• 0 Posts
  • 73 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 27th, 2026

help-circle
  • Yeah, I’m with you on that (like, if it were a fake attempt, wouldn’t you want the shooter to not be a Republican?), but there are enough weird things around the shooting that it should give anyone pause.

    The big one that I haven’t seen a compelling answer for is how someone managed to get on a roof within comfortable plinking distance of a former president running for reelection and then fire multiple shots before getting dusted. “Incompetence” is the only answer we’ve been given, so I’m not surprised that conspiracy theorists are flocking to this.



  • Why is it that the proponents of this argument never substantiate it with numbers?

    How many troops are deployed to combat from Israel versus other bases in the region? What percentage of our supplies are stored in Israeli bases or pass through Israeli ports on their way to combat forces? Hell, how many airstrikes against Iran departed from Israel versus other locations (like literal aircraft carriers)?

    I have a funny feeling that Israel’s military value to America is “impossible to quantify” because all efforts to do so have made it obvious that this relationship is a massive net loss for America.











  • It’s the sort of move that might look like a clever reversal, but ultimately has a very steep price tag.

    A blockade is an act of war, and this one is clearly pointed at the rest of the world, not Iran. It’s predicated on the same faulty assumption that Trump’s administration made when invading Iran: our military is unanswerable, and they will take it lying down.

    Escalation paths from this are all bad-- what if an EU ship ignores challenges from a US Navy vessel, or China sends a military escort with a shipping fleet? Are we really about to start another shooting war, or will we stand there with our dicks in our hands as they sail by?

    I’m thinking this brilliant idea is abandoned in a week.





  • So yes, I’m generally aligned with normalizing career changes and breaking down social barriers around perceived masculine / feminine roles, but:

    Now Reeves says what’s needed are policies and programs to draw male workers into fields such as nursing, teaching and social work.

    I am not sure I agree with the premise here. I think that trying to lure men into e.g. social work is an answer looking for a question. The broader landscape of what constitutes work is always shifting, and right now interpersonal services are waxing, but that could change overnight. I think that we need to think more generally about how to help people transition between fields as labor demand changes.

    I’m also not sure how to think about “jobs created” in this context:

    That parity masks the significant gains women have made in the labor market recently. Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump’s second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That’s nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.

    This is the sort of statistical claim that makes me want to better understand the underlying structure of the data. Are these full time roles? Are they roles that were eliminated and re-opened? Where, geographically, are these positions? This feels like the actual story to me.



  • More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And “consolidated” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research — the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations — will be snuffed out.

    This is incredibly depressing, and leaves some huge questions I am afraid to even seek answers for. I worked alongside some brilliant, dedicated scientists stationed at Los Alamos-- does this mean that everyone there on behalf of the forest service is being moved to a desk in SLC?

    It’s plainly a mass firing dressed up as a re-org, and it will cripple our understanding of how to proactively address localized climate change for decades. Fuck.