I have a friend who had a case before Cannon and told me that she was both one of the stupidest and the meanest judges she's ever dealt with, which is saying something since she practices primarily in Florida. As a representative of the caliber of judges the Federalist Society has to offer, Cannon is pretty damning... and if we get four more years of Trump, the federal bench is going to be stacked with jurists even worse than her.

I've been going back and forth about this all day. On one hand, I think it's obvious that Trump is a symptom of the right wing's systemic slide into open authoritarianism, rather than its architect... but on the other hand, I don't think his cult of personality would have long outlived him (especially if it turned out he was assassinated by a fellow right-winger over his ties to Epstein) and there's not many figures on the right who would be able to reconstitute it quickly. On the other hand, I don't think his cult members would go gentle into the night, and there would be ugly, violent reprisals. On the other hand, I fear there's going to be violence no matter what, and it's probably better for it to happen before the election than after for a host of reasons. But on the other hand, etc., etc...

A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD's lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.

You, just like the rest of us, are an infinitesimal speck of dust on a surface of an unremarkable ball of rock orbiting a star just like trillions of others, whose existence as a thinking entity will likely span less than 100 years out of the 100 trillion years that the universe will exist in a meaningful sense before the stars die and the last black holes evaporate.

The universe owes you nothing; human rights are nothing more than the common decency we owe one another in the face of an uncaring universe, and the idea that anybody other than the ruling class should even have them in any meaningful sense has a surprisingly short history. In contrast, the idea that might makes right is as old as the first predatory microbes. If a society believes in the value of human rights, it needs to be ready and able to vigorously defend them against would-be strongmen who don't feel constrained by rules and norms of behavior, who will happily banish those rights back to the philosophical ether from which they came if it means they can secure more power and comfort for themselves.

Colm Meaney was associated with Sinn Fein (formerly the political arm of the IRA) for a long time, so "Pro-Union Irishman" took me a minute.

Based on how quickly behavioral and morphological changes happened in Soviet experiments on silver fox domestication, I suspect that domestic cats are about as domesticated as they're gonna get.

It's not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for "microgrid" systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed -- and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don't want any of that communist solar power!

I've got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there's almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state -- contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it's a worse place than California to try and build something, and that's entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I'd much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

They're flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you're right up next to them -- and once they're past the front lines Russia doesn't have many (if any) point defense installations.

In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine's reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine's air force is to support efforts on the ground.

They've got drawbacks, too, especially since most examples of them in residential construction are the efforts of, shall we say, enthusiastic amateurs.

1. Because soil holds moisture for an extended period of time, they tend to get saturated, and then excess moisture migrates down to the waterproofing system, which will inevitably leak over time. Most amateur-built earth sheltered homes are not using particularly sophisticated waterproofing materials, and rarely take a defense-in-depth approach to them that could mitigate a failure in one layer of the system.
2. Maintenance is expensive: once any part of the waterproofing fails you are going to have to dig it up to repair it.
3. Soil - especially wet soil - is heavy and the prescriptive structural parts of residential building code aren't really intended to address this kind of construction. You need an engineer to ensure the house is properly structured for the loads involved, and if you're building new that extra structure is going to cost money and limit design options.
4. Building into a slope to allow roof access for planting, mowing, etc., limits daylighting options, and particularly in the US where bedrooms are required to have an egress window it can be nearly impossible to design a floorplan with the expected gradient of public to private space.

Don't get me wrong, I love the concept, and I've even drawn up plans for one I'd like to build on the lot next door to me once the nigh-derelict rental house currently occupying the space gets condemned... But this is one case where I absolutely do not want to be buying somebody else's project. I don't trust the other people who build them to do it right.

• No trigger discipline
• No hands on the wheel
• Open container of alcoholic beverage
• Speeding egregiously
• Driving a Nissan

All checks out.

He's suddenly full of righteous indignation now that he's had a taste of his own medicine. Hypocritical fucknugget.

What in the generative AI nonsense is that header image? A mysterious man is lasering the moon, while his crotch ray attacks a low-flying jet and another beam shoots from his briefcase towards parts unknown, and a confusing late-night aerobatic demonstration takes place in the background?