To add to the other comment, saying “always-late wife” would convey the correct meaning to most English speakers.

If she’s dead, I don’t think it matters what you say.

Since this is about punctuation, what’s with the double dashes? Trailing off is usually written with an ellipsis, though an em dash can be used, since this is more of a break in speech. And yes, double dashes are sometimes used as a substitute on a keyboard or with a typeface that doesn’t have an em dash.

But this is hand-lettered text— just draw the em dash!

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

I dunno, man, it just feels like the ol’ fascist/totalitarian tactic of flooding the zone with shit until people get exhausted from fighting it has worked, people are exhausted, and there’s this energy of elated resignation, like, we can’t swim upstream anymore, so fuck it, riding the current is kind of fun (and the inevitable waterfall is out of sight and out of mind for the moment).

No, don’t break it to them. Let them be surprised.

I work for a university department, and our programs strive to make “DEI” and “merit” literally the same thing. We want the best and the brightest, so we try to overcome the barriers that keep them down, such as family history and economic circumstances. Those factors disproportionately affect people from minority groups because of historical reality, and that’s the only reason that race even enters into it. Many of the people in our programs are white people from poorer backgrounds. We don’t control the admissions process, we just try to get the best people to apply.

Put another way, the people with the family and cultural background (i.e. money, knowledge, and connections) to get into grad school are not always the same people with the best scientific minds.

Put yet another way, if the result of your hiring process is all weathier, white men, that’s prima facie proof that the hiring metric was not merit.

I think it’s probably neither allowed nor disallowed in state constitutions, but I’m just a dilettante constitutional scholar. Whether it’s allowed or not under the current system, that system is broken and can’t be fixed within the limitations of the system, and it needs a disruption. Disruptions tend to be unpleasant, so this is the least-disruptive disruption that I’ve come up with. There’s even historical precedent for it, in the form of the free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire.

For all of the reasons given, secession from the United States is a bad idea. But I’m going to keep banging this drum: The metropolises need to secede from their states, while staying part of the United States. Heck, Los Angeles County alone has more people than 40 of the states. It’s about time that they got fair representation.

YES! Proprietary home-automation ecosystems are a confusing mishmash of standards, and Matter is only just barely starting to change that. Home Assistant is the glue that sticks them all together. I can have expensive Hue smart bulbs, cheap HomeKit bulbs I found in the clearance bin, Magic Home RGB LED controllers, Sonoff smart switches, a garage door opener connecting via MQTT, and it easily connects to all of them and presents a uniform toggle switch for all of them. I can switch all my (smart) lights on and off from a menu on my GNOME desktop. No fighting with proprietary apps for each different ecosystem. Home Assistant is amazing in how boring and unremarkable it makes the implementation details.

Who’s going to hold him accountable? These things are true:

1. If an individual or small group tries, they’ll be arrested or killed by authorities.

2. A large enough group of people acting together could do it, but it has to be large enough, or see #1.

3. To build a large enough group requires getting the word out, and getting the word out means that the authorities will hear about it. See #1.

4. If the word goes out by anonymous, untraceable communication channels, then each person has to trust people they haven’t met and don’t know to act in concert with the plan. If the others fail to act, see #1.

I just realized that I’ve re-created the need for resistance networks (a web of trust in which each person only knows and trusts a small number of others each) from first principles. But even those require people willing to risk getting arrested or killed, because sometimes the authorities bust resistance cells. Basically, this is how all dictators hold on to power against overwhelming discontent in the populace: Nobody can get together in large enough numbers to do anything about it, and individually, going along with the regime is slightly (or a lot) better than not.

Dictators fall when enough of the population decides that the status quo is worse than defying the dictator. The United States is nowhere near that stage yet.

That’ll be next week in the U.S.

I question even that: Did they really? Where did the party articulate a cohesive plan (or hell, even just an enthusiastic promise) to counter the rise of oligarchy?

They promised an escape from him stylistically, but the majority of citizens who aren’t political junkies weren’t sick of it, because they weren’t exposed to it, because they don’t pay much attention to political news. What did they promise that the non-informed voter would notice in they’re day-to-day life?

If only they’d put this much effort into getting one person to change her mind on the issue, instead of trying to get 10 million people to change their morals.

It appears especially ghoulish now after it came out that even her campaign’s polling showed that it was a losing position.

The ZBMINIR2 that I ordered came in the mail today, and it seems to have the same features as the WiFi version. I’m guessing that Sonoff just increments the model number with each revision, and the ZigBee version came later.

Is the ZBMINIR2 not the ZigBee equivalent?

I’ve decided to pay as little attention to the news as possible, since I can’t do much about it anyway. But I believe I heard that the continent is now called Mexican America? Imma go with that.

they were literally the first company to make a home computer that didn’t require soldering experience or a kit

I’ve never heard that claim before. How is that the case, considering that the Apple I was just a motherboard, and the Apple ][ hit the market six months after the Commodore PET?

Indeed, and I realized in the process of writing that comment that the famous graphs showing the growth of productivity vs. the growth of real wages explain a whole lot more about people’s experiences than the consensus generational divisions.

I think I used to hear that, too, but I searched when writing the comment and found the consensus is now 1981. But then, people I know who were born in 1979 have so much more in common with elder Millennials than Generation X people born in the 1960’s. That’s why I’m skeptical of the whole generations concept. I mean, without looking up her birth date, is Kamala Harris a Boomer, or GenX?