Wednesday, June 04, 2025
RIP Jeffraham Prestonian
Longtime community member JP passed away overnight. It's always quite upsetting when a regular passes. In my mind he was here from the beginning of the blog. I'm sure that wasn't day one, precisely, but I don't remember the place without him.
Online communities are strange places, where you know lots of people both quite well and not at all. I know many of you actually knew him well, not just in the "online" sense, and someone from the community submitted this for a remembrance, which seemed fitting to me:
Our dear friend, Jeff Preston, aka Jeffraham died in his sleep on the morning of June 4, 2025, just 17 days short of his 62nd birthday.Jeffraham was the free spirited heart and soul of our blog. He took care of anyone who needed help, especially his beloved roomie, SIL. He never failed to make us laugh. He was passionate about guitars, scooters, music, and especially cats. He loved people; his time at Bananastan made this evident. He had a kind word and a smile for everyone.
He has been one of my very best friends for two decades now. Right now, there's a Jeffraham sized hole in all of our hearts.
Safe journey, dear friend.“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
I'll add one more thing. JP will live on forever in this blog, like a little ghost. I don't know why this happened, but at some point he got stuck in the machine.
When you write/edit a post in blogger's CMS, you can hit the preview button to see how it will look on the site. When I do this, the post appears with precisely one disqus comment. Every time.
We All Gotta Eat
There is a place in politics for talented mercenaries, but in DC too many of the people who get ahead are the ones who always have their eye on the next career move and who are much more concerned with the next, bigger paycheck.
Soulless grifters aren't going to save us. Was Jean-Pierre good at her job? Did she succeed at any aspect of her job - informing the press, informing the public, and, yes, making her boss look good?
Welp
People get mad at The Left, but every iteration of above-it-all centrism is much more damaging to The Democrats, especially from someone like this.
The End Of The Biden Boom
The official (real or fake?) numbers come out Friday, but this is the standard estimate from a payroll company. It only include private sector jobs, so Friday (if real!) could be even worse!
Private sector job creation slowed to a near-standstill in May, hitting its lowest level in more than two years as signs emerged of a weakening labor market, payrolls processing firm ADP reported Wednesday.
Payrolls increased just 37,000 for the month, below the downwardly revised 60,000 in April and the Dow Jones forecast for 110,000. It was the lowest monthly job total from the ADP count since March 2023.
Will Get Worse
There will be a bunch of economists loudly professing that all the data is sound because they know how professional those agencies are, and then they will get quieter and quieter.
Trump administration officials delayed and redacted a government forecast because it predicts an increase in the nation’s trade deficit in farm goods later this year, according to two people familiar with the matter.That isn't because economists think Trumpers are good, it's because they think economists are good.
Tuesday, June 03, 2025
Coyote
"The Market" has fully decided that TACO is true even as Trump is continuing to increase tariffs and...
Needs More Cats
Didn't see it on the program.
Sales of subscriptions for the coming season of programming at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts are down by about $1.6 million, or roughly 36 percent, compared with last year.Certain types of things are going to have a liberal-leaning customer base. I'm sure Trump doesn't care about the finances, but MAGA isn't going to fill the seats of most things that hit a venue like that.
By this point in 2024, the center had generated $4,413,147 in revenue from selling subscriptions to its theater, dance, classical and other seasons of performances. This year, it has generated $2,656,524 as of June 1, plus $155,243 from a new mix-and-match package, according to internal data obtained by The Washington Post.
Is It Elon's Fault
Apparently!
At air traffic control towers at two dozen West Coast airports, officials are unable to easily pay to have the windows washed and shades cleaned, said a Federal Aviation Administration employee. A DOGE-ordered overhaul of the payments system means FAA staffers must write statements justifying all expenditures, the employee said — not just for window-washing, but also elevator maintenance and even pens and pencils, the employee said. Purchase orders that used to take 15 or 20 minutes to fill out now consume 1 or 2 hours for each tower.Better solve this one, Mr. Duffy, because when the planes go down they're going to blame you anyway!
“These are things that people don’t think about, but clean windows are crucial for controllers,” the employee said. Because he is so often busy with purchase justifications, he has fallen behind on landscaping, fire alarm safety and pest control, all of which are “staples in the air traffic towers,” he said.
Abundance
A good piece on the new cool fad.
tl;dr If your whole thing is about breaking through impediments, it's a bit fishy if you are incorrectly identifying those impediments.
...paywall, everything is behind the paywall now. There are always ways around them, but you have to find those ways yourselves. Here's a taste:
tl;dr If your whole thing is about breaking through impediments, it's a bit fishy if you are incorrectly identifying those impediments.
...paywall, everything is behind the paywall now. There are always ways around them, but you have to find those ways yourselves. Here's a taste:
The abundance agenda has the virtue of not demanding any significant showdown with capital or corporate power. If all that is standing between here and a progressive utopia is a change in the “political culture” of liberalism, as Klein and Thompson say, we’re in luck. All we have to do is change a couple minds, flip the switch from FRET to BUILD, and let the good times roll.
But the abundance vision is smaller than it purports to be, myopic about power, and flattering to those who have it. It is satisfying — and convenient — to imagine the obstruction is all coming from inside the house, from wokesters and lawyers. The real impediments, however, are simultaneously more banal and more formidable. In the White House, Ramamurti tells me, “the biggest obstacle to fast, decisive, ambitious government action was the Administrative Procedure Act,” which was passed in 1946 at the behest of nervous anti–New Deal businessmen to check the public sector’s wartime economic powers. Time and time again, Ramamurti says, it was fear of lawsuits filed by corporate interests under the APA that thwarted government action.
Mechanical Turks Everywhere
Amazing stuff.
Builder.ai, once touted as a revolutionary AI startup backed by Microsoft, has collapsed into insolvency after revelations that its flagship no-code development platform was powered not by artificial intelligence—but by 700 human engineers in India.
The company marketed its platform as being driven by an AI assistant named “Natasha,” which could supposedly assemble software applications like Lego bricks. But recent reports and commentary have revealed that behind the scenes, customer requests were manually fulfilled by developers, not machines.
Kitchen Table Issues
Is this one coming in strong in the polling?
Schumer tried to kill Obama's deal with Iran, so he's consistent!If TACO Trump is already folding on Iran, the American people need to know about it.
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) June 2, 2025
No side deals. pic.twitter.com/T4gnekrGhT
Fema
This isn't GENIUS HI IQ knowledge that he's lacking, this is basic living-in-society stuff.
WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) - Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season, according to four sources familiar with the situation.I usually don't point to people's university credentials, but...
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