Bush Sr. and Jr. are breathing a sign of relief!

“That’s when I realized the threads were stripped.”

What amazes me are the number of companies selling “lifetime” VPN service or “lifetime” cloud storage service with a straight face.

Like… that is TRANSPARENTLY a scam. You’re literally gonna sell lifetime licenses to people with more money than common sense, until the entire system is overloaded, then just go out of business.

While I’m not naive enough to think there will be any meaningful reduction in personal car usage in my remaining lifetime (~20-30 years), I’d like us to START making infrastructure investments that will at least point us in the right direction. But no, it’s endless stroads and sprawl and retail development and single family housing as far as the eye can see.

That auto-drive-ready car will be ready for auto-drive any time now, we swear!

Can you explain it to dipshits like me? As I read the Constitution, impeachment is the only remedy to remove a Federal judge, and success requires a supermajority of the Senate.

Well, here’s the problem. Alito is correct, that Congress can’t impose “ethics rules” on the court.

The sole remedy given to the people is impeachment, and Bribery is explicitly listed as a valid basis for impeachment under Article 1.

We would never get an impeachment through the Senate, of course.

You would do well to either sign up for an instance relating to your interests

Is that essential, though? As long as everybody is federated, it shouldn’t matter, except maybe it will take longer to see some posts.

Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It’s almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.

Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.

Mastodon:

Pick a Mastodon instance.

Open it in your web browser, follow the prompts to sign up.

Search for people you want to follow, and add them. Maybe search for subject matter that interests you, and follow people who post about that.

PixelFed:

Pick a PixelFed instance.

Open it in your web browser, follow the prompts to sign up.

Search for people you want to follow, and add them. Maybe search for subject matter that interests you, and follow people who post about that.

Clearly having too much money doesn’t buy happiness

I don’t think that has been demonstrated. Are the super-rich, on balance, the same happiness compared to the merely middle-class?

It’s also important to account for inflation and other cost of living increases when considering household income.

Yes, I probably should have stated that these were non-adjusted values. This particular 20/20 story was probably in the mid-90s or so, so $30K bought more than it does now.

I remember back in the 90s John Stossel did a piece on money and happiness, and he complained that surveys show that happiness stops increasing somewhere around 60-80K per year income, so clearly money does not buy happiness.

Median household income at the time was about $30K per year.

Of course, how this would actually work:

Workers: “What do we get?”

AR: “Well, half of you are fired, the other half keep working just as hard.”

<later>

AR: “What’s with the guillotine?”

Workers: “We’re acting in our rational self-interest.”

AR: “I see.”

AR: <to the fired workers> “They’re the reason you can’t get a job. If they didn’t form a UNION to keep you OUT, you’d be doing just fine! And I can’t fire THEM, thanks to the UNION.”

AR: <to the employed workers> “Well, I’d love to give you more time off, but I can’t, because those MOOCHERS over there are freeloading on the system, and I gotta pay outrageous taxes for their welfare because THEY DON’T WORK.”

Media: “Let’s talk to two experts in the labor field.”

Expert 1: “Oh, the problem is definitely abusive, bloated unions and exclusive contracts.”

Expert 2: “Oh, the problem is definitely freeloading welfare queens.”

Workers: <try to push each other into the guillotine>

AR: Flies away in her golden private jet, “MUHAHAHAHAHA!”

I can only hear this in Professor Farnsworth’s voice.

They are referencing an old Australian sketch comedy piece about an oil tanker.