@mcfate
Hold my beer. -- Gavrilo Prinzip

More seriously, this is a textbook example of an unprovable hypothesis. You could equally argue that the assassination of a prominent person is so shocking, so extraordinary, that it either signals or causes seismic shifts in power.
And the custom of heads of state killing each other's people rather than each other indicates, to my eye, a desire to keep history rolling along in the usual profitable groove.

@MrsDanaD @th3j35t3r He doesn't lie about his height, he just uses those lifts to make what he says true.

@DavidSalo The simpler explanation is the wind-up Godzilla strategy: put in place an agent that will act autonomously, unpredictably but mostly to your benefit.
You don't have to worry about giving it orders, or risk its getting caught taking orders from you -- because it's clearly autonomous.
At the very least it distracts your enemy, at best it does real damage. Sometimes it backfires, but so do perfectly directed agents.
Trump is Putin's wind-up Godzilla, Cannon is Trump's.

@Faay @Valkyrie_D You must bee pollen my leg!

@th3j35t3r Rock and roll will never die!

@estherschindler In the 1990s I was involved in a big push for "distance learning" between UC Berkeley Extension and Pacific Bell. Primary Rate ISDN (~1.5Mbps, high bandwidth in those days), repurposed corporate teleconferencing setups, you needed a techie on both ends. The end result was not that different from Zoom--for a lot of things it sucked, just like Zoom, but at least you could go to class without driving 60 miles. And anyone can set up a Zoom session nowadays.

@Museek The GOP/DINO way of dealing with water shortages is simply to deny they exist. I actually saw this in the WA state legislature last session: one of our DINO state senators colluded with his GOP buddies on a bill that would let you overdraw an aquifer if you built a fish ladder somewhere -- anywhere.
There's a "De Nile" joke in there but it's not worth the reach.

@EvilBunny That's the thing with both Reagan and Trump: neither had the brains or the attention span to get through 900 pages of conservative wonkery or contribute meaningfully to conservative thought. But those people were happy to have a frontman, and he was happy to have them behind him.

@corlin Debates about the ethics of circumventing copy protection, and of copy protection itself, were hot in those days. There are still some crusty old guys muttering "Information wants to be free." And of course there's still the Free Software Foundation.

@JV3MJD OK, but Trump got more laughs.

The weather here is catering to my laziness. In two days it went from gray and drizzly (too wet to do anything) to sunny and blazing (too hot to do anything).

My only problem with Sarah Waters is that she doesn't write her novels as fast as I read them.
#books

@TomB In presidential elections I'm unfortunately used to voting for someone simply because they're not The Other Guy. This year is the most extreme case I've ever seen, and I remember not only Mondale/Reagan but McGovern/Nixon. The Democrats can run Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, Whitmer, a cat, a bowl of leftover oatmeal -- I don't care, any of those would be better than TFG.
#politics

@Maude TBF I haven't read it either and don't intend to. I won't waste my time on nine pages from the Heritage Foundation, let alone nine hundred.

@Maude Standard political strategy. Start out extreme and get the true believers committed to you, then run toward the middle where the votes are.
I believe him, though, when he says he knows nothing about Project 2025. He doesn't have the focus to read even an executive summary. But he'll definitely use it if he gets into the White House again. He won't have to know anything about it -- he's got people who do that for him.
#politics

@lfrum I've been there. I'd definitely avoid anger, sadness, and frustration -- I swear potential employers can smell them on you and it spooks them. Cultivate stoicism -- it comes in handy in a lot of areas, sadly enough. (But we don't get sad, we're stoics!)
Tailor resumes to target job listings -- make sure you send a simple 1-2 page PDF, not a Word doc; consider different uses of your skill set; talk to people; and keep your antennae out EVERYWHERE, I got a good job off Craigslist.

My phone suddenly went blank the other evening. Turned out to be a broken screen, thanks to my habit of sitting on it. Would have replaced it, it's pretty old, but a with a broken screen it was worthless for trade-in. Got it fixed instead, for not too much $ -- but now it won't charge. Sigh. Rinse, repeat.