Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-crawford-schimel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8k4.-Dt4.yJjPB0QbgpFy

Remember that time Elon Musk spent millions of dollars and lost? It was today and it was really funny. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-crawford-schimel.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-crawford-schimel.html

Update: Eat can eat 1,001 dicks.

I will accept passive aggression. A lot of people don’t bother with the passive.

I don’t know what our reputation is globally but I live in a tourist city (New Orleans). A lot of people don’t even bother with the passive part. Most “tier 1” conference cities are huge but we’re a relatively small city. We have a population of about 350,000 (compared to over 8 million in New York City) but enough hotel space and a conference center, stadium, whatever able to host a global event. The Super Bowl was just here and Taylor Swift had three shows. Those were known events but there will be weekends where you go downtown and meet 20 exterminators or something before you realize the exterminator convention is in town. (This actually happened to me. There are so many more exterminators than you could ever imagine.)

We host a lot of events and, as a result, even people who can’t afford travel meet people from everywhere. My high school friend is a bartender and he’ll have random hatred of places and professions because they’re obnoxious or don’t tip or whatever. To this day, he loves Hawaii residents because they had a football game here once and everyone was chill and nice.

Anyway, I say all that to say: Canadians are more than welcome to be passive aggressive here. South Louisiana in general is more aggressive than passive.

https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2007/10/08/edsbs-road-trip-baton-rouge

Once it’s all tallied, something like $100 million will be spent on a single state’s judicial election. That is insane. Ten million would have been insane just a decade ago.

I imagine that’s why things are close. A lot of voters are being bombarded with (mis)information. The people who are undecided probably have no idea what’s true or false.

My theory is that for-profit social media companies push conflict and controversy because it increases “engagement.” So, people are conditioned to be hostile and hiss like a cat at the first sign of disagreement (real or imagined). Lemmy, obviously, has different incentives.

It’s happening on Mastodon and BlueSky too. I try to respond with kindness and sincerity. (I don’t always succeed. I kind of suck at it, to be honest. But if we all even can halfass human decency, it’ll be better than most of the internet.)

I think long term, the changes in scientific research will be the big story. They made it so grants can only request something like 15% of facilities funding. Some universities can eat the cost of a lab but 95% can’t. So, it’s going to destroy any sort of research that’s mostly done in labs.

To give a hypothetical example, you could imagine a novel battery chemistry that really only needs a few humans to run the experiments but an expensive lab to just run the battery through 10,000 charge/discharge cycles to see if it degrades. That research probably won’t be done in the United States.

The executive order allows wavers so maybe it won’t be batteries — Elon Musk needs those — but a lot of basic science research will be done in Europe, Canada, China, etc. who are more than happy to accept brilliant scientists and fund their research. It’s basically pocket change in the context of a national budget and the payoffs are potentially huge.

For international readers or Americans unfamiliar, Wisconsin has a state Supreme Court vote. It’s probably 50/50 and is the important one. Florida has 2 special elections for vacated House of Representative seats in Congress. The districts both voted heavily for Trump so the Republican candidate should win.

So, in Florida, don’t necessarily expect the Democrats to win. But if it’s even close, Republicans will be filling some diapers. They should be winning these districts by 20 or 30 points. Winning with 53% or whatever would be a really bad result for Republicans.

We’re aware. People who get all their news from Fox or ignore politics in general probably aren’t but even my conservative family members are embarrassed about the threats to Canada and Greenland. Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans so pissing them off crossed a line. Even apolitical people probably know the U.S. National Anthem is being booed at sporting events.

There’s elections in several states today that will provide some data to know more. Louisiana had an election on Saturday and rejected 4 constitutional amendments supported by Republicans. None even got 40%. Louisiana is an oddball state so I’m not sure it’s a harbinger of today’s elections but if voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere vote like Louisiana, it’ll be very telling.

A jambalaya v.7.3 ratio spreadsheet exists:

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/food-and-drink/latest-fandd-board-cookbook-parts-1-and-2-plus-the-jambalaya-calculator/110548628/

Here’s the food/drink topic section:

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/food-and-drink/

It’s insane (compliment) and also insane (derogatory).

The Android rom ones like xda forums are active.

This is definitely not what you’re looking for but college sports forums are active if you want to read the dumbest shit ever.

I’m from Louisiana so I’ll pick on my own team and link to to Tiger Droppings:

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/lsu-sports/

The recipe posts are actually good. It’s basically a forum for insane people who get mad about LSU gymnastics recruiting but then post an alligator sauce picante recipe that’s better than anything you’ve ever put in your mouth.

To start, I’d recommend checking out Flathub and seeing what’s available there. Flatpaks are relatively new but anything there can be installed on basically any Linux distro. It’s organized by category so you can see your options.

Chrome is available on Linux if you’re worried about switching. Firefox is usually the default and what I use just because I’ve always used it (plus, it fully supports ad blockers whereas Chrome now cripples them). Also, Chromium is essentially the exact same as Google Chrome. Both are made by Google and Chrome is just Chromium before Google adds all its branding and stuff.

Don’t worry about antivirus. ClamAV is there if you want to run a scan but you don’t need anything like Norton.

VPN: check your provider. Most work with OpenVPN or have a Linux client.

Gmail obviously works in the browser but there’s a ton of desktop email clients. To give three examples I’ve used:

• Geary is a simple, clean email client that just does email does it well. Not very customizable, though.
• Thunderbird (made by Mozilla) has more features/options and supports extensions. If Geary is too simple, Thunderbird is a good middle ground.
• Evolution is like the Microsoft Outlook that comes with the paid Microsoft Office Suite. It has a calendar and all that enterprise-focused stuff. Probably overkill but it’s there if you need it.

Windows 10 is listed and I’m not quite sure what you mean but you can always run it in a virtual machine if you need it. I use Gnome as my Desktop Environment. Gnome Boxes is super simple. VirtualBox is more complex but has every option I’ve ever needed.

Don’t worry too much about the Desktop Environment thing. KDE and Gnome are the biggest two and both are pretty much equally capable. (You can also always install stuff made for the other if you want. It just might not match the theme.) There’s loads of desktop environments but don’t be intimidated by all the choices. Some are stripped down and designed for older or low-spec computers. There’s one focused on Chinese users. You can ignore most while you get your feet wet.

Half the 2000s Silicon Valley star executives seem to be there. Mark Zuckerberg even dresses like he’s in a Limp Bizkit cover band now. They’re not irrelevant due to money/power but they aren’t culturally relevant anymore and are seemingly all having a collective midlife crisis.

You can use any shape you want. The rest is idiotic but you can get crazy with the shape if you want.

I might be the poster child for medicinal use. I never really enjoyed getting high and I’ve gone to many Dead and Company and Widespread shows. So, I’m not an amateur or in favor of restricting drugs but I normally just say “No thanks.” when I’m the rotation. Most strains make me itchy or tired and antisocial. Everyone’s brain chemistry is different. For me, I either had fun or (more often) just felt miserable.

When I developed an anxiety disorder, I tried everything else. And some pharmaceutical pills do work but it takes like 30 minutes for a pill to work. But I found a strain and dose that works in 2 or 3 minutes. I’m not saying everyone will have the same experience but it should be legal everywhere. People who don’t even smoke recreationally testify that it’s got fewer negative side effects and helps. If it were a novel drug, it’d easily get FDA clearance.

A lot has gone backwards since then but at least cannabis is legal in most places (even if only medicinally). I have a prescription and being able to know the strain and dose is actually really important.

I just have random anxiety attacks and a small-to-medium dose of Granddaddy Purp works better than any traditional medicine I’ve tried. Benzos just make me sleep. I can at least function with the right dose and strain and I can be certain about it buying from a dispensary. And my case is minor. It’s way more important for people with stomach cancer or whatever who have no appetite. The right dose and strain makes them hungry and happy. I don’t think there’s an equivalent pharmaceutical. Every state/country should make medicinal marijuana legal. Otherwise, people buy it off a dealer and can’t measure the dose or know the strain.

South Carolina used to do that. Like even at fancy restaurants, they would open an airplane bottle to make your cocktail.

This may not be what you’re looking for since you said “modern” but A Short History of Wine was a fun read and covers a ton of world history. It’s obviously through the lens of wine/alcohol but it’s often actually about trade networks, different cultures, and diplomacy.

It’s through a specific lens and doesn’t pretend to cover everything but alcohol pops up in history often enough that it almost mirrors economic history.

If that isn’t your thing, I would recommend regional history books. It’s almost impossible to cover all of human history without some sort of focus. Otherwise, it’s just a textbook and you can download a professor’s syllabus to find those.

Early in my career (a long time ago), I was tasked with ordering replacement chargers for some laptops. I ordered several off Amazon and even though they were labeled as being what we wanted, they were apparently bootleg and were not, in fact, the correct charger. Fried a few laptops before I realized Amazon wasn’t the “Amazon” of yore selling first-party parts and I was ordering from random third party sellers. (That was all relatively new at the time. Amazon was a bookstore branching out in my head.)

In fairness, I was a programmer and not an electrical engineer. And chargers back then weren’t exactly USB-C level smart. The barrel charger fit. I just thought “Oh, what a great deal. I’ll order these and get plaudits from my boss for saving money.” It wasn’t even my money.

The other one is that when I was learning to code — I’m self-taught because everyone was back then — I used Vim and invented my own style. All my code was basically unformatted or, at best formatted consistently in a very non-standard way. That’s easy to fix nowadays where I can hit save and my code gets formatted automatically but it wasn’t so simple back then. I still feel bad for the engineer who followed me who had to fix that shit.