4 April 2025
✖︎Urging calm by insisting that big banks, hedge funds, and other major players should take a longer-term view to understand that his tariffs were necessary to increase widespread suffering among the impoverished.
Again, some spot-on satire. The people who have disposable cash are going to eat up stocks and make huge gains when all of this shit is over and done with and sanity eventually (hopefully) prevails.
✖︎Gemini, the most strident of them, will give you a page full of explanations as to why this oversimplified approach could backfire — “while this calculation offers a seemingly straightforward way to target bilateral trade deficits, the real-world economic implications are far more complex and could lead to substantial negative consequences,” it warns, adding that “many economists argue that tariffs are not an effective tool for balancing trade deficits.”
That explains it, this whole government is being run by a hallucinating AI. Cool.
✖︎Donald Trump is a man with a history of bankruptcies doing what he always does: gambling with someone else’s money. Except this time, it’s yours. It’s every worker laid off. Every single parent now facing higher grocery bills. Every business owner watching their supply chain crack in half. Every retiree seeing their 401(k) nosedive.
These “reciprocal” tariffs are really hitting the targets, huh? Feels super well thought out, just like everything else this administration does.
✖︎Donald Trump is a man with a history of bankruptcies doing what he always does: gambling with someone else’s money. Except this time, it’s yours. It’s every worker laid off. Every single parent now facing higher grocery bills. Every business owner watching their supply chain crack in half. Every retiree seeing their 401(k) nosedive.
Am I overdoing it on the links about tariffs? Maybe. But more are coming!
✖︎We are finally free from the shackles of capitalism. I mean, to be clear: it’s still capitalism. We’re just making sure that basically none of you benefit from it anymore. You. Are. Welcome.
It’s satire, but it’s also the truest thing that I’ve read about the tariffs so far.
✖︎The immediate political challenge for Trump is that, regardless of the prospects of his policies boosting U.S. manufacturing over the long term, in the short term they are likely to inflict pain on two major constituents of the G.O.P. coalition: working-class maga voters and Republicans in business.
I wish I could say this was all just some bad joke, but instead, it’s a living nightmare that will continue until a few republicans who know better grow a spine.
✖︎Of course. I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat, or go to the bathroom, and yet I succeeded anyway.
While it didn’t actually get anything done, at least he’s doing something. Him, Bernie, and AOC are apparently the only ones with a pulse.
✖︎Sometimes though, I get overwhelmed by all the new projects I want to start, and I end up procrastinating and not doing any of them.
This is exactly what I’ve been feeling lately, especially since being laid off. I’ve been trying to focus on foofaraw, plus it’s print zines and the forthcoming Anthology, links here on TIV along with doing LLoN, daily Grubs, plus all the reading and watching I want to do… and then I end up doing nothing.
31 March 2025
✖︎Such a fun web experience of listening through the history of samples.
✖︎If you’re genuinely concerned about free speech, this should be setting off alarm bells regardless of your position on Israel-Palestine. The government is literally snatching people off the streets for expressing political opinions and shipping them 1,400 miles away from their homes, lawyers, and support systems.
Between the lack of due process and the targeting of political speech without crimes being committed, or even charged, ever American should be angry right now.
✖︎The creation of the bowling pin bat (also known as the torpedo bat) optimizes the most important tool in baseball by redistributing weight from the end of the bat toward the area 6 to 7 inches below its tip, where major league players typically strike the ball. Doing so takes an apparatus that for generations has looked the same and gives it a fun-house-mirror makeover, with the fat part of the bat more toward the handle and the end tapering toward a smaller diameter, like a bowling pin.
It might end up being too late for baseball, but I continue to be amazed at the innovation and chances they are willing to take to make the game more enjoyable. It’s a lesson other sports need to learn from sooner than later.
And more from Defector
✖︎Maya is the best so it was no surprise that her P&B interview is one of my favorites to run so far.
✖︎The controversy over Lamar’s performance highlights the hypocrisy around the DEI backlash; experts say the term has come to serve as a modern-day slur wielded against people of color, while at the same time, the people offended by it see themselves as being victims of a lack of diversity.
What a joke.
28 March 2025
✖︎Elon Musk said on Friday that he had sold X, his social media company, to xAI, the artificial intelligence start-up he founded in 2023, in an unusual arrangement that may raise conflict-of-interest questions.
This has sketchy financial maneuvering vibes written all over it.
✖︎“I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and am a United States citizen,” Noriega said in his statement, adding that on Jan. 31, after buying pizza in Berwyn he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. Officers took away his wallet, which had his ID and Social Security card. “They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.”
This shit is going to keep happening until Trump followers and Republicans in office say something and I don’t imagine that will actually happen anytime soon and it’s scary as hell.
✖︎“I know he’s going to be happy as hell when he hears me talking about him,” James said, to McAfee, about Smith. “He’s going to get home and grab some ice cream out of the fucking freezer and sit in his chair in his tighty-whities on the couch.” Rich imagery, and yes, Smith REACTED to the news Thursday morning with HARD TRUTHS. The substance of those truths is inherently uninteresting, though I find the form fascinating; Smith’s FIRING BACK exists alongside the ESPN NBA desk tsk-tsking James for his Windhorst comments.
LeBron James did something I thought was impossible. He got me to agree with Stephen A. Smith, because Smith is right and James is just a big baby who gets mad when people don’t cower to him and things don’t go exactly the way he wants.
✖︎How great is this?!?!
✖︎Just some more fun signal chat stuff.
✖︎Despite the lawsuits, outrage, and general resistance from artists, generative AI is already working its way into the workflows of many creative fields, including anime.
As fun as it is to generate these images of ourselves in all different styles, I wholeheartedly think these AI companies need to be stopped and sued for billions of dollars in copyright infringement.
✖︎This is an administration that actively, proudly rejects expertise. It casts those who have it as the corrupt old guard, the real enemy, the “deep state,” and it touts its own refusal to heed them as proof of its legitimacy and righteousness. By that view, the security establishment must be bent to the White House’s will, and if the people at the top don’t have the traditional qualifications for their positions, all the better.
I’m honestly running out of things to say about this shit…
✖︎So he’s drawing innocent people into the crossfire as he alleges all of ICE’s targets are rapists and terrorists—unsubstantiated claims that none of the detainees can defend because they won’t get a day in court.
We are so far beyond ridiculous clown behavior at this point…
✖︎Really loved the first two episodes of The Studio. While we were watching the first episode, I said to myself, this feels like they were directly inspired by Birdman with the way the camera moved and the music. Sure enough, the music is done by the same guy, drummer Antonio Sánchez, and the “oner” is not only pivotal in the second episode, but the entire show.
✖︎Really wish this were an area the world wouldn’t follow our lead… the whole world is about to crumble.
27 March 2025
✖︎I am so excited for the new PT Anderson (and Wes, which should also be dropping a trailer this week) that I’m breaking my rule and posting this here instead of saving for RoL. Test screenings had pretty polarizing and negative leaning reviews, but I don’t care; it looks incredible.
✖︎Sure, cities are leveled, families torn apart, but have you seen what Lockheed Martin’s doing with drone optimization? It’s incredible.
A third, new site from Joan Westenberg as they continue to absolutely kill it. The Index is already a go-to for contextualizing the news, and now Slobstack will fit nicely next to The Onion and McSweeney’s in doing it through satire.
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