he left office with a projected budget surplus
It wasn't a projected surplus, it was an actual surplus for his final two years. I suppose you could say it was also a projected surplus, but Bush II and Dick "Reagan Proved Deficits Don't Matter" Cheney took care of that right quick.
Fun TJ Maxx fact: in England the stores are called TK Maxx, apparently because "TJ" means "tug job".
I honestly think it’s going to work
I don't pretend to be able to predict the future, but Trump tried this same thing four years ago and couldn't pull it off - and he was actually still the President at that time. Seems like it would be even more difficult for him to do it this time as an ex-president, especially considering that he's now so old and senile that he can't even paint himself orange properly any more.
I have a few lesbian coworkers who are absolutely rabid trumpers. It's just some of the craziest shit I've encountered in person.
I drive a 2001 which is in that dead zone after cassettes but before aux plugs. I still had to be burning CDs a few years ago but eventually stumbled across an adapter that tricks the car stereo into thinking my phone is a 6-CD changer in the trunk.
Would you think those guys would know to do something about a dude on a roof with a rifle?
My best friend in high school in the '80s had something on his home stereo I've never seen before or since: an 8-track tape recorder. We would make 8-track mix tapes and take them to parties ... which we promptly got kicked out of because they were tapes of stuff like Yes, King Crimson, Laurie Anderson, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, and didn't nobody want to listen to that kind of shit back then.
Nah, prisoners and children will take over all the shitty jobs.
Not exactly the same, but I once attended a work call when I was staying with my Dad after he had a knee replacement. He had decided to "tough it out" and not take painkillers, and during the call he started screaming "kill me! oh god kill me!" because of the pain, quite loud enough to be heard by everyone on the call. My boss said "it's OK, ChickenLady, this call isn't that important. Go ahead and kill your father."
I'm not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like "you're a school bus driver".
I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with "bombast". They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word "infinity". Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you're a Bombast customer, you're helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.
Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.
climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating
Could it be ... fossil fuel producers lying about their output of greenhouse gases? Nah.
Dave Chapelle has just continuously tanked his career since then
No, it's the Jews and the alphabet people that have tanked his career - according to one Dave Chapelle.
I do genuinely wonder how much money Melon Husk gave him for that stage appearance.
And to top it all off, in order to preserve the only thing they have left - their freedom - they want to hand the country over to a dictator. It just doesn't get any more oxymoronic than that.
Plaintiff Brown not only lost a $50,000 a year gig as an electrician’s assistant, he also “became estranged from his father, who required him to leave the Brown residence,” the suit records.
"Get your racist ass the fuck out of my house." Gotta love it.
Do these people ever just stop for a moment and ask themselves why people react with such disgust when their views are exposed?
It's particularly weird because most (all?) of the racists I've known in my life are constantly looking around for other people that share their views by making dog-whistle comments (or explicitly racist comments for that matter). Like, they're never content to just keep their racism to themselves and are perpetually looking for affirmation from others - if you need that much approval from others, why not adopt views that aren't so abhorrent?
Pepperidge Farm remembers the last couple of years of the Clinton administration when we had an actual budget surplus and all the talk was of what to do with this surplus. But then the "fiscal conservatives" said "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter".
often has trouble understanding
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
God I'm so sick of Musk spa ... wait, what? Actual technology news?
Most of the climate change predictions I've heard in my lifetime have talked about stuff that would happen by 2050 or 2100. It's always been bullshit, just a way of pushing out the consequences beyond a timeframe we can actually conceive of effectively. In reality this shit is already hitting us and accelerating hard.
I used to work for a large corporation and one day I found myself in a meeting with a bunch of female vice presidents where I was the only man there. The presenter was unable to display on the big screen because she didn't have a connector; I happened to have the right kind and loaned it to her.
She said "you're pretty handy to have around." My brain decided that a clever thing to say in response would be "well, I'm pretty well-endowed in the dongle department" and I started to say that before my brain thought better of it and cut me off. So what I actually said was "well, I'm pretty well-endowed". One woman in the room actually guffawed but everybody else managed to ignore it - although I'm willing to bet this story was told later more than a few times.
There's an interesting corollary to this in the school bus world. Beginning in 2004, the EPA started imposing emissions standards on diesel engines and the standards have become increasingly stringent over the years. The standards govern the allowed amounts of NOx (nitrous oxides) and particulate matter to be emitted, but the units measured are per-horsepower-miles, meaning that an engine with twice the horsepower is allowed to emit twice the NOx and twice the particulate matter amounts, which has led to bus engines that have much more power than their counterparts from twenty years ago did - despite this added power being largely unnecessary for hauling kids around at relatively low speeds.
And importantly, the EPA diesel engine standards do not in any way govern CO2 output, so today's school bus fleet is emitting far more of it than twenty years ago.
At least it got the last letter kinda wrong.
:(
I'm a school bus driver and I work with a few Trump-supporting lesbians. It's no mystery why: they really, really hate black people and that hatred blinds them to any possible conception of their own self-interest. For good measure they're also staunchly pro-union.
Republicans keep their hold on power by systematically disenfranchising voters who disagree with their policies. In a perfect world, voting for a third-party candidate that has no chance to win might have some positive impact; in our world, it means you're doing the Republicans' work for them.
take material action to rein in the increasingly lawless and openly right-wing Supreme Court
Nooooooo! Then the right-wing media would paint them as partisan! Instead of what they're doing now, which is ... painting them as partisan.
Must be a general lack of education.
Republican politicians have long used language targeted at a 5th grade level of comprehension. Trump's big innovation in politics was targeting a 4th grade level.
We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, D.C., and clean it up, renovate it, and rebuild our capital city, so that it is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime.
Uhhh why you no do that during your first term? It's not like DC has suddenly become shitty in the last four years.
Just because most people don't seem to know this: Comcast's wifi service Xfinity is actually mostly fed by the routers Comcast cable customers have in their homes. So as a cable customer, you're paying the electric bill and giving up part of your bandwidth to support Xfinity.
It’s literally on the other side of the planet.
Lol and there's just no way to get information about something happening on the other side of the planet. Why, it takes our square-riggers six months to sail from there to here!
I've been trapped with Trump since the fucking '80s. For young people today, it would be the equivalent of 40 years of Logan Paul, with him being President at the end of it.
I saw my first cybertruck in person the other day. It looks incredibly dumb in promotional photos, but it's astonishing how much stupider it looks in traffic surrounded by normal vehicles.
If you're doing business with a religious son of a bitch, get ... it ... in ... writing. His word isn't worth shit, not with The Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.
-William S. Burroughs, Advice for Young People
Even if Elon Musk is putting in 100-hour weeks, he's the CEO of five companies, which means being CEO of one company is a half-time gig at most.
There's no way Musk owns Trump ... Putin would never sell him.
electronic absentee voter system
the Secretary of State’s office, run by Republican Christi Jacobson
All you need to know right there.
I'm a programmer, and this reminds me of one time when I got a support call about a bug in our app: a "State" picklist with 509 entries (for you non-United Statesians, this is a bit more than the 50 or so states - we sometimes include shit like DC, Puerto Rico and Guam in these lists - I should have been seeing), including about 20 different versions of "Louisiana" (like Lousiana, Louisiania etc.) and lots of different countries (occasionally spelled correctly). What had happened was that we originally had a table in the database for listing all the states, and one of our coders got the assignment to add a marriage license module to the app, mirroring the state's paper form that was used for this. Since the "State" line had to accommodate people from other countries, the clerks just used this line to enter whatever country they were from and insisted on the same functionality in the app. Since our database was fully relational, this coder just used the existing "States" table but added new entries in code whenever a user typed out a non-standard thing in the box. Completely hosing every place in the app that used a States picklist.
The real mystery was how this table grew to 509 entries before anyone noticed a problem.
I saw my first real Cybertruck in the wild the other day. It was absolutely incredible ... how fucking stupid that thing looked.
I'm a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having "only" ten thousand followers.
I used to live in Louisiana and had a friend with a house on one of the enormous lakes there. I was hanging out there one day when he decided to move a big slab of steel-sided building that had been lying in the water there for years. He wasn't doing anything productive with it, just wanted it moved 30 or 40 feet to one side, so he hopped into the water with his snorkel-equipped ATV and started fucking with it a little bit. Within ten minutes or so, about 15 of his neighbors had shown up in their snorkel-equipped ATVs (without being called or anything communicative like that) and started "helping", which amounted to everybody randomly nudging the slab from all sides without budging it even an inch. Eventually they gave up and drank beer.
I think they've quietly dropped this one, since they don't seem to mind Trump being owned by a Russian dictator, his son-in-law getting two billion dollars from the Saudis, or Trump stealing classified documents and casually leaving them lying around for foreign agents to help themselves to.