"…Enemies foreign and domestic."

It wasn’t (maybe still isn’t?) a strictly proportional representation system, so the urban areas get slightly fewer members per vote. More equal than the Electoral College, but still imbalanced in favor of the rural areas where wealthy people have huge estates that have been handed down for generations.

Whatever the most recent one at the moment is.

But seriously, my wife and I watched all of the Marvel movies in release order from Iron Man through Infinity War. I watched a sone of Endgame and turned it off after a bit. Sounds like we made the right choice.

We also stopped Game of Thrones after season 7 episode 4, which appears to be the ideal place to stop to maintain good memories of the show.

Churchill lost re-election because he made a really tone-deaf radio address on Labour’s plans for socialized medicine, national insurance, and nationalisation of utilities and critical industries (all of which the overwhelming majority of the country wanted), basically calling them communism, said it would require a “gestapo” to implement, and he wouldn’t stand for it.

Clement Atlee more or less thanked him for that speech the next day, and assumed the Prime Minister role after the Tories were absolutely trounced in the 1945 election.

Atlee lasted 6 years. Labour ran the show with a huge majority for a full five year term, then got an unworkably small majority of 5 seats in 1950. Snap election was called in 1951, and Conservatives retook the majority, despite Labour getting 48.8% of the vote, and Conservatives only getting 48.0%.

…Funny how that keeps happening.

Churchill resumed the role of Prime Minister until he retired in 1955.

Podcast, or some insane Art Bell interview from 30 years ago.

I just don’t want to see ads.

Make the passing grade for a driving test 20% higher than it currently is, and make everyone take a driving test every five years. You get one re-test if you fail.

And once you hit 70, driving tests every year.

Anyone who fails under the new regulations would have been causing a lot of problems on the roads.

I’m of two minds about people not adblocking.

On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they’re generating) largely because they’ve been passively trained to “tune out” ads. Also consumerism.

On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we’d definitely live in a world of WEI… and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don’t have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.

70 or older in my family. My dad’s wife just posted an excited post on Facebook about a Tesla Concorde taking off, and do had to explain to her that it’s a flight simulator. She’s 73.

I think old people are the ones less likely to understand this stuff.

In the US, there will always be a critical mass of voters ready to end the careers of anyone who tries to do any of the above.

I’d add that buses for the most part don’t help, and we should revive the trolly systems that Goodyear intentionally put out of business, and furthermore build out mega railway projects to take long haul trucks off the road.

Railways need to be nationalized, and we need to make it easier to live rurally without the need for multiple cars and lots of gas consumption.

And we need to start building a bunch of new nuke plants like 30 years ago.

None of that will start to happen until it is way beyond too late though. And even if the US got onboard with the program, there will always be 40% of the planet who won’t. So fuck it, enjoy nature while it lasts. We’ll turn the sky white to geoengineer away some of the solar radiation, but the line will continue to go down from here.

While we’re at it, how about cybernetics, too?

Therapy (with an MFT or PhD therapist) and a gym membership can do amazing things for you at 21.

No single person will have all the answers. You may find a Yoda to help with your career, but they probably won’t have the life answers you’re interested in. That’s what your 20s are about: figuring yourself out and putting yourself together.

My 20s were about figuring myself out. My 30s were about figuring the system (economy, etc) out. Now I’m in my 40s, I understand the system, and don’t like it.

I think there are examples of it working, and examples of it not. Singapore’s system works as intended, but here’s a list of yearly salaries for high-paid heads of state >$500,000 USD (sources from Wikipedia). Draw your own conclusions.

• Cameroon President: $620,000
• Denmark Queen: $11,000,000
• Hong Kong Chief Executive: $568,000
• Japan Emperor: $3,000,000
• Jordan King: $848,000
• Kuwait Emir: $165,000,000
• Luxembourg Grand Duke: $12,000,000
• Norway King: $33,000,000
• Oman Sultan: $7,000,000 (could be a very old number)
• Qatar Emir: $33,000,000
• Saudi Arabia King: $9,600,000,000 ($9.6 billion)
• Singapore President: $1,400,000
• Singapore Prime Minister: $1,600,000
• Switzerland President: $507,000
• Syria President: $576,000
• Tonga King $2,100,000
• United Arab Emirates President: $4,600,000,000 ($4.6 billion)

They pay their government leaders really well, which I think is kind of interesting.

It was the style at the time

If I could live in West Virginia but without West Virginians, I’d probably do that.

Stupidest law I’ve heard of this week.

iPhone or Mac?

They’ve said that it costs them 1.5 cents to answer a search query, so that dollar a month wouldn’t go very far. I probably incidentally run 40-50 searches a day between my devices… $10 is a value that works for me.

I’ve been using Kagi as my default since June, and don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.