like that, but doesn’t explain why they’d ban stuff other than sex toys simultaneously:

Etsy is also banning nudity for human models, including “gluteal clefts and female nipples/areolas.” If you’re selling a sexy item of clothing, for example, you must censor body parts, use a mannequin, or opt for just photographing the clothing.

“Sexual language” concerning incest or “referencing familial relationships” will also be banned now. The examples Etsy lists are “Daddy’s slut” and “Choke me Mommy.” As of publication, these terms are still searchable on Etsy, and so is nude content. Searches for “porn” come up blank.

They are the largest residential homeowners insurers in California, insuring 1 in 5 homes.

“The rate filing that State Farm just made yesterday (Thursday), they’re triggering a rarely used part of the insurance law,” said Soller.

"It’s a regulation meant to address a company’s financial solvency. That’s what they’re saying and we’re going to look closely at that, and we have some serious questions about State Farm’s financial condition and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. "

That actually sounds like a rather bigger deal that I first thought from the title, if they’re on the brink of going under…

Hmm. If the concern is the Etsy brand value, I’d just spin it off into a new company that does permit it. If you’ve already built a network of people selling and buying stuff and the software to do so, terminating it just sends the value of that to zero.

I don’t have a problem with doing this, but I don’t think that it’ll have much effect in policy terms.

Like, the states that are willing to guarantee abortion rights in their constitution are the states that are unlikely to pass a law ban abortions in the first place.

and Democrats across the nation hope similar measures mobilize supporters on Election Day.

I suppose it might do that, though.

You can buy discs online.

Stewart (and Colbert) are literally a clown

what this job even freaken entails.

You know Volodymyr Zelenskyy, current president of Ukraine?

He’s a comedian who did a political satire TV series about being president of Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy

Born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. Before his acting career, he obtained a degree in law from the Kyiv National Economic University. He then pursued a comedy career and created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which Zelenskyy played a fictional Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party with the same name as the TV show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.

EDIT: Darn, someone else apparently mentioned it as well, checking their link. I’m still gonna leave this text up, though.

George Washington wasn’t able to attend school after the age of 11, because his father died and he had to take over running the family farm.

https://www.georgewashington.org/education.jsp

Despite being the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, the President of the Constitutional Convention, and the first President of the United States, George Washington’s level of education was far lower than any of the other Founding Fathers of the United States. In fact, he was often scorned by some of the other Founding Fathers for this inadequacy. However, this lack of education was not George Washington’s fault. Upon the death of George Washington’s father in 1743, George’s formal schooling ended. He is thought to have attended the nearby grammar school run by Reverend James Marye, the rector of St. George’s Parish, up until this time. Therefore, the extent of young George’s formal educational training was in basic mathematics, reading, and writing.

Although his older half-brothers had the opportunity to gain a formal education over in England at the Appleby School, George was required to take on the responsibility of running the family farm after his father’s death.

On this list, every ranking places him as the highest-ranked President to ever serve other than one that places him at #2 and one that places him at #3:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States

Trump’s run on pretty anti-immigrant speech, but he’s pretty moderate in most other respects. He’s probably the least-religious president we’ve ever had, and ran for the “religion party” ticket; he had to run with Pence to make up for lack of appeal to social conservatives. He advocated for (well, or at least gave the impression of) fairly-protectionist policy and ran for the free trade party’s ticket. Since the start of the Cold War, the GOP’s tended to be the hawkish party, and he ran on a relatively noninterventionist platform (though I’ll concede that there’s always been a paleoconservative isolationist faction, but it’s been relatively weak for quite some decades).

Trump constantly says outrageous stuff – he definitely makes it a point to be politically incorrect – but his policy is actually not especially exciting.

I looked at his website way back in the 2016 election before his campaign had built up any steam. This was back when Hillary was running a nice, typical website, long list of issues, you know what campaign websites normally look like. At that point in time, he – hillariously – had only three issues on his campaign website. And none of his actual positions represented much of a change from the status quo:

• Opposition to FTAs; at the time, we had been negotiating TPP with the Pacific Rim countries and TTIP with the EU. Both had effectively failed already at this point. Trump gave the public the impression that he was responsible for this, but it was something that was going to happen under Obama or not. He also spent a long time complaining about NAFTA. Thing is, I already had listened to speeches from a few politicians who had played this game with NAFTA (e.g. Ron Paul complains a lot about NAFTA but is quieter about why he opposed it, because it wasn’t permissive enough, whereas most people listening to him are upset that it isn’t restrictive enough). I had a pretty good guess that Trump was going to pull similar shennanigans on policy, looked at his white paper and sure enough, no specific changes, just lots of fluffy emotional text giving the impression that he was in opposition. And in office, he took NAFTA, negotiated a few minor changes, and then renamed it to USMCA. Having kicked the legs out from decades of time that manufacturing unions had built public opposition to NAFTA, he left the thing alone. So, he advocated for a position that sounded unusually close to the position that the folks on the left side of the spectrum wanted and, in fact, essentially left existing policy alone.

• Opposition to immigration. Now, you could make a fair argument that he worked pretty hard to sell a nativist image. But his actual policy also wasn’t particularly notable. He put through one regulation that SCOTUS was pretty sure to shoot down and kept it a constant source of political theater for a significant chunk of his term. He made an enormous deal out of his wall, kept it in the news, gave the impression without ever saying so that he was going to build a wall along the entire border. But this isn’t even a new game to play from Trump. Bush Jr used the same shtick back when he ran. In his case, it was a “fence” and played a less-prominent role in his campaign.

• Gun rights. He has no specifics and this is trivial to do: just don’t involve yourself in additional restrictions. This has been a pretty stock generic Republican point because it costs nothing to do ever since the Democrats did the federal Assault Weapon Ban, which was not popular and sunsetted; it’s something that every candidate just slaps on their page.

Hell, Trump was a Democrat back when Bush Jr was in office.

But Trump is far right. The news says so.

If you read news media that favors the Democratic Party, it will say that Trump is far right. If your regular news sources favor the Democratic Party, you have probably read a lot of articles over past years that say that.

If you read news media that favors the Republican Party, you will find plenty of material that will say that Biden is far left.

But Biden’s not far left! That’s ridiculous!

Yup. But presenting someone as being extreme is a good way to make them less appealing. You can find people who will self-identify as “left-of center” or “right-of-center”, even “left” or “right”. But very few politicians will call themselves “far left” or “far right”. That’s usually a label used by the media favoring the other side.

There are a lot of things that I don’t like about Trump. But they mostly deal with his presentation and the tactics he uses. I dislike his willingness to make contradictory statements. I don’t like the fact that he tries to piss people off about someone else – especially via dishonest claims – and exploit that anger. I dislike his willingness to disregard the political-consensus-building role that elections have, to concede, though I’ll grant that maybe if there’s a problem there, it needs to be fixed in the underlying system. But he’s extraordinary mostly in his presentation, not in the policy that he’s adopted. We had him for four years. US policy didn’t change much, certainly not from mainstream Republican Party policy.

When Trump first ran for office, I remember Bill Kristol – a conservative commentator who really dislikes Trump – stating that most of what Trump says is misdirection. Basically, Trump can’t force the media to say what he wants. But he can make a colossal amount of noise about something outrageous that they cannot resist covering, so that they talk about that instead of whatever meaningful actual policy stuff is going on. The coverage may not be positive, but it lets him direct the media narrative – it’s all about whatever outrageous thing he said on Twitter. I was a bit skeptical at the time. I could believe that Trump wouldn’t change much on NAFTA because I’d seen other Republican politicians play the same game he was, but had a harder time buying that on immigration. But that was, I think, pretty accurate as an assessment. Most of what is unusual about Trump are the outrageous things that come out of his mouth when he’s politicking. It’s not really his policy.

I believe that candidates from a given area are expected to perform disproportionately-strongly in the state that they’re coming from. Sometimes I’ve seen Presidential candidates coming from large states, with commentary that they’ll bring that state’s support to the table.

That being said, I don’t have numbers available.