Let the ass-kissing begin.

Bill Kristol, at The Bulwark:

The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything — after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal — the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong.

[…]

So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.

But we can’t only do those things. As Churchill put it: “In Defeat: Defiance.” We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage from Trump. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.

To do all this, we’ll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.

George T. Conway III writing for The Atlantic:

We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse. He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.

[…]

But I daresay I fear we shall see a profound degradation in the ability of this nation to govern itself rationally and fairly, with freedom and political equality under the rule of law. Because that is not actually a prediction. It’s a logical deduction based on the words and deeds of the president-elect, his enablers, and his supporters—and a long and often sorry record of human history. Let us brace ourselves.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responds to Trump’s McDonald’s costume:

We see Elon Musk coming in here. He’s doing these little contests, where he is promising 1 million dollars in some kind of giveaway lottery if they sign up for his list. You have a billionaire just dangling a million bucks to those of us many of us struggling to make ends meet if they dance for him. You’ve got Donald Trump putting on a little McDonald’s costume because he things that what people do.

They’re not trying to empathize with us. They are making fun of us. Donald Trump thinks that people who work at McDonald’s are a joke. Elon Musk thinks that dangling money in front of a working person is a cute thing to do. They have absolutely no idea what our lives are like. And so they think this way of callousness is a way of connecting. It’s not a way of connecting, because you and I both know that when that camera turns off and they turn around and go into their car, they are laughing at us. They think we are the suckers. And they said that publicly.

That’s why Elon Musk thinks that your vote can be bought with a dollar. That’s why he thinks if you put a bunch of money on a mailer and shove it in your mailbox, you’ll just do whatever he says. But Pennsylvania we are smarter than that, aren’t we.

Not to mention Donald Trump wouldn’t make it past McDonald’s back ground check due to his 34 felony counts.

The trailer for season two of Silo, which starts on Apple TV+ on November 15. So excited to watch the new season!

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry writing for Ars Technica:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). A game of creativity and imagination, D&D lets players weave their own narrative, blending combat and roleplaying in an immersive gaming experience. And now, psychologists and therapists are working to turn it into a tool by exploring its potential benefits as a group therapy technique.

Research is still in progress to determine if there are links between playing D&D and enhanced empathy and social skills, but the real-life impact of D&D therapy is slowly gaining traction as staff of counseling practices that have embraced D&D group therapy say they are witnessing these benefits firsthand.

As an avid D&D player in my youth in the 80s all I can say is, damn it took everyone 50 years to get with the program. For those who don’t know what we are going on about -

This was Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue of his interview with VP Kamala Harris.

Good evening. It has been a tradition at the late show since yesterday to that the major party candidates sit down with me for an interview in October. We invited Kamala Harris to be our guest this evening, and she accepted. That interview in a moment. In the interest of fairness, we also also invited former President Donal Trump to go fuck himself. He declined our offer.

You just know this is what Scott Pelley really wanted to say…

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. — Montesquieu

Montesquieu knew that comparison is the thief of joy well over three hundred years ago. So get off social media, stop worrying about what everyone else has and appreciate the wonderful life you are living today.

Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness is a choice.

Hamilton Nolan writing for How Things Work:

The culprit is the car. More specifically, the culprit is America’s decision to design our cities around the car. Predicting the future is almost impossible, but one of the few predictions that I feel very confident in is that, a century or so down the road, people will look at modern car-centric America with the same disgust that we feel when we hear about old timey cities without modern sewage systems, where everyone just dumped their chamber pots in the street. “Whoa, that’s fucked up!” people will marvel from their quiet, pedestrianized cities of the future. “They couldn’t walk anywhere.”

[…]

Americans unlucky enough to grow up in more recently built towns and exurbs are stuck having their entire lives defined by the spatial needs of cars. Their neighborhood density is low, their mobility options are limited, and the most urban-esque experience they ever get growing up might be playing with friends on the pavement of a suburban cul-de-sac. Never will they “walk” to a “corner store.” Always will they drive to a Target. If there were ever any beautiful nature along the way, now there is only highway and billboards and shredded semi truck tires on the side of the road. Sad.

All it takes is a trip to cities like Copenhagen, Antwerp, and Seville to realize how the American obsession with cars and gas powered toys is out of control.

Annie Karni, reporting for The New York Times:

During an event at Duke University, Ms. Cheney told students that it was not enough for her to simply oppose the former president, if she intended to do whatever was necessary to prevent Mr. Trump from winning the White House again, as she has long said she would.

“I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Ms. Cheney said, speaking to students in the hotly contested state of North Carolina. “As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

The room erupted in cheers after she made her unexpected announcement.

I have so much respect for Cheney. Liz Cheney took this principled stand while she was one of the most influential Republicans in the nation. I get being a conservative, politically. I get being opposed to the Democratic Party, politically. Liz Cheney is a conservative and — like her father — endorses very different policies than Kamala Harris. But (lowercase ‘d’) democratic politics ought to be viewed very much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are in psychology. Some things matter more than others. And nothing — not climate change or the environment, not reproductive rights, and certainly not fucking tax rates — nothing matters more than support for democracy itself and the rule of law. The only way we’re going to get those other things right — which are really, really important — is through democratic governance and the rule of law.

I don’t support or endorse a Reagan/Bush/Cheney political viewpoint, but that viewpoint is coherent. Trump espouses no coherent views at all. He literally tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. He’s a criminal. He’s mentally deranged, decrepitly old, and failing before our eyes. With Trump as a candidate and still in contention - not liking the Democrats is not high enough on the political hierarchy of needs to cast one’s vote for anyone but Kamala Harris

Nancy Friedman’s word of the week:

Tim Walz has tonic masculinity. Confident. Decent. The kind of man who…would start his job at the White House ‘being asked about national security and the tax code and end with him wearing a headlamp up in the attic fixing some old wiring.

When Bill Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention this week, he shared an economic claim that seemed implausible:

You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but so help me, I triple-checked it. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans one.

Is that true? Actually, yes.

According to the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 51.5 million jobs have been added since January 1989 and roughly 1.3 million of them were created while a Republican president sat in the White House.

Democrats 50, Republicans one.

Tim Walz’s acceptance speech at at the DNC:

And we made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch everyday. So while other states were banning books from their schools we were banishing hunger from ours.

Perfectly sums up the priorities of the two parties. This November vote for the ticket that prioritizes democracy and the american people - vote for the Harris / Waltz ticket.

Stephen Ornes writing in Quanta Magazine:

To see why, consider an important metric that tallies up how much room a system will need to store data. You start with the base of the number system, which is called the radix, and multiply it by the number of digits needed to represent some large number in that radix. For example, the number 100,000 in base 10 requires six digits. Its “radix economy” is therefore 10 × 6 = 60. In base 2, the same number requires 17 digits, so its radix economy is 2 × 17 = 34. And in base 3, it requires 11 digits, so its radix economy is 3 × 11 = 33. For large numbers, base 3 has a lower radix economy than any other integer base. (Surprisingly, if you allow a base to be any real number, and not just an integer, then the most efficient computational base is the irrational number e.)

In addition to its numerical efficiency, base 3 offers computational advantages. It suggests a way to reduce the number of queries needed to answer questions with more than two possible answers. A binary logic system can only answer “yes” or “no.” So if you’re comparing two numbers, x and y, to find out which is larger, you might first ask the computer “Is x less than y?” If the answer is no, you need a second query: “Is x equal to y?” If the answer is yes, then they’re equal; if the answer is no, then y is less than x.

The real advantage is being able short cut many conditional statements at the hardware level. However this would involve a complete re-working of the binary foundations the industry has been built on over the last 50 years.

CLIVE THOMPSON writing for Wired:

I WAS ENTERING the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a squat and angular box that glowed in the corner. “You gotta try this,” he told me, and handed over a piece of paper on which he’d handwritten a program.

I plunked it out on the PET’s chunky mechanical keyboard.

typed “RUN,” hit Enter, and watched as my name spilled down the screen in bright green-on-black text, over and over.

For a 12-year-old in the pre-internet era? This was electrifying. I had typed a couple of commands—ones that seemed easily understandable—and the machine had obeyed. I felt like I’d just stolen fire from Zeus himself.

I had a similar experience when I was 9 and one of my uncles purchased a Texas Instruments TI-99 / 4a machine. It was the summer of 1983 and one hot summer afternoon - I sneaked up to my cousin’s room and entered the following:

1
2

10 print "I am great"
20 goto 10

And here is the output - you can try it yourself on a web based TI-99/4a emulator:

Those 2 initial command lines set forth an entire generation of coders that built the modern internet.

Vice President Kamala Harris has debuted her first ad for her presidential run and its a much need improvement in Democratic messaging. It’s a rebranding of what the vision of freedom means under a Harris Presidency:

• Freedom is clean drinking water
• Freedom is good public education
• Freedom is fair wages
• Freedom is policing by consent
• Freedom is gun control
• Freedom is fighting climate change
• Freedom is a decriminalizing poverty
• Freedom is easy and secure voting

Compare that to the “freedoms” that Republicans are pushing for in Project 2025:

• There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
• There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
• There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
• And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

The Harris ticket is reframing Freedom to what it means to the everyday citizen. And the Republicans are panicking because they are exposed in their indefensible authoritarian ambitions.

Harris for President.

Loz Blain writes on the greatest product designs of the last century:

Leo Fender and his team have made indelible contributions to the arts. The list of innovative Fender products that have gone on to be generational icons is staggering. Telecaster, Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Twin Reverb, Deluxe Reverb, Bassman, Princeton, 5E3 Tweed, P-Bass, Jazz Bass … You’ve seen these names behind just about everyone who’s been anyone since the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.

And towering over all these giants, the mighty Strat. It remains enticing and intimidating in equal measures to me. It’s so easy to enjoy in all its many forms, there are so many rabbit-holes of tone and style to go down in this one machine, and it becomes unnervingly articulate the better you learn to use it.

But the better I get, the more those iconic tones start to taunt me. So many greats have made this guitar their own that I’m forever hearing hinted echoes of their work through my own amp, snapping me out of my reverie as I notice how much I pale in comparison. That’s part of the weight you take on your shoulders when you pull a Strat out of the rack: if you’re not sounding like the greatest that ever did it, it’s not the guitar’s fault!

As a legacy, though, what a gift to music. And while the team was invaluable to the process, there’s one fella’s name on the headstock. I reckon Leo Fender could rest easy if the Stratocaster was his only contribution. There are surely better guitars some 70 years after its debut, but there are none greater.

No. I would argue that there is no greater guitar designed. The Fender Stratocaster is perfection. Even today, 70 years on, it still feels a designed today. Here is an example released by Fender:

David Dayen on car dealerships:

F&I is the profit center of the dealership. Jase explained that profit margins per vehicle sale run between five and ten percent. In other words, if you want to make $1 million in additional profit, you have to sell $10-$20 million in additional inventory. That’s as many as 500 cars, when the average dealer is selling 100 to 200 cars a month. To do that, you need more salespeople and a bigger lot, with uncertain outcomes for all that expense.

But raising F&I, Jase says, is 100 percent profit. The same labor and operations costs are in place, whether you sell more warranties and insurance or not. That’s not theoretical. The 2023 annual report for Lithia Motors, a nationwide dealership network with 298 U.S. locations, indeed lists its profit margin for F&I at 100 percent. Lithia’s 2022 annual report says the same thing.

One of the biggest tools in the F&I toolkit is delay. Usually, a customer comes out of sales with some sense of the monthly payment. “Once you have the person committed to that payment,” Jase said, “it’s up to the finance person to maximize profit… We have people in the box. They’re boxed in, they can’t go anywhere. Don’t let them out of the box until deal is closed.” The extended wait time sealing the deal creates a sunk cost that customers don’t want to repeat by starting over somewhere else. And it wears down their defenses to every new offer.

Jase has a name for the overall process: The Dealership Triangle, with each point funneling the customer to the next step. The seller is pushed from sales, where installation extras are added, to F&I, where more extras and markups happen. And a major goal for F&I is to sell a service contract—a catch-all term that includes warranties or other insurance bundles—thereby creating a service customer. By Jase’s estimation, more than three-quarters of all buyers maintain brand loyalty by buying their next car at the dealership where they have a service contract.

It’s unbelievable how many people get fleeced at the car dealership. In 2024, the average car payments for new, used, and leased vehicles are $735, $523, and $595, respectively. That’s an awful lot of money to be paying on a depreciating asset!

This is why I follow these rules when buying a car:

• Only buy what you can afford - This means no loans. Pay in cash.
• Never lease - Leasing often leads to higher long-term costs and restrictions.
• Buy the base model with the standard options - Most modern cars come with everything you need in the base model; anything extra is usually a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.
• Negotiate on the out-the-door price - This should be lower than the sticker price.
• Do not buy extended warranties, upgrades, or add-ons - These often provide little value for the cost.
• Be ready to walk - Remember, you are the buyer. It’s your money, and you are in control.

By following these guidelines, you can avoid getting fleeced and make a smarter, more economical car purchase.

In George R.R. Martin’s fantastical land of Westeros in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, the spectacle of dragons breathing fire captivates his audience through a blend of myth and fantasy.

The images of dragons unleashing torrents of flames on the new series of House of the Dragon got me thinking: if dragons existed, what real-world biological mechanisms and chemical reactions might they use?

As they say nature is stranger than fiction. In this case nature perhaps has an answer:

A dragon could draw on some chemistry used by the bombardier beetle. This insect has evolved reservoirs adapted to store hydrogen peroxide (the stuff you might use to bleach your hair). When threatened, the beetle pushes hydrogen peroxide into a vestibule containing enzymes that rapidly decompose the hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen.

This is an exothermic reaction, which transfers energy to the surroundings, and in this case raises the temperature of the mixture to almost boiling point. The reaction is so aggressive it is sometimes used to propel rockets. The increase in pressure caused by the rapid production of oxygen and the boiling water forces the noxious mixture out of a vent in the beetle’s abdomen and towards its prey or threat.

If employed by a dragon, this reaction has a few nice features. It would create the high pressure needed to drive the jet of oily fuel, the exothermic reaction would heat the oils making them more ready to combust, and most importantly, it would generate oxygen that would drive the combustion reaction.

All the dragon would need is some sort of biological equivalent of a petrol engine carburettor to mix the oil with the oxygen and create an explosive mix. As a bonus, the erupting mixture would probably form a fine mist of oil droplets, like an aerosol, which would ignite all the better.