$8/dozen in Chicago burbs. Costco is cheaper ($7/18), but they’re sold out at least where I am.

Question for you: What’s better than an octopus recipe? Answer for you: 8 recipes for octopus.

Nice nips, cupcake.

“Thank you. My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured, thanks to you.” - Elon Musk

Then he did the seig heil salute. Just in case people are still confused, here’s Hitler’s own words from Mein Kampf on saving civilization.

“All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.” - Hitler

He should just be honest and said “this $1m is a mandatory payment to trump so that he exempts Apple from tariffs, no other reason”, of course, then it’s an obvious quid pro quo.

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

This is my favorite thread of the day. I learned something, and it brought back memories of plugging one of these into my parents '87 Buick LeSabre wagon. Complete with wood grain panels. Yeah, I didn’t date much back then.

Not that easy when it’s a fleet of servers in multiple remote data centers. Lots of IT folks will be spending their weekend sitting in data center cages.

Until said dog poops in the corner halfway through, then you have 12 more hours of entertainment, snuggles, and smells

Meanwhile, me over here with the self-doubt slamming ctrl-z

The 2017 tax bill that the Republicans rammed through had a time bomb in it for software developers. Starting in 2022, companies could no longer expense R&D costs, and instead had to amortize them over 5 years. This has led to massive tax bills in 2023 for companies. I have no doubt that this is another major factor in the recent tech layoffs.

Take an imaginary bootstrapped software business called “Acme Corp.” This company generates $1,000,000 of revenue per year running a SaaS service. It employs five engineers, and pays each $200,000. That is $1,000,000 paid in labor costs. For simplicity, we omit other costs like servers and hosting, even though those costs can also fall under the new R&D rules, and have to be amortized. So, how much taxable profit does this company make?

In 2021, the answer would be zero profit. In 2022, the answer was $900,000 in profits(!!)

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-will-us-companies-hire

Sometimes it’s like wiping a marker

A large part of this is being driven by illegal trafficking operations that recruit desperate families looking to give their families a safer life. Republicans have chosen to demonize both the families as well as the traffickers. It must suck living a life incapable of empathy for others less fortunate.

Anyways, this is actually a pretty good read on it, despite it coming from CNN:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/us/migrant-surge-travel-agencies-smugglers/index.html

Visa, for example, spent $10 in the 12 weeks to October 6, compared to $77,500 during the same period last year, according to Sensor Tower’s data.

I’m no business genius like musk, but I’m gonna take a guess that wouldn’t even pay the bills for the ridiculous X sign he put on the roof and then had to take down.

What does Atwater make?

What do you mean, like, how much money does the company make?

Oh, no, I mean what do we make?

I don’t follow. We make money.

No, I know we make money. I mean, what do we create?

We create wealth.

No, no, I mean, what do we build, what do we design, you know? Because I have some ideas that could really help the company.

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, we don’t build anything.

Yup. Anyone who received this non-public information and then traded based on that information is guilty of insider trading. I would also think that reddit has some liability here, as they shared this information to non-employees.

I think it varies by seniority. We had layoffs, and all of our lead and principal engineers were able to land a new position in 4-6 weeks. But the junior, mid, and even some senior level engineers had a far rougher time. And managers/directors are having a really difficult go of it right now.

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