Hi gang hope everyone had a good week and, if applicable, are ready for the long weekend!
We could all use a break from this…
Homeland Security revokes Harvard’s ability to enroll international students
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/05/22/trump-harvard-international-students-enrollment-revoked
…and this…
Trump administration seeks to end basic rights and protections for child immigrants in its custody
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/22/trump-children-flores-settlement-agreement
…etc.
Here’s what’s in the GOP megabill that’s just passed the House
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/21/nx-s1-5406392/trump-republicans-tax-bill-reconciliation-medicaid
I’ll leave you with this adorableness:
Kermit urges U-Md. graduates to dream big: ‘Keep believing, keep pretending’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/05/22/kermit-the-frog-university-maryland-commencement
Have a good day!
Make room for more Pete Kegsbreaths and Jared Kushners at Hahvahd because those guys deserve ALL the advantages in life.
1. White
2. Connected (Petey boy’s mommy opened a lot of doors like Jared’s convict daddy)
3. Rich (in the case of Kush)
Fuck the brilliant foreign students (and the undeserving kids of 3rd world dictators and billionaires -often the same thing, right?)
…forget where I saw it but there was a lady yesterday who just asked if everybody saw them go from “Harvard discriminates against students from asia” to “Harvard is in bed with China” without really anything to bridge the two…but it’s stacking yet more on the pile of “the law & the courts say nah, bro” stuff they continue to do in hopes that the law will get embarassed looking like an unenforceable ass & give up & let them do whatever they want
…& I have no shortage of reasons I could yell about the whys & wherefores of the shit I don’t think they should be getting away with where education is concerned…but I could be in danger of feeling like it could be that the thing about the cumulative effect of the throwing bullshit at settled law until you can dobbs your roe down the line might deserve to be head of the line for setting a precedent or two about?
…like…there are some sound legal rationales for how in order to resolve a specific case involving specific charges & thus particular elements of the law some things are or aren’t pertinent in an evidentiary sense…but at some point the corroborative evidence of a wider contextual lens really ought to enter into the thing…functionally the US administration seems to have more in common with a slam dunk RICO case than a serious attempt at governance…& maybe it ought to be illegal to declare there isn’t a law against that?
Yeah, I’m really trying to train myself not to go cross-eyed when someone tells me two pieces of right-wing agitprop that on their faces are completely contradictory … but it’s hard.
Won’t protect kids… because they’re not white (mostly). Disgusting.
I seem to remember MAGAts/Qterds were screaming how the “Deep state” and Dems were having satanic rituals with kids in the basement of pizza shops which had no basement.
Yet hardly a peep now that the “Deep State” is Trump.
I seem to not detect any outrage from that quarter… is it because the biggest Qterds loved the kids TOO much and in disgusting ways?
Love how the MSM treated QAnon as if it were actually serious till it served its purpose.
…I don’t know what specifically happened to the Qanon fringe…but what I can’t help but suspect is they just shaded their way into a different echo chamber that provides them with much the same crutch?
…they’re so deep in nested “real” governments at this point the only thing they think they’re sure about is that they take their lead from the orange clown in the centre ring of the circus…I mean…how did it go…he was really president when he wasn’t but they pretended he wasn’t to bring down biden & the demon lizard people in the deep state that’s all democrats despite those not having been part of their state’s representation since the parties swapped platforms way back when…who elon’s firing so ICE can ship them to a gitmo in the hollow earth…to…uhhh…give the pride of the white race a numerical advantage when preschool members of the next generation fight ender’s war for the right to carry an assault rifle to the counter when ordering fast food
…that sound about right?
…sigh…I don’t wake up & choose violence, you know…I lean pretty hard in the non-violent direction, even…but…some days…if I’m honest…I seriously question the social mores that make it unacceptable that saying & doing certain things might reasonably be expected to result in someone slapping you for being a thing society needs to correct?
…if you work in an industry in which exploit is both a verb & a noun…in what universe are you trying to give a thing that gets jailbroken for shits & giggles faster than the DRM on AAA video games access to a command line with sudo/root privileges*?
…the slap should have been hard enough that I could hear it from here
…& nigel farage should have been punch drunk before brexit got to a referendum
…no? …just me, then? …oh, well…since we live in a democracy & all I guess I better not slap any fools today
…I’m not at all sure this being-a-grownup shit is turning out as advertised, you know…we might have a case under the trades descriptions act…maybe that’s the responsible way to pursue this…pitch a fit & demand a refund like a power-user of the consumer paradigm?
[*- ETA …in case your eyes glaze over when they see terms like sudo instead of playing a mental .gif of generic-movie-hacker-scene…the first two things that talks about the “command-line tools” enabling are broadly equivalent to borrowing your email or equivalent comms connection…locking you out of stuff requires esclating the system’s privileges beyond the user’s…the way the IT department can stop employees installing signal on supposedly secure policy-compliant devices, say…because admin > user…”root” is the top of that heap in the nomenclature for…wanna say most operating systems/platforms…sudo…at a command line…is exercising the option to use an account that has lesser privileges to execute something that needs higher privileges…like “run as administrator” in windows…bolting a toolkit like that into your highly-exploitable-from-a-text-input “natural language” interface for the thing that literally isn’t capable of knowing better…is some serious fodder for a darwinian theory about birthing the seeds of suicide at a species/evolution level…that we as a species have “specialized” to the point where a full birth/growth cycle went into producing someone who would one day be paid pretty decent money to be that fucking dumb in niche so abstract you’d struggle to explain it to your grandpa’s grandpa…might mean we’re some sort of evolutionary cul de sac approaching the dead end…& we’ve been getting terminator wrong all this time…arewethebaddies.gif?
I think our society is structured to spend a lot of time trying to redirect the radicalization of the under classes but never really considered what might happen if the upper classes went completely insane instead. It’s cool, I guess we’ll just see how it plays out?
…ummed & ahhed about it a bit…but in the end I thought maybe enough people wouldn’t click through that there was a decent case for appending the second half of the bluesky thing as a sort of dual-purpose reply to that remark?
Also: IT DOESN’T FUCKING THINK YOU DUMB SHIT-ASS MOTHERFUCKER.
“It’ll call the police on itself if it think you’re doing something wrong … oh well unless someone who wrote its code tells it not to do that, of course, but we would never!”
These people really think they’re God and have created new life. It’s insanity.
I’m sure he wouldn’t do that. lol of course he would.
Related.
…remember when the guy with all the gold was all “I pity da fool” & looked like he’d slap the orange off that ass?
…nostalgia’s weird…but…have we tried calling the A-team…because this can’t be the best we can do so presumably they’re warming a bench somewhere with a plan that requires a lunatic…& possibly a DIY cabbage mortar of some sort?
Doesn’t matter. Just business as usual and you can bet your ass there will be ZERO major news coverage of this or the other thing above. Because Republicans essentially get to do whatever they want, or else they shriek “LIBRUL MEDIA BIAS” and the major outlets will cower in the corner.
…ok…so…in the interests of me not mulling it over for the next couple of days while I try to do mostly other stuff & then there being a cascade of stuff about it nobody wants dumped in their lap on a sunday morning…I have a less facetious/frivolous response to this one
…I know one or two people who are old enough that they were working “in the markets” back when mungo jerry vyed with the jackson 5 for the #1 on the charts…which was when people started playing about with automating trades via application of algorithms
…none of them are the specific person that wrote this
The Rise of Computerized High Frequency Trading: Use and Controversy [scholarship.law.duke.edu]
…but by…the early 20-somethings…back in the hazy mists of time when the idea of the twice-cursed electoral whimsy of the US would have made folks laugh like they did when obama took the piss at the corresspondents’ dinner…something upwards of 90% of “forex” trades were high-speed bots like the ones scalpers use to snipe tickets for gigs or crypto-miners snag graphics chips or whatever…but legal…& vastly better funded
…you don’t have to have a bot that’s a super-human savant making better trades than warren buffet to engineer vast amounts of profit out of AI-fueled trading…you just need a fast enough one that you can feed enough capital into for it to take a rake as its movement of that capital’s gravity through the market makes ripples…or splashes if you really throw it about
…& with the degree to which concerted efforts to use the IT route to compromise significant brands the way the likes of M&S in the UK has been lately…or the solarwinds thing from a while back…or the one that fucked up the airlines…or spain losing the grid for a day or two…or…there’s more of these than I have the appetite for, really
…I dunno…we did a pretty shitty job in some ways of figuring out how to make what seemed like best use of our physical environment…&…well…everything’s faster if you do it with a computer & all
…but I guess I wonder how much it might bite us in the ass how people who still think it makes sense to argue against moving away from anything you could describe as sustainable due to a complete lack of knowledge of the physical world they exist in know…even less…about how the “digital world” operates in analogous senses
…I saw a rough rule of thumb estimate somewhere that running the same query through an LLM as a search engine is approximately an order of magitude more resource-intensive for a parity-to-worse result in terms of the information provided from an accuracy rather than convenience perspective…for those that fuck with terms like lag & ping & latency the search engines are also better optimized in a few senses but raw electricity/water type inputs-wise the 10x thing is about the size of it
…we already had a google I/O where they pretty explicitly said “you get AI with that” for their whole ecosystem from operating systems to browsers to search engines & smart speakers & networked IoT stuff…on the heels of stuff coming out that showed they had results to show they had a steady vice-grip on a market that would eat the core product of search results getting worse & keep printing money
…& the fiscal policies of the current pretense of an administration in the US are a waking nightmare…oh, what fresh hell is this has become the accident of hourly proof…& it really does look a whole lot like we aren’t ready for how wrong how many things could go if all the invisible hands keep tipping over dominoes until something dramatically cascades
…I’ve dealt with way too many people at well-paid elevations in organisations to which tech is integral to the point of being unable to do business without it who actively don’t want to be expected to even try to understand it in broad over-simplified ways because they consider even knowing that stuff to indicate a sort of person they believe themselves to be above in much the same way their respective paygrades do/still-would starkly exemplify if they had anything to do with it for that whole picture not to frankly terrify me
…but…I have also read copious amounts of dystopian sci fi…some of which was…of dubious quality…so…maybe it’s just that…it’s probably that…I’m sure it’s fine…it’s all fine…everything’s fine…excuse me while I put the kettle on…maybe I’ll feel better if I have a sit down & a cup of…oh…I have a coffee already…& I am sitting down
…hmmm
…can I maybe get back to you after I’ve managed to stop thinking about this?
50% on europe huh?
guess we are breaking up with america a little earlier than expected…
course hell probably just wishy washy back to nothing once hes told people to buy now
…that “business genius” means “will attempt to shakedown the global economy like “the market” is early mob-era vegas & the US is the only game in town”…doesn’t result in him getting dumped in a hole in the desert before we’re halfway to the credits…goes against everything that genre has dictated?
…or it’s like once upon a time in america & you’ve misjudged how the subjective experience lines up with the actual runtime
…in which case this is all going to go on longer than you think seems plausible but in the end james woods will wind up getting chewed into landfill by a garbage truck to let us know we’re almost to the finish line?
[…apologies for spoiler to vintage gangster movie where applicable?]
Like big sorry to all the women of the world but can’t we just find them some baby mommas so they can get their “I have created life!!!!!1!!” out of their system?
No.