Just that whatever level of fame he achieved, his talent and performances warranted more, IMHO, and between being choosy on projects, the occasional commercial dud, having a few of his greatest performances before he was a major name, and finding success in supporting roles while having “classic Hollywood” looks, there was just a disconnect. I have enjoyed his work much more than I have Tom Cruise’s, for instance.
Not entirely surprising I guess, but still a sad one. Somehow stayed just a touch under the radar despite some of the most iconic roles of the 80s and 90s.
”hope that our relationship will only grow stronger in the coming years”
This hits different given the rhetoric of her husband and his (nominal) boss.
Yup. Anyone other than an equity partner is literally a little money machine made of meat. A third-year will bill 2000+ hours (and most can bill maaaaybe 80% of their working hours) at $800-$1200 per hour and take home maybe $300k in salary and bonus.
Can’t be fiftieth in education if no one does the rankings!
It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”
Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.
I mean, it’s definitely certainly 100% true that when Russia breaks the ceasefire it will be Zelenskyy’s fault, personally, so the US will have no choice.
It’s true. Agent Orange and Couchfucker told me so.
I mean, people will still trade with the US, but no exporter is going to eat those tariffs out of the goodness of their heart or fear of the Orange Menace, so prices in the US will go up, likely a bit more than the amount of the tariffs as suddenly volumes are lower and administrative overhead is higher. Then the US economy slows in a way that will not rebound quickly, and investment in the US becomes much less attractive due to low customer buying power and the inability to move goods freely. All of this of course reduces the amount actually collected in tariffs. Reduced economic activity may ultimately have positive knock-on effects for many, but the direct economic impact worldwide, distributed, will definitely be negative.
I don’t see a single way this is good for anyone, aside from those who can directly benefit from access to the levers of power and/or just want to watch the country burn (or at a minimum, smolder).
That’s the other galling side of this. It’s just so fucking dumb even as a way to “do” capitalism. Yes, theoretically one of the options in the face of tariffs is that an exporter can choose to eat the cost and both the importer and its country “win,” but that presupposes a market with few buyers and exporters with big enough profit margins that they can eat the cost. In reality of course, the exporter will instantly seek out other customers and if none can be found, they might eat some of the costs, but also pivoting their production to (previously) less profitable goods now makes much more sense because of the artificial barrier, and in the extreme case simply shutting down and liquidating assets is better than losing money on every sale. Then of course there are retaliatory tariffs, which work much better than the initial ones because they are targeted and leave the remainder of the global market available to country levying them.
Damning with faint praise, but you’re not wrong. No billionaire getting stuck-in like Musk is doing it to make the world a better place for anyone else, and no one except autocrats and accelerationist wackos should be pleased with how things have changed in the last 6 months.
I have no hope for USA anymore. It’s gone steadily from bad to worse, and it seems like Americans never learn, ans especially like the Democrats never learn. Because they’ve done absolutely NOTHING to strengthen checks and balances or to strengthen democracy in USA.
This is a fair criticism, and is looking like a much bigger mistake than it seemed initially, and I think it’s telling the one single thing Obama spent the political capital on to get properly enshrined into statue is the one bit of his legacy that Trump is having the hardest time undoing. Constitutionally, we have fucked ourselves by thinking we could run the largest economy in the world on the legal equivalent of a “plan of a plan,” worshipping said high-level outline like it was holy writ, and then making surprise-pikachu face when a bad actor who’s not concerned about long-term stability starts shoving dynamite into its many cracks (pardon the mixed metaphor).
I hope you’re wrong, but I am not confident enough that you are to argue the point.
Yup. Whoever is next, and hopefully that will be in January 2029 if not earlier, is not going to have anything like the same influence that previous presidents have had. They will be able to deescalate short-term issues and generally provide a lull in the storm, but Trump has exposed the fragility of US power, and his base proves that America is an unreliable partner, so getting anything significant done that might cross administrations is going to be so much harder. Even if the next president is not insane and is without any above-average level of evil (neither is guaranteed), then that only helps temporarily. Hell, even if there’s some sea change in the electorate that makes democratic allies more optimistic, recovering from Trump 2 is going to mean the US looks inward for a time and there will be, if not a power vacuum, a serious low-pressure system that draws in disturbances.
Now, I’m not sad about the decline of American hegemony per se, but this is very much a “not like this” moment, and a slower unwinding would be better for stability. Our best case scenario here is that our allies understand the conflict inherent in the American ethos and work with us where practicable but also pursue the “strategic independence” we’ve been hearing about. I hope it’s Europe that steps up and reasserts itself, because barring a very unlikely leveling of the international order, your other options are China bulldozing the world for the financial benefit of the party, or Putin throwing bodies (both at enemies and out of windows), cutting off fossil fuels, and threatening nuclear war every time he doesn’t get his way.
For a while at least, attorneys at treasury were not allowed to use PACER because it charges nominal amounts per page to fund the Judicial branch. PACER is the one and only tool for researching and filing records in ongoing federal cases, which is to say, every single case that these lawyers would be working on.
It’s kinda bullshit that there is a fee at all, but it is what it is and has been standard operating procedure for 20+ years, and they just flip a switch and wait for the howling to begin, because they have no idea what is important and don’t care. This is just Xitter all over again, except now it’s the government of the largest economy and military in the world.
…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?
Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.
The first term justices were all from the pre-existing Federalist Society list. It was full of overly partisan, reliable conservative activist judges, but they were generally people who’d arrived at their positions through arguments that, while arising from shitty first assumptions, one could cogently follow and even appreciate some of the mental gymnastics. They were either nominally qualified or on their way to being so. Alito (aka Great Value Scalia) has arguably been worse than the Trump Three; in retrospect I would have happily taken our chances with Harriet Miers.
I guarantee that Trump’s list for this term is much, much worse. Frankly I would assume Aileen Cannon is at the top of it.
There was a time when Clarence’s mindlessly textualist dissents were basically a drinking game for Law Students. Take a shot every time he mentions that something didn’t exist in 1789! He was also famous for never, ever asking questions in oral arguments. Then of course there are the famous complaints about salary. Dude simply does not give a fuck, but that kind of committed disdain for the institution ended up serving him well as the GOP sank down to meet him.
I mean at this point, Trump’s preferred end state is basically China except stupid and unpredictable.
They see such an obvious opportunity for increasing their soft power that they’re saying things here that might actually slow down a move towards a world where taking Taiwan by force is acceptable.
I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.
I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.
You say “looming data apocalypse.”
I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”
Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.