The media completely failed at their job of informing the public.

A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.

They went soft on Trump’s criminality and incompetence, and his sheer volume of scandals meant that the past ones were forgotten as the next one erupted. He would not have won his 2016 minority victory had the US news media adequately conveyed that Trump was not the fun fictional character in the reality TV show The Apprentice; he was a serially bankrupt man repeatedly accused of sexual assault with a lot of criminal ties and a history of not paying his bills, being helped on by the Vladimir Putin regime, which had itself seriously corrupted the information environment of the election.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga

Load virus on to banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation.

Just got back from a 3 day trip to Brussels, we loved it. Plus, Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) everywhere. We did take a day trip to Bruges though, that was even better than Brussels IMHO. Especially since I could walk around saying to my wife “If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”.

Sometimes it’s like wiping a marker

Assume positive intent. Amazing how much lower stress your stress levels will be if you don’t feel attacked (on the road, on social media, in conversations, etc).

Oh yeah, and buy a bidet. Your bum will thank you.

Classic: A Christmas Carol, the 1951 version with Alastair Sim. Sim’s giddy portrayal of Scrooge on Christmas morning is one of my favorite performances of any actor.

Modern: A Christmas Story, and Elf.

I haven’t seen The Always Sunny podcast mentioned yet. If you like IASIP, this is a must listen.

This paper describes the paradigm in detail, they’re called Orthodox File Managers.

I learned Norton Commander way back in the 90s, then moved to Midnight Commander, and it’s still a key part of my toolset. Using the keyboard in a hybrid shell / tree view mode is still the single most efficient way I’ve found to manage files. Need to find files under a subdirectory? Press F7. Need to move an entire directory somewhere else? cd to it, then press F6. Want to move all the pdf files under a subdirectory somewhere? Use the find dialog, then move the search results. No mouse/trackpad needed, everything is at your fingertips.

Somewhat related, at least on Linux and OSX, GNU Stow is a great way to manage dotfiles.

I guess it depends what one calls “the media”. Something like IEEE Spectrum is top notch for tech news. Reuters and AP generally are pretty good for normal news. Past that, maybe something like The Conversation?

For a lot of these you need to study/practice on sites like HackerRank for a while first. Some companies go overboard and expect you to build some crazy recursive dynamic programming implementation in 15 mins without an IDE, others are more realistic and just want to see if you know things like algorithm complexity, can pick appropriate data structures, and write logical and clean code. And yes, very little of it applies to what most of us do day to day. Anyways, HackerRank is great for interview practice, you can Google for pretty much any solution to their questions.

Gross, yet probably not unusual for the Red line.

There are some amazing journalists over on Mastodon.

By far the best for breaking news is Steve Herman of the VOA. https://journa.host/@w7voa

For analysis, The Conversation. https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUS

And if you just want a curated feed of interesting stuff going on, follow Lisa Melton. https://mastodon.social/@lisamelton

Any one who worked on an Oracle DB when they had the 30 character object name limit learned to make names like this. You’d figure out all your domain objects, and abbreviate them all (person could be PRS_, account could be ACCT_, etc). It was a horrible experience.

So he went to public school in New York back before Reagan started cutting taxes for the rich and exploding the wealth gap. The taxes that paid for that very school and gave him his start. Now this twat is on the conservative side of completely gutting public schools.

V.J.s Drive Inn in Winnipeg MB Canada. Greasy heaven.

Any products that support Koch Industries. Horrible people.

A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, The Annoying Orange

If the poop is crowning, I’m thinking the only way Imodium is gonna help is if you take it anally