It takes a truly bureaucratic mind—someone with a sensibility for relentless, daily tedium—to dismantle bureaucracy.

Democracy, by contrast, is far easier to unravel than state bureaucracy. Bureaucratic systems often outlast governments, as seen with the colonial administrations in Africa and South Asia. Bureaucracy is designed to be “portable” across different regimes and transfers of power.

Elon is likely facing a long and tiresome road ahead—one he’ll almost certainly abandon in some spectacularly embarrassing fashion within two months. Bureaucracy endures because it’s so deeply embedded in the everyday, utterly quotidian and entwined with, like, everything.

Agreed. A more granular map would be interesting to see. I mean, something like 65% of NY state’s population live in the NYC metro, which is a tiny part of a deceptively large state.

Re: Colorado, it’s just a relatively healthy state with a general ethos of living well. I think you’re seeing some of the urban effect through the Denver, Colorado Springs, etc. and the addition of rural areas of Colorado still having an outdoorsy culture, as well as (often) affluent rather than “rural poor.” Colorado has one of the lowest rural poverty rates in the United States.

And since Colorado would be in the 25-29.9 category now, it’s comparable to many states that also have comparable rural poverty rates. The fact that the states with the highest rural poverty also have the highest weights makes me assume obesity rates and poverty rates heavily overlap.

Edit: to the point, look at the county map for childhood obesity. You can literally point out almost every major city in the United States.

Lol it did a pretty good job. I was hoping someone would finish it.

So three North Americans walk into a bar at the top of the mountain.

The first guy walks up to the bartender and says, "

Is it possible they’re expressing admiration or paying you a compliment and not trying to invoke your smirking condescension?

Incidentally, according to the most recent CDC numbers, Colorado is no longer “green” on this map, just Hawaii and DC.

There’s only eight states under 30%. West Virgina tops the numbers at 41%.

~75% of the United States is classified as overweight or obese, which is staggering. It has to be pretty unevenly distributed even within states, because I live in a college town in a low-middle-weight state, and very few appear obese, and I’m regularly in a nearby major metro, and I don’t see a ton of obese people there either. Rural children are 10-15 times more likely to obese, so I’m guessing that is probably a major factor as well.

25-35% obesity rates covers like 80% of states, so the US is just fat and getting fatter.

If you’re alive you’re connected to all things and everything indirectly. Also if you’re dead.

This person posted this earlier today then deleted it when people started pointing out how gross it is. It’s all they’ve posted about.

Indulging this person’s fetish that they’re facilitating by using an LLM isn’t a great idea. You’re enabling someone who is probably in mental distress, and you’re spending way more time on it than they are. He’s just throwing responses into an LLM and copying the response over, and he’s indulging in the attention. This account is literally only this post and comments.

It’s creepy to think of some low-effort sweat slobbering over the attention from those willing to indulge his AI-constructed fanfic. Gross.

Trump’s support among women increased in 2024 compared to 2020, despite the common narrative about this. 7% more women voted for him, and this increase wasn’t just among white women. In fact, for the first time since 2016, Trump actually lost support from white women.

The biggest shifts came from Latinas: 20% more voted for Trump than in 2020, continuing a steady rise in Latina support since 2016. He also gained 5% more support from Asian women. Beyond women, Trump made gains with voters under 30 and most men, but his biggest wins were with Latine voters and the youth vote overall.

It’s a weird dynamic: an anti-woman political platform seems to increase support from women. Sure, there are probably other big issues at play, but the data suggests targeting women in a platform mainly turns off people with higher education levels—without pushing away women themselves.

I understand what you’re saying. I’m just saying it’s relevant because the article and underlying research article are ultimately about increased volcanic activity at the site of a supervolcano. The purpose of their research was to establish what was underlying volcanic activity that might indicate an eruption from other cause of emissions.

Also, noting how destructive supervolcanoes would hypothetically be is relevant just because it’s crazy.

It’s talking about how those small-scale emissions indicate higher risk of super-volcanic eruption, which is the part of the topic of the third section of the article and is the implicit concern throughout the article.

In fact, the entire point of the article is to discuss how analyzing these emissions can be used to determine if it’s simply the “dissolution of calcite in the surrounding rocks” or if it is “traced back to underground magma,” allowing geologists to determine if volcanic activity and eruption risk is increasing. This data was used to raise the “warning level” of the area from green to yellow.

Yeah, it would mostly be the sulfur and volcanic winter. And the famine.

The article is talking about supervolcanoes, and you’re talking about regular volcanic eruptions. I’m clarifying the difference in magnitude.

Just a single dollar bill, and everyone gets it for one day and can only spend it on another influencer. Reminds me of those dudes in college that are convinced it is ok that they are failing, because eventually people are going to pay millions to watch a stream of them playing video games in their filthy rooms. 🤣

Or maybe Z knows something about inflation that everyone else doesn’t lol

That might be minimum wage in two decades who knows

Gen Z’s financial ambitions, and the dissonance between their dreams and reality, honestly highlight a troubling cultural shift that I’m sure, if we’re honest, we all recognize. This poll, while maybe not bulletproof in methodology, lines up with other findings from Credit Karma, other Morning Consult surveys, and academic sources like PLOS and Collabra: Psychology. The term “money dysphoria,” used by financial therapists, gets to the heart of the issue, which is a mismatch between the paychecks, fame, and wealth many envision and the actual economic terrain we’re navigating. The fact that more than half of Gen Z reportedly wants to be influencers points to a broader trend where social media distorts not only career goals but also broader ideas about value and success.

Researchers see Gen Z as unique—sometimes in ways worth celebrating, but more often in ways that are troubling. Every generation wrestles with the pressures of its time, but Gen Z is the only generation that spent critical childhood-development years under a spotlight powered by social algorithms, constantly fed by curated images and endless comparisons. It seems obvious this environment is going to shape approaches to work, wealth, and purpose, often in ways that are kind of adrift from reality. What stands out here isn’t just misplaced optimism; it’s the fallout of growing up in an ecosystem designed to blur the lines between aspiration and delusion.

This isn’t to pin dysfunction entirely on Z; after all, no one chooses the world they inherit. But the extent to which our formative years were shaped by this digital distortion makes the challenges uniquely sharp. Gen Z was effectively raised in a hall of mirrors. That’s going to have an effect. And honestly, when I’m talking with from Gen Z about it, we tend to either completely agree and are pretty worried about it, or some people absolutely deny it and get pretty angry about it.

I think if you’re honest with yourself and are in college, you can kind of look around your classrooms and see who is going to feel which way.

I don’t think you’re accounting for the massive difference in scale when considering a super-volcanic eruption. It would cause global famine and a massive die-off of most species including humans. If Yellowstone went off, for instance, we would be living under volcanic winter for at least a decade. It would release something like 1,000 gigatons of CO2, which would be roughly equivalent to all human caused CO2 since the industrial revolution, and it would do it all at once.

By way of example, the Toba supervolcano was so devastating and caused so much death it literally created a pronounced genetic bottleneck in the history of human genome.

Hmm. An article quoting Pew: “a majority of white women (53 percent) did vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, up from 44 percent in 2020 and 39 percent in 2016 per Pew.”

but I think you’re right, those numbers sound like all women. I’ll edit the post.

Latines now make up 20% of the U.S. population, making them the largest minority group. Among the under-18 demographic, that number climbs to nearly 30%. If current population trends hold, Latines are poised to become the largest ethnic group in the country within about 25 years—that’s just three presidential terms away.

While Latines are a minority ethnicity, they are the largest one and the second-fastest growing, trailing only Asians. Asians, despite having one of the lowest birth rates, experience the highest proportional rate of immigration. Notably, Trump gained 12% of the Asian vote in the most recent election, a trend across these growing demographics that, if sustained, could spell significant gains for Republicans in the future.

However, let’s not overlook the broader electoral picture. Black, Asian, and Latine men and women combined make up about 29% of the voting public in presidential elections, while white women alone account for a staggering 37-38%. For context, Latino men represent just 5-6% of voters. White women are, by far, the largest voting demographic.

Interestingly, Trump increased his share of all women by 7% compared to when he ran against Biden and has increased his support from women each time he’s ran. The devastating thing, I think, is that Trump won 13% more of the 18-29-year-olds, 5% more of 30-44-year-olds, and continues to capture “Boomer Lite,” aka Gen X, a majority of whom he has won each time he’s ran, but he increased his share by 9% this time.

Edit: corrected an earlier data error.

It’s theoretically possible but extremely unlikely for a number of reasons. There’s a difference between bending constitutional intent by flouting democratic norms on the one hand, and outright ignoring what most people consider to be an explicit and core constitutional principle on the other. And, again, I’m not someone that believes Trump is ultimately heading for a lich-king transformation, so basic biology makes it even more unlikely.

… how. Why. What… I don’t even know what questions to ask.

Oh zing!! What a sick burn! Do more!