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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • The federal government lawyers have said in court that Elon Musk was not the leader of that organization. Therefore, the fact that he said he has departed from Washington would not affect that organization.

    Of course we know that he was leading it, and the president has said as much, and the above claims are all being contested in court by quoting the president. But anyway, if you want the official answer, now you have it.

    But the official answer also changes over time. Because if Musk was not the leader of that group, then many of the actions that he claimed to take and many of the actions that people attributed to him would now be actions of a private individual, which would expose him to massive civil liability. Therefore, we can be sure that the government’s lawyers will continue to change their story about when and where and how he worked for the government.


  • Definitions are important, but you don’t get to unilaterally choose them. Depending on the person you’re talking to, sometimes it’s more effective to ask them to define the terms first, or to ask them which dictionary they prefer.

    So depending on the situation, it might be more beneficial to bring in the quotes from various Israeli leaders about how they’re trying to get Palestinians gone, and how they’re happy with Palestinian death, and then bring in those graphs that show the numbers of the dead, and ask whether they think that’s acceptable.

    Another way to think about it is that sometimes questions of definition can distract us from questions of morality, and if the person that you’re trying to talk to is running away from the issue. By doing so, you can reasonably adjust your focus back to the facts.


  • It’s kind of a mistaken premise. Yes, there’s a feud, the feud is real, but those people are both narcissistic liars. They don’t actually believe in anything except at the time they say it, so if they can get some kind of benefit by saying it now, they will. If they can get some kind of benefit by making up next week, they will.

    It’s not like you or me, where if we actually said all of those things, we would never be friends with each other again. They can be friends with anyone in the first place.





  • I like your general idea, but when you speak in broad terms and make claims that the election wasn’t rigged, when we have specific examples of ways that it was, nobody believes you except people who already did.

    You could have said that nobody tampered with voting machines. I don’t think that’s true, because we have some specific evidence that people did, but we don’t have any large-scale evidence. So it’s quite possible that voting machine tampering was irrelevant.

    What’s more relevant is things like disenfranchising voters after the election happened, and mailbox burning, and rules that prevent felons from voting, all of which benefit the Republicans. And gerrymandering of course. Those things all happened, and some of them were very large-scale. I think most people would say those count as rigging the election. So if you’re not talking about that, you need to be more specific.





  • YouTube took down the video because of its own policies, not because of copyright law. So we should be blaming YouTube.

    I think it’s easy to see exactly why if you consider how YouTube treats small content creators. If I post a video and companies claim copyright on it, the video gets demonetized and I might lose my account. I can respond and contest the claim and maybe I can win but I still lost money in the meantime, and perhaps more significantly, the companies that made their copyright claims will never face a consequence for attempting to burn my channel. In other words, if I get things wrong a few times I’ll lose my channel and my income source, but if they get things wrong a million times, they face zero consequence.

    And you might be inclined to blame the media companies. But again, this is YouTube doing what YouTube wants to do of its own volition, and not something that’s required by law. If YouTube valued small-scale content creators and end users, it would create different policies.



  • Remember that they are both lying even now about almost everything. Narcissists don’t believe in some underlying reality, because they make up reality every second of their lives, so the fact that they’re feuding now doesn’t mean they actually had some kind of permanent fallout. You could say that they are acting at this exact moment just to deflect attention away from Trump and his big beautiful bill, but it doesn’t really matter because they’re narcissists, and everything they do is an act.

    So, you shouldn’t cheer for either of them because they certainly are not genuine about anything and they definitely will never be on your side, ever.





  • What you just described is a system that mistreats your workers. Those temporary hires, if they lose their jobs, they can’t put food on the table. But if the company loses a temporary worker, it’s not going to be troubled, they’re just going to go hire another person.

    That all being said, if you’re working under contract and your company has robust protections for retaliation by employers, some of the risk of telling them in advance goes away. That’s great, but there’s still some remaining risk. Many bosses will be vengeful, bitter, and they may sabotage your work however they can for the last few weeks or months. And you won’t be able to stop them, because you’re leaving, so even if you filed an internal complaint, it wouldn’t go anywhere.