Property rights. The almighty sole principle.

There are two issues with human rights.

One is selective enforcement. There are a long list of countries with abysmal human rights records, but it’s too strategically convenient or economically essential to look the other way. Whrn was the last time they made a fuss about Jamal Khashoggi? Human rights only gets invoked when sabre-rattling is useful, not as a solid and consistent moral framework.

The other is that it’s a “luxury product”. Can every country support a modern human-rights model, or does it require a certain level of economic and political stability? It’s hard to maintain rule of law amid active insurgency, or if you can’t even deploy the bureaucratic state. Once you’ve gotten past that threshold, will both leaders and the broader population be eager to switch from the system that got them where they are? You’ve got to convince people that being able to write an anti-government op-ed is more important than security, or the price of eggs. This is a long term soft sell: berating countries for not measuring up to Western standards isn’t going to get them to make that choice any faster.

I figured that when the DOGE fiasco imploded, he would scream "treason’ and make Musk the fall guy to placate people. Wouldn’t roll back anything but a few symbolic changes, but it would let him look the hero.

Don’t tell him there’s been women on the $1 coin since 1979, and recently themed seasonal quarter reverses that alternate between illegible and just overly busy.

Do cults inherit well?

The leadership of the DPRK transitioned across generations, but there was plenty of institutional alignment and wheel greasing.

Trump will be trying to negotiate with the reaper for six months after he’s dead. I can’t imagine he considers his mortality, let alone in the context of anything that has to survive after his departure. There will be a free for all to grab his mantle.

It’s the same playbook as foreign sanctions elsewhere.

The Assads, Kims, and Putins of the world can get their people to rally into a “bunker mentality” which helps prop up their regimes as a grand and noble struggle.

Trump has brought the same energy home. And history shows you can milk it for decades or generations even before something essential craxks.

ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.

The big problem is:

• the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel

• the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it

Why not an aerial for Jeopardy? It’s usually on local broadcast, so you could plumb together a DVR setup if you want it within a unified experience.

I hear that again and again, but I don’t quite understand the endgame anymore.

There was the theory Russia had compromising material on him to get him to play along, but the MAGA crowd is so committed and reverent that I’m not sure anything could shame him anymore.

Russia could show a tape of him porking his 7-year-old daughter on the Times Square Jumbotron and the GOP would rally to lower the age of consent to 6. If the Russian financial authorities showed incontrovertible proof that Trump was broke, Congress would declare he had a bazillion FreedomBux ™ to magically settle his debts.

Why would he bother listening when there’s no leverage left?

It’s more chilling to think this is pure domestic terror with no evil-other boogeyman to blame. The far right got all their best and brightest in one place, and thry couldn’t dilute their paranoia and hate enough to serve their greed.

It makes shopping for laptops either super-easy or super-hard.

I can either get a Thinkpad, or try to find the one or two HP and Dell business laptops with one… and we all know how it ends (looks at stack of X230t, E585, and new L13)