memfree

The split isn’t left/right (what the rest of the world would see as middle/extreme right), but money/workers, and I no longer see a fix. When Citizen’s United decreed that “money is speech” (it isn’t: money is power, and codifying ‘free speech’ was meant as a protection against power), the fix was to overturn that and go further to get money out of politics – but that didn’t happen.

We are in the process of losing everything that made the U.S. worthwhile. Other countries used to try to emulate the U.S. models for things like: public education, research and development, public works (roads, dams, etc.), economic model (and laws restricting it after it crashed), and lack of corruption, including laws to prevent and/or punish the latter. Now we are removing and de-funding all the stuff that made the U.S. attractive and successful. We’re working on becoming the next North Korea rather than the next, say, Sweden.

We seem to have lost all culture except for a love of money and spectacle. There’s no respect for education, Truth, Justice or the like. If an official does something questionable, they get to keep their job and the most their underlings can do about it is resign – and that doesn’t make things better. There ought to be an option where the official has to resign and the underlings who are doing honest work need not fear retribution. Instead, we reward those who can ‘spin’ the narrative or outright lie. The populace ought to be offended by those lies, but instead there is a large number of people who would rather be a good team member than demand honesty.

That’s where money comes in. You pay agents to start or reinforce several ideas, do data tracking to figure out which ones get high “engagement” scores, then campaign on that garbage rather than on anything of substance. Once you win the election, you don’t have to follow through on anything. Just give tax breaks to your backers.

Somewhere in there, Ars should have noted that this does not mean literally ALL grants, but all federal grants as defined in 2 CFR 200.1 (which isn’t to say they won’t change that definition).

It isn’t part of the government, but was designated an official federal depository library . There are over 1000 such libraries, but archive.org is the most ‘digital’.

Okay, so explain this: why can I archive various random pages on congress.gov, but when I try to look at archives for the 14th amendment, I get complaints that I can’t access it from ‘this site’ (archive.org)? I can view the live page, but I can’t archive it and then see the result. I’m also having issue archiving the current Article 1 page (as mentioned further under this post).

Edit: To me, the 14th amendment issue hints that: a) that page in particular requires cookies and b) it intentionally won’t load for/from archive.org – but this is not consistent for other pages so it seems extra fishy.

Help! I tried to archive https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/ – but it won’t show up in archive.org. It tells me I can go to:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20250806054229/https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/ but when I look at the URL, it seems to be redirecting to July 21st (https://web.archive.org/web/20250721170235/https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/), which does not look like the live page. When I try to dif, I see the July page, too.

Did the government break wayback, too?

Does it have a hint of lemon? NY cheesecake should have lemon or lemon zest (and cream or sour cream). Sample recipes: one, two, three, crazy four. Philadelphia cheesecake has neither – it is a very simple recipe promoted by Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

This pumpkin cheesecake recipe uses gingersnaps instead of graham crackers… it might change your mind about acceptable crusts, but it isn’t in the ‘plain cheesecake’ category because: pumpkin!

It is hard to be overly picky about bagels unless you live in Manhattan. Crossing over to Jersey City immediately drops the quality. Venturing futher is just asking for trouble. I will happily eat the things that pass for bagels in the rest of the U.S., but one trip to the big city set the mark so high that I don’t try to for perfection elsewhere. The lowest mark I’ve sampled was set in Montreal where I thought a onion bagel bought straight from the bakery would be be lovely… but instead was a crumbly, bready disaster. Obviously the Québécois have different expectations of bagels than do New Yorkers.

What type of cheesecake? NY (dense), Philadelphia (lighter), Japanese (hyper fluffy), or one of the Ricotta variations (possibly more authentic?)? There’s a bunch of others that are less common outside their native countries, but these styles are at several places within an hour’s drive, so I’m counting this list as the most common.

He defended Epstein and Trump. I will allow a small business the right to refuse him service.

Yup. Buy dry beans and dry rice – none of that precooked stuff. Buy fresh potatoes tho. If you can afford it, I’d also get a bag of onions, maybe carrots, and some spices that do NOT contain salt. You can also buy salt, but it is way cheaper per-gram to get salt and other spices on their own. Note that brown rice has more vitamin content than white rice (thiamine deficiency), but most white rice is enriched to compensate.

The science folks document attacks that succeed and those where the prey escapes (possibly wounded, but still not a meal). Here’s a PDF on some hawk rates – it is just a few pages from a larger work. Excerpt:

Relatively high successrates of 89 and 82% have been documented for the fish-eating Osprey (Pundion haliuetus)in Europe (Brown and Amadon

1968. and North America (Ueoka and Koplin 1973). Success rates of 33- 65% have been reported for the insectivorous and rodent-eating American Kestrel (F. spurverius),depending upon season, prey type, and geography (Jenkins 1970, Sparrowe 1972, Rudolph 1982, Collopy and Koplin 1983). Various success rates have been reported for raptors that feed mostly upon mammals, but supplement their diets with birds and reptiles. Mader (1975) documented a rate of 16% for Harris’ Hawks (Purubuteo unicinc- tus). Wakeley (1978) reported that Ferruginous Hawks (Buteo regulis) were successful 17% of the time in Idaho. Orde and Harrell(l977) reported a successrate of 79% for Red-tailed Hawks (Buteojumuicensis) in South Dakota. Nesting Golden Eagles (Aquilu chrysuetos)in Idaho were suc- cessful on 20% of their capture attempts (Collopy 1983). Clark (1975) calculated a success rate of about 20% for the rodent-specializing Short- eared Owl (Asioflammeus).

Maybe souls reincarnate anywhere into anything.

Or maybe a soul only reincarnates into related beings. In the story of the The Goat Who Saved the Priest, the goat itself had been a priest in a past life. There was a relationship to its actions in past lives and the form it took. I’ve heard versions of that story that suggest the goat had been the very priest it ‘saves’ (because souls can reincarnate in the past or future?).

Perhaps if we had intergalactic flight and our actions impacted creatures on other planets, we’d reincarnate into those creatures. Then again, perhaps we already do.

This you?

you vote with your money in a more efficient way than any election

If you look, I was the person explaining that per Doctorow collective action is good. You’re replying to a post where I said, “…or even vote Z, then together the difference will matter.” Maybe you meant to reply to someon else, or maybe you’re a sock puppet that forgot to change accounts.

If I may chime in, like Sundray, I am used to the author’s style, which preempts critics by acknowledging the difficulty before getting to the positive. He’s had enough people tell him ‘recycling plastic is a joke!’ to now start by saying, yes, I know, BUT you should still do it and then he’ll get to the positive. He’s not suggesting people are foolish for doing it, he’s simply letting the reader know that it ought to work better than it does and the failure is NOT on the citizenry, but on the deep pockets trying to escape blame. He wants you to know how they profit off the backs of the working class and he wants us to fight back together (and to keep recycling).

Boycotts work because boycotts are collective . That’s his point. If you get enough of society together to boycott X, or to call their government out on Y, or even vote Z, then together the difference will matter. What doesn’t matter is a bunch of people buying an item, while you are making your own private ‘boycott’. Personally, I ‘boycott’ youtube. Guess what? They don’t care. They have enough eyeballs that they don’t miss me at all.

P.S. I was happy that Paramount+ asks “why?” you cancel your subscription because I got to explain it was due to the 60 minutes settlement and firing Colbert… but I doubt they care that 1 person stopped giving them money over that.

Ask, “What about the Epstein Files?” as the first volley.

No idea :-)

I was just giving you a quick-list of what I noticed popped up under ‘new tv’. I’m sure there’s a more comprehensive list with reviews somewhere, but I don’t have a handy link to such. Tomatoes sez ‘meh’.

caveat: I just checked Washington Black on rotten tomatoes and… it looks like regular viewers don’t like it – but it is still ‘Certified Fresh’? I’ll still try it, but I’m not expecting to be wowed: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/washington_black

Also from the UK include: Red Eye and Stags. I saw a good review for Washington Black, so I’ll try that one. If you count FX, then add Adults to the short list.

This is correct. Web dev is told to make sure ads load before content. They don’t want users that don’t generate profits.