Good point. I should have qualified what I said by saying that the Israeli operation may have the effects I listed. But, as you say, it might backfire and have the opposite of the intended effect. I guess that is always a risk with these types of operations.

This is the conclusion I’ve come to as well. I used to be frustrated at how stupid Trump supporters are. I would wonder how anyone could be so gullible, cynical, racist, or mysogynist as to vote for Trump. How does he get away with, even prosper, saying such crazy and harmful things? But I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump voters are just extremely unhappy. A vote for Trump is a big fuck-you to the establishment. Both parties were basically run by a modern day aristocracy. The Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes are the most obvious dynasties, but they also have many, many surrogates. More importantly, they defined a kind of cursus honorum for becoming president, including all of the right schools, fraternities, clubs, contacts, donors, etc that you have to follow to move up through the various offices to get to the top. The Tea Party disrupted the Republican aristocracy, but then Trump came along and just obliterated it.

Now, on the one hand, we can probably all get behind the idea that breaking up the aristocratic hold on political parties is a good thing. However, history has also shown that supporting populist demagogues who specialize in chaos and hateful rhetoric often leads to a bad time for the country and the people.

These last five years are the first time in my life that I’m genuinely worried for the stability of the republic. It has been said many times by people who have lived through it that people never think civil war will actually happen until it does. And then they look back and the signs were obvious. Whoever actually wins, when half of the population is voting for a hateful chaos candidate, that’s a big red flag.

It wasn’t “stupid”. As a psy-op, it further complicates Hezbollah’s communications, sows fear among Hezbollah members, demonstrates Israel’s far-reaching capabilities, makes civilians suspicious of Hezbollah officials, etc. If Israel does something similar a couple more times, Hezbollah will have to resort to bicycle couriers and smoke signals.

It also undermines Hezbollah’s credibility. The Lebanese people are not stupid. They know that Hezbollah is a shadow government allowing Iran to control Lebanon and use it as a staging ground for attacks on Israel. That leaves Lebanon in a permanent state of semi-war with Israel, not to mention its involvement in multiple other external conflicts. None of which is helpful for the health and prosperity of Lebanon.

Lebanon is a natural trading nation and always has been. It is a beautiful country full of kind people with excellent commercial instincts. They are held down as a nation by the fact that Hezbollah has turned the country into a pawn of the Ayatollah.

My guess is that assassination isn’t as easy as it is made out to be in the movies. The CIA, the best funded intelligence agency in the world, tried to take out Castro hundreds of times and failed. They couldn’t find Osama for a decade, either, and even then the US used Seals, not the CIA. Sure, killing some rando is probably easy, but not a government leader who is actively avoiding assassination, as I’m sure Hamas leaders are doing.

It isn’t such a simple question and I don’t remember all of Scaramucci’s points, which is why I gave the reference. Also, given how long OP’s post was, I figure they probably do want the longer explanation in the podcast. But since you ask (even though you claim its not important to you), here’s what I recall:

1. Many people, especially uneducated people, can’t tell the difference between entertainment and politics. To them, Trump is entertaining, so that’s who they like. When Trump says crazy shit, as detailed by OP, it isn’t a negative. They love it because it is entertaining.
2. Many voters don’t understand economics and the business cycle. They assume that the current state of the economy/inflation/affordability is the direct result of whatever the current president is doing. So, if affordability is bad right now, it is Biden/Harris’s fault. If affordability was better when Trump was president, they want him back. I think The Mooch called it “economic nostalgia”.
3. Racism and misogyny plays a role.
4. There is a large segment of the population, not just in the US but around the world, that believes in the “strong man” style of leadership. A big, loud and proud alpha male type who never surrenders is comforting to many people. This is lizard-brain stuff that goes way back to caveman days.
5. Straight white males have been either ignored or actively disparaged by many on the left. Things like DEI may be justifiable on a group level, but proponents sometimes forget that people are not just members of a group, they are individuals. As individuals, they may not feel the privilege that they supposedly have. So, as much as a straight white male may support the goals of DEI or “wokeness” or whatever you want to call it, they don’t want to be discriminated against as individuals, anymore than women or minorities do. This is why support for Trump is much higher among white men than women and minorities.

That’s all I can remember right now.

It’s not an advertisement, dumbass. I found the last two episodes of that podcast pretty much exactly answered the question that OP posed.

If you really want to know why Trump is still competitive, listen to Anthony Scaramucci, a.k.a. The Mooch. He worked for Trump for a couple of weeks before being fired by him. The Mooch is a long-time conservative investor-type who knows Trump well and can’t stand him, so he has been helping the Democrats. Thr Mooch really understands Trump and his followers. I’m pretty sure he helped with Harris’s debate prep, especially helping her understand how to get under Trump’s skin.

He hosts a great podcast along with Katty Kay called The Rest Is Politics US (as opposed to the parent program The Rest Is Politics UK). https://tripus.supportingcast.fm

In particular, check out the last two post-debate episodes:

#27 Trump vs. Harris: What You Didn’t See

#28 Why Kamala Harris Still Has a Problem

That is a good analogy. I think phones and tablets being app-centric has really handicapped Zoomers in some ways. As Gen X, the first thing we learned about computers was the file system. That gave us a map of the computer. It also made it clear that the operating system, the applications running on the operating, and the data you generated and stored on the operating system were all different things. With app-centric devices and cloud-storage, people aren’t exposed to that paradigm so much.

The new paradigm is more account-centric. You have a Microsoft account or a Google account or an Apple account and that’s the ecosystem you work within.

I had a girl drop out of my University class because she couldn’t figure out what a “file” was or how to “email” it to me. She just kept trying to share her Apple storage with me. Really sad. It’s hard to help someone who gets to university without even grasping the basic nature of a file system.

Oprah? Did AI get so advanced that it invented a time machine and sent us back to the 1980s? Next you’ll be telling me that Phil Donahue is back.

I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the conflict. The war is between Iran and Israel. Gaza is just one tiny battlefield in the larger war. Iran and its proxies don’t want to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Cui bono? Iran and its proxies, that’s who. Kamala Harris knows this. She isn’t stupid and she is well-advised by experts. You and your fellow protesters aren’t helping at all, you are just making her job of defeating Trump harder. Wake up, my friend.

Hezbollah and Hamas are Iranian proxies that have wrecked Lebanon and Gaza respectively. Hamas’s murderous attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 was all about creating chaos, provoking Israel, and undermining the Abraham Accords. It wasn’t about solving the problems of the Palestinian people, it was done to further Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” goals. In that sense, Hamas’s October 7 operation was very similar in nature and purpose to Bin Laden’s 9/11 plan, and Israel is responding much the same as the US did back in the early 2000s against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Iran and Hamas started the current clash with the purpose of provoking Israel into a drastic response in Gaza. Gazan civilians are caught in the middle, but if you think it’s Israel’s fault, you are falling exactly in line with what Iran and their proxies intended.

The Russians, for all their faults, have a well-developed sense of realpolitik, and they have a term for people like you and your fellow protesters: useful idiots. I prefer the term “naive but well-intentioned”, but there is quite a lot of overlap in this case. That “naive but well-intentioned” outlook is fine, even laudable, most of the time, but it is quite unhelpful at this moment when the competition between Harris and Trump is so close.

Interesting. I’ve got a fast internet connection and a server running 24/7 with Transmission and 9 TB of hard drive space. I run it behind Gluetun/NordVPN to avoid those copyright strikes. My setup has been extremely successful so far. I only delete torrents once they hit a ratio of 1.5 at the moment, though I could extend that if necessary. I don’t use cryptocurrency, though, and don’t intend to start. I assume my setup would be somewhat valuable to a private tracker. Do you have any recommendations?

I thought I read that private trackers are hard to sign up to. Or that you have to prove yourself somehow and people get stressed about maintaining their ratio. Is that true? If so, that doesn’t sound fun.

I don’t live in America either, but I went on a cruise once and there were many Americans, including a black American couple who were very obviously urban. By which I mean, the wife wore high heels and a tight jeweled mini-skirt on a sea-kayaking excursion…clearly signalling that she hadn’t spent much time outside of a city.

Anyway, I was shocked when they spoke exactly like The Jeffersons, with all the exaggerated whooping, non-stop vernacular, and stage-like mannerisms. It was so over-the-top that I honestly thought they were play acting, but after chatting with them for a while I realized that was just how they were. They were very nice people and clearly having a great time.

Yes, the article makes the point that Signal needs to compete for talent with the rest of Silicon Valley. I get that. And we’ve all heard about the nearly unfathomable amounts of money that tech companies throw around. When you break it down to individual salaries, though, and see that even normal people in normal jobs are making a million dollars a year between salary and stock… well, I think it really exposes the spectacular wealth inequality that we have allowed to fester. I mean, sure, shelter costs may be high in Silicon Valley, but the cost of other goods remain about the same. A $50,000 truck that an average person in Nebraska might have to save for years to afford is barely a rounding error for folks making a million a year. I’m no economist, but it does seem like there are consequences for this kind of ever-growing wealth inequality.

It is also absurd on its face for a multi-millionaire developer to place a “Donate Now” button in an app and talk about being a non-profit to tug at the heart strings of people who make one-tenth of what the developers are making. It’s feels like Scrooge asking Tiny Tim for a donation.

Anyway, I don’t blame the developers for this absurd situation, and I do appreciate Signal, and Meredith is clearly a cool person who is fighting the good fight against big tech surveillance. But every once in a while an article like this reminds me how deeply fucked up the world is. It seems we are approaching pre-French Revolution levels of economic disparity, and maybe it helps explain why so many working class people are pissed off.

This is a very rude question, but on this subject of being lean, I looked up your 990 and you pay yourself less than some of your engineers.

Yes, and our goal is to pay people as close to Silicon Valley’s salaries as possible, so we can recruit very senior people, knowing that we don’t have equity to offer them. We pay engineers very well. [Leans in performatively toward the phone recording the interview.] If anyone’s looking for a job, we pay very, very well.

So, I googled their tax filing out of curiosity. It’s true that Meredith pays herself much less than her engineers, which is great. What I was rather shocked to see is that they pay their software developers enormous salaries. They’re listing developers making over $400,000 per year, with their VP making over $660,000 per year. Now, I’m all for the value-creators making more money than the CEO. I just had no idea that software developers make that kind of coin. I was thinking of donating to Signal, but I’m kind of weirded out by those astronomical salaries.

I’ve got a 2015 T540p with integrated graphics. It’s fine for low-spec gaming. I only run Linux-native games and haven’t managed to get any Windows games running in compatibility mode yet. Here are the games that have “just worked” for me so far.

Dwarf Fortress

Cataclysm: Dark Day Ahead

Darkest Dungeon

Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2

Caves of Qud

Unity of Command

Stardew Valley

Planescape: Torment

Shovel Knight

If that’s the kind of retro gaming that floats your boat, an old Thinkpad is just fine.

I’ve had this game on my wishlist for years. Maybe time to take another look.

Hold up there, cowboy. Hawaiian pizza is Canadian cuisine, not American.

Years ago, I was hanging out with a manager of finance and asking a few basic questions about finance. After a little while, i guess she got tired of the conversation because she handed me her old finance textbook.

Anyway, I was mostly interested in the foundational ideas of finance, not the details, so I went away and started reading the introduction. It turns out that the introduction was very short, no more than two pages. It was extremely well-written, simple, and to the point.

The foundational idea of modern finance, according to this standard textbook, is very simple and highly reductionist: the one and only goal of finance is to maximize shareholder value, and share prices are the ultimate way that goal is measured. I’ve never seen a whole discipline reduced to such stark and prosaic terms with absolutely no attempt to articulate ethics or justify it in relation to some wider public good.