It is so fitting that what may quite literally be Trump’s only sincerely held belief about public policy is short-sighted, inefficient, bad for the world, and based on shallow considerations of aesthetics.

Edith LOOOOVED her dogs…

https://lithub.com/some-things-you-may-not-have-known-about-edith-whartons-dog-obsession/

Yup. Give 'em laptops or tablets if you like. Maybe you break their distance vision in exchange for saving their backs from the half a dozen hardback tomes and trapper-keeper we used to lug around. Textbooks can be updated quicker, incorporate video, and if there are public domain texts, they can be provided for free. Completing worksheets with a keyboard and trackpad also doesn’t worry me, and I actually wish we had class discussion boards when I was in school.

Leveraging tech because it provides some practical benefit is just common sense, but thinking the tech is the benefit is stupid, so of course that’s where we are, driven by the olds you mention, as well as a healthy ecosystem of ed-tech grifters.

Did they bury something interesting here, or was it literally just this?

Macron, who is hosting the gathering, was picked up on a camera’s microphone asking Zelenskyy if he had a bilateral meeting with Trump as they walked the grounds of the Hôtel Royal. Zelenskyy’s response is inaudible. Macron encouraged his counterpart to stay longer in France, to which Zelenskyy responds that he “need[s] to go to Brussels on the 18th.”

The monkey-bar wings idea is a pretty nice touch, actually, as is figuring out a way for it to be outside, or maybe just accepting that it COULD be.

So I looked this up. It’s the viewing/sitting/fidgeting area for an interactive art installation at the San Francisco airport called the Butterfly Wall. As a kids area, yeah it’s still a bit sterile and eye-rollingly “sophisticated,” but they left out the actual attraction, a tank-like thing with very satisfying-looking hand cranks that raise little goassamer-winged mechanical butterflies that than then descend like fancy versions of the parachute men you’d get from the dentist because he won’t keep candy. I’ve seen tonally similar things at a dozen different parks, museums, and botanical gardens, and this one is actually kinda nice in that being indoors it can be a little more delicate.

As others have said, most kids areas I’ve seen are much less ST:TNG-coded, and even SFO has others that are “better.” My kid is through the “every random play area must be experienced” phase, but she’s traveled a lot, and we’ve seen tons of aviation themed mini-playgrounds and open spaces with primary-colored benches along the walls.

Pet peeve time: this kind of cherry-picked observation is weaponized laziness, the social media equivalent of stand-ups thinking it’s clever to muse, “why isn’t the whole plane made of the black box stuff?!”

High risk, high reward.

Fair enough, I may have inferred a bit too much, so here is what the CEO said:

And so third parties, the reason you saw some of these really high numbers, is we’re like, ‘A Rivian? And what’s a Rivian?’ So they they don’t know the car, and they quote an enormously high number, the insurance company agrees to it, and then that happens.”

A couple of years ago, I was applying for a work visa, and they needed my college transcripts. Despite matriculating in 19somethingsomethingoldold, my class was one of the first to use an online system that was able to be migrated into multiple subsequent generations of registrar systems, so they needed to have my school email ID, which I hadn’t thought about eleventymilliongetoffmylawn years, so THAT meant placing a call to campus IT, and providing enough personal information for them to look it up.

And that, my online friends, is when you are forced to viscerally confront that you were a deeply cringe knowitall who spent way too much time thinking your personality flaws were edgy superpowers and that knowing the name of a random reference in a Bertrand Russell book you barely understood proved how smart you were.

Which is the point of the phrase of course. It’s meant to simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss the “well ackshully” crowd. No, Switzerland is not fully surrounded, but also it doesn’t matter in any politically meaningful way.

TL:DR: Poor scale and awareness due to being a niche brand, overly large aluminum body panels requiring either massive replacements or complicated welding, small shops guessing that it must be even more exotic and expensive than the CEO claims, and insurers shrugging and moving on because the volumes aren’t hitting their financials hard enough for them to care.

Welp, time to arrest Comey again.

Shame the rest of the digits didn’t come out as clean as the ‘8’. This had serious T-shirt potential.

“What transpired is not reflective of who I am, the values I hold, or the way I was raised,” [ADA CEO] Henderson said. “I will work hard to bring our community back together to build on the progress we have collectively made for those affected by diabetes.”

Jesus, he sounds like a pro athlete who got arrested for drunk driving.

That is the most wholesomely multicultural list of arrestees I’ve ever seen. You go, kids.

I mean, I’m so very happy these very, very dangerous criminals have been stopped from – checks notes – throwing stink bombs through windows. They should probably go to prison forever and ever and ever.

I will wax a little poetic, then. ;-)

Nashville has had a machine since at least the late 60s for harvesting songs basically provided for free by writers desperate for a break, and routing them them through overproduced studios full of controllable singers even more desperate than the songwriters. Now, to be fair, the occasional gem slips through, more when the model was less refined, and then there’s folks like Dolly Parton who infiltrated it like a virus and then took it over to explode with decent music.

Still, other than what Steve Earle called “The Great Credibility Scare of the 80s” when he, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, KD Lang, and Melissa Etheridge (among others) were allowed to bubble to the top of the scene, there’s always been a grifter business mindset that’s somehow worse in country because, as a direct outgrowth and expansion of certain varieties of folk music, audiences ask for authenticity when all they really want is cultural validation (hint: for country-adjacent music, authenticity usually looks a lot like it does in other genres). Bubblegum country therefore somehow feels dirtier than bubblegum pop, and it gets even worse as product categories ossify and Nashville country gets targeted to a more and more specific segment of the public.

I’m fully aware that even the stuff I like, the “Rockabilly [and] other various fusion efforts” broadly called “Americana,” is subject to its own tropes and business pressures, but being smaller and targeting a different niche, there’s at least room in the conversation for artistry and risk, and thankfully good music isn’t as hard to get made as some other forms of entertainment, so there’s a lot of it out there waiting to be found.

Also, nothing wrong with some nasal vocals in the right context, LOL. I do grow weary of “High and Lonesome” bluegrass vocals after about two songs, though.

This, and not ironically.

It is a slippery thing, this two weeks — not a measurement of time so much as a placeholder. Two weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at all. It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time, it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But later can also mean never. Sometimes.

That’s just reckless! You’re a maverick who doesn’t play by the rules! I’m too old for this shit!

I actually do think the point is there more as an alignment guide for a potentially sloppy stack of punched paper (see also the manila envelopes with brads built in), but I would be lying if I said I never skipped the hole punch when it was just a couple of sheets.

More or less. Nominally they were for quickly binding paper that had been through a 2- or 3-hole punch.

Really, they were for making badass clocks in kindergarten.

Yup. You want to speculate on SpaceX, then no one is stopping you. You may even make a shitload of money if you do it right (based on recent valuations I’m not so sure, though), but maximizing short term capital gains based on vibes is absolutely not what the S&P 500 is used for.

If SpaceX is actually consistently profitable, they’ll be in the index in one year. Is what it is.

Sounds like this was a pretty fucked up situation, but one wonders why the white cops (can’t say for sure, but the police wrists on the bodycam look very pale) would really have no trouble believing that a white kid out late at night had been tormenting a brown one.

I bet it has way less to do with being “woke” than it does with their actual experience on the job. They also called the ambulance right away, but they did fuck up quite badly by not believing him when he said he’d been stabbed.

To be clear, the Sikh kid needs to go to prison, the police need to be investigated and those officers disciplined, and I grieve for the victim and his family, but people who think that an 81%-majority ethnicity is enduring some epidemic of oppression, because previous white shitheads lulled some lazy cops into complacency, they have some other agenda. I wonder what JD Vance’s is?