IHeartBadCode

To note, the US has not sent an ambassador to the Bahamas since 2011. Nicole Avant, the last US ambassador, left the position to work with then President Obama’s reelection efforts in 2012. Since then we’ve largely left the role to the Chargé d’Affaires in the Bahamas. Nothing big happened, Avant’s tenure as ambassador wasn’t some ordeal or anything. It’s just been a long stream of weirdness and dysfunction that’s left the position open this long.

• Obama’s purposed replacement died of leukemia before confirmation.
• Trump kept trying to pitch Manchester whose nomination just kept getting stalled out. Didn’t help that he thought the Bahamas was a US protectorate and not, as it actually is, an independent country. But yeah, he was so ignorant of anything about the Bahamas that even the Republicans in the Senate couldn’t get him through.
• Biden’s pick of Smyre just never made it to committee. Like it’s literally on their agenda as a To-Do. Oopsie, guess the forgot to get around to it.

The fact that Walker is being picked is hilarious because the guy likely has zero ideas about anything related to foreign relations. It’s not some big secret that being Ambassador to the Bahamas carries with it the key to a really nice house in Nassau. And the embassy itself is quite nice though quaint. The real question is, will Walker be ambassador once the new facility gets done? Because the new embassy is supposed to be super fancy.

Freezing investment into the country and nuclear grade austerity will always bring inflation to an almost stand still. You’re literally tossing liquid nitrogen on your economy, it’s absolutely going to freeze.

The IMF does not expect the Argentine economy to grow this year, but rather to decline by 3.5%, while it should start growing next year.

And this is the key aspect that usually makes people who consider this pause for a second. Because freezing your economy might solve the right now problem, it also has the ability to ice economic activity completely, triggering an economic depression. This is the “balance” so to say. The harder your freeze, the more you’ll need to rewarm the markets to get your economy going again.

President Milei and the government hope that the new laws, which offer investors decades of tax and customs relief, will quickly attract capital and curb the recession.

This has always been the super tricky part of the weapons grade austerity. The what comes after part. So Milei has done it, he’s cooled the markets and supply has nearly cratered in the country. The next steps is to get production back and start pesos in the country to start flowing again.

I’ve always been a bit irresolute about Milei’s approach on the economy. I’m not against it, it’s just a strategy that’s playing with fire in a gun powder factory. First and foremost, I hope that the people in Argentina find economic stability, because boy do they deserve it. So to that end I hope WHOEVER succeeds in getting that done. And second, I really hope this is something that can be long lasting. Hyper austerity has a history of bad boomerang effects. It can work, it’s just takes a ton of work, more than most governments are willing to invest. And so there’s a big chance that we could start to see some positive only to then watch it completely crumble once again.

If I was a leader, this isn’t exactly a strategy I would pick. There’s just a ton of places where it can go all wrong. But I hope the guy gets it fixed once and for all. But dang, I don’t know how dude is smiling in that photo because if I was going down this road I wouldn’t be able to sleep properly.

Some have suggested that the Deep State is already seeking to undermine Trump’s second presidency by plotting a civil war or scheming ways to prevent him from entering the White House

Because they are, and this is the really important part, FUCKING IDIOTS WHO SAY DUMB SHIT.

This is the shit that gets me upset. Back in the early 90s there was this group online, had an IRC chat room and everything, that would wax prophetic about pyramids, exotic matter, the Kennedy’s, and the Pentagon. NO ONE FUCKING WROTE ARTICLES ABOUT THEIR DUMB ASSES. Because they were idiots.

“Some have suggested” WHO?! Name and shame or shut the fuck up about it. Articles like this just fucking make idiots look bonafide. This isn’t an us vs them situation. This is like eight people who are detached from reality saying crazy ass shit and some outlet reporting it on a slow news day.

I swear one day, I hope, media will see how fucking twisted they themselves have made this god-forsaken planet. What they draw from it, I know not what, but hopefully a bit of “damn maybe we should chill a bit” is in the cards.

Faith.

Same reason I don’t cite poor farmers giving to Trump’s presidency.

Faith in an idea is a powerful motive. The poorer you are the more you rely on faith rather ability and/or resources. Literally take a political science 101 class. Belief that something is right or true is like 99% of how organized humanity works.

Exactly. Like I’m going to feel whatever for the opposite side of the aisle here. But the fuckers who looked at the state of affairs outside and was like “nah, fuck it”. Oooo, that’s a whole other feeling that’s not pleasant one bit.

I do really hope that everyone understands that the default nature of the universe is to be undone, including the niche that humanity inhabits, and that are continued still being here state requires some input from us. Get up off your collective asses and do something for fucks sake. Somehow I don’t believe it’s a tall task to press a fucking button. Which one we can debate, but at least PUSH ONE OF THEM.

Nobody knew health care could be so complicated

— President Trump (February 27, 2017)

I mean if nobody got the message he wasn’t going to anything. Being direct this time isn’t going to help. Literally didn’t even fucking LOCK HER UP like he said he would. Don’t even get me started on his tax return, still waiting on that, likely will happen on infrastructure week.

Anything that guy says is just utter shit.

Oh man tell me about it. The ones who voted Trump, yeah. But the vast majority that decided to stay home? I have less savory words for.

Article gives zero reasons. I’ll add my opinion. Newness factor. Not having the meta settled, the lack of map knowledge, etc. Just all the things that circle the “new” of such a game drives the folks at the moment. It’s got the feel of early OW when you just picked your person, got on a map, and did the objective not really knowing anything.

It’s yet to see how the balance patching goes for the game and how new characters for the game go. I’ll say the game does one thing out the gate better than OW2 and that’s the reduced FOMO in the game related to battle pass. You buy the battle pass, you have infinite time to complete it. Now you can’t sit the fence on if to buy the BP or not, hence my “reduced FOMO”, but this is one of those things they’ve started doing in a lot of other games like Halo and what not, and it’s something that I think Blizzard should do for OW. But I don’t think that alone is going to turn the tide massively.

But I will say that Rivals and OW2 are absolutely proving the F2P is here to stay as a model for games. So I really think those in the OW community who were salty about OW2 swapping over have basically lost the war on the topic.

Again, all my 2¢, and I’m not claiming to be some scion of knowledge in the gaming industry. Just letting you know my feels.

Not exactly related to this, but I find it incredibly interesting the sheer level of media coverage on the shooter, when compared to media’s supposed new rule of trying not to linger too much on the shooter least copy-cats get made.

The last five days has been a deep dive into this person’s hunt, social media accounts, and a complete life bio. Like cops are going to toss him into jail, but this guy hit rock star status and it’s got the feels of we’re going to see this again down the road.

I don’t condone the dude’s actions, but goddamn has everyone including law enforcement made this man shine brighter than any shooter that has come before. If law enforcement plans on having some sort of backburn narrative getting out but shit like this, where the guy acted on pain.

That starts transcending the guy himself. That makes it a lot harder to prevent McVeigh style inspiration for retribution. We had the Ruby Ridge / Waco spawn the OKC Bombings because those events stirred ideas, so the people themselves became less important to the narrative. Columbine’s major memory was one that was alluring to disaffected youth that continued to be largely ignored.

The toothpaste is coming out of the tube on this shit. If law enforcement is going to get a handle on this situation, they’re going to need to start picking up the pace. Senator Fetterman’s hot take of “news media is just shitty” on a story about how this was inevitable has been largely seen as clears throat:

Wow they’re all fucking disconnected from reality

Like it’s not some new science that if you back into a corner a wild animal, it’s likely going to strike. The fact that Senators are THIS blind to their failures to address this issue that both of them continually indicate they want to solve, is unsurprising, but holy shit that’s the kind of shit that turns words into gasoline on an already raging fire.

No shortage of shitty takes on the 2024 election or on this assassination

— Sen. Fetterman (via Twitter)

Yes, excellent choice of words to ignore how Congress for the last three and a half fucking decades has continued to FAIL over and over again on fixing this problem. No need to look at this event as yet another failure of Congress to do their fucking job correctly or anything like that. It has to be the various shitty opinions at fault here.

But the media has stories they need to hype up so that you’ll put money in their pocket and Congress will just continue to do their favorite past time of pointing fingers until the heat death of the universe. All the while they’ll look at each other befuddled on how the next one of these could have possibly happened?

I find all of this wildly interesting in how most of them professed not too long ago that they had learned their lesson to only show, yet again, no they didn’t. But that’s about par for people who have long since become comfortable with their positions of wealth and power, there comes a point where feelings and the emotions of the masses just no longer appear on their radar. When you stop giving two shits about anyone else but yourself, every wrong looks like someone else’s fault. For Fetterman, I hope his ass gets primaried, one can only hope.

It is, the police are trying to save face by finding someone dumb and innocent to scapegoat into “he was totally resisting arrest”. They’re going to murder someone, call it him, and promise that anyone else attacking the rich will meet the same end.

It’s wild that no one ever had a problem with this with email

Do you work in IT? I couldn’t imagine sitting there trying to guide people through IMAP and SMTP settings. Like email has been made a lot easier on that end because most people use an app on their phone that allows them to select from one of the three major providers, they click it, poof all done.

But imagine someone calls you up and is like “hey how do I setup mutt for gmail?” “How do I set up Canary for Microsoft?”

Then imagine someone who has 1/10 of your knowledge trying to set it up. We have to remember that a lot of people are unaware of the file/folder metaphor in computers because a lot of people just “put it in a cloud” and call it done. The tablet/phone era has really eroded a lot of knowledge about systems. I know that seems hard to believe on the Fediverse when we’re all surrounded by incredibly knowledgeable people.

So quit. You provide a valuable service. Don’t do it anymore.

That’s what Musk is trying to do. Intimidate folks into quitting. So you’re just basically saying let Elon do the thing Elon wants to do.

If Govt services cease to function they fail

Yeah, that’s not the outcome anyone should want. When a function fails, we can’t just pop it back up when Trump isn’t President again. I had to go over this with the Trump term one tariffs. The reason Biden didn’t do away with them is because we violated the trade agreement to implement them. Once we violated the agreement, it doesn’t matter anymore what anyone does. It’s not fixable anymore. We have to go through decades worth of regaining political favor with the foreign country to repair it.

Same thing here. When the service fails, we can’t just pop it back up once Trump is no longer in office. If people start to hurt because a function fails, those people are going to be hurting for decades while we try to repair the damage. It’s one of those stack of cups kind of thing. It takes a significant amount of time to stack the cups compared to the half a second it takes to knock them all down.

then show why they were made by their absence

All that’s saying is that the next two decades should be complete shit for everyone except the insanely wealthy. I would rather not have that lesson, I don’t think it’s required. I also don’t think a lot of people would even learn the lesson even if they experienced it first hand.

Yeah I think that’s the frustrating part of this. Either allow elonjet back or get banned for doing this. But having it both ways shows how shit a person Elon Musk is.

If anyone asks, to me, it’s THIS aspect of it that’s the big problem. Musk is literally doing the thing that he hated about elonjet.

Elizabeth Warren once again calls for reform on inconsequential shit. She sits on the Finance committee, how about you pass some real fucking fiscal policy instead of yelling at the Fed because of their legally required monetary policy.

That woman is really high up there for useless Senators.

He won’t buy it with his money. He’ll buy with our money. DOGE not being an official department and mostly being a independent contractor means they don’t have to have the same level of accountability for funds that the Government has (or in the Pentagon’s case should have, but nobody in Congress seems to have a spine about stopping the flow of funds until a successful audit happens).

When they talk about shrinking the Government, they aren’t talking about getting rid of services, they’re talking about privatizing the services. Everyone who keeps thinking “Oh shits going crash if they do that” is forgetting, they’ll just turn those services over to private companies that receive tax dollars for providing that service to the public.

Javier Milei’s plan to privatize the Paraguay-Paraná waterway

maniacal laughter GODDAMN! Woo! That fucking Libertarian paradise comes at you fast. Man, Milei is in over his fucking head and the depth of it is slowly dawning on him at about the pace 80 year-olds fuck. All those experts are gone and my boy here is fucking treading water in a slow panic seeing the picnic he’s planned in the hurricane.

potentially benefiting multinational businesses at the expense of the local population.

Oh no, that’s exactly what it’s out to do. Milei is looking for capital injection after his nose dive on inflation. Like all of the austerity, Milei has successfully slowed inflation down drastically, but has done so by basically bringing his country’s economy to a damn near halt. That’s the easy part. You stop putting any kind of investment into the public, they hold onto their money longer, economy slows and inflation basically flat lines.

The trick is that once you’ve got the economy this cold and all the fluidity has almost frozen completely, you warm it back up and try to control the thing to prevent another run away inflation. That’s the difficult part, because your people have to trust you to play their part and not be scared they’ll watch their dollars buy less and less again. And you’ve got to warm it up, because if it completely freezes, then you leave recession and enter depression where money enters a glacial pace of movement.

The thing I find funny is that the Libertarian paradise puts all the trust completely into the hands of the public. Which given how cold Milei has made his economy, is either the most insane or genius thing ever. But then he does this and, “AH, he wasn’t going to trust them after all.” He’s going to wheel and deal and see where it lands. Problem is that the folks with money know the position he’s put himself into. The cards are stacked in the favor of the rich people who Milei wants to invest in his country and boy are they going to play their hand.

Hornsby sang a song about it. “That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change. That’s just the way it is. Ah, but don’t you believe them.” Man people are hungry to think this shit ain’t going to play out the same way it always does. It amazing the lengths folks go to thinking that. It’s shit like this that makes me think hope is one of those bad four letter words.

Yeah, something got in their crawl and Bluesky is on low key TPOT rising.

Someone did a post on it, you can see the map that was done in the picture there with TPOT in blue.

I don’t know why they started coalescing on Bluesky, but it is what it is. If they get annoying there, I know how to mute them. But as long as that doesn’t also herald the “free speech absolutists” that literally add zero value, I’m cool with TPOT heading to Bluesky.

Besides, I’m more active on Fedi/Mastodon at this point than Threads/Bluesky so it’s not really a pressing thing for me. I mean shit, I wouldn’t have a problem with Musk’s network if he’d clamp down on the utter trash going on over there. Like it’s gotten to pure garbage, I haven’t the time to block everyone who pops into my feeds that how hard the algo there is pushing the trash.

The postrat folk. The deep value Silicon Valley folk. Core Techbro kind of people.

Would have thought they’d be prone to sticking with Musk

Ditto, but at the same time. Being with daddy Musk might be too traditional at this point. No idea the reasons, but you can to see a lot of this popping up in that circle on Twitter.

TPOT → Bluesky is actually an interesting example of what looks like a successful transplantation… quasi-existential concerns about Elon Twitter, vibes have been off leading to big cascades of migration tend to happen after inciting incidents (eg twitter banning substack links being a canary in the coal mine)

You know the “I sound super thoughtful” kind of stuff. Lots of praise from that Group on XTwitter/Bluesky.

I don’t know. Lots of folks pointing out That Part Of Twitter (TPOT) also migrating over.

That’s not the victory Republicans will think it is.

The House Freedom caucus routinely has at least one or two who dig their heels in over “this bill doesn’t go FAR enough!”

With a 218 majority, that means 100% of the Republicans have to toe the line. Not a single person can be out of line, something that rarely happens with either party. There’s usually at least ONE person who doesn’t like the outcome.

This is going to put a lot of people who are known for digging in their heels into very precarious situations. Either they toe the line and have to accept some compromise because of Democrats in the Senate looking to filibuster. Or they alone hijack the Republican plans.

And woe if someone dies, gets sick, or retires in office on their side, something that also happens at least once per year on either side.