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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • The federal government lawyers have said in court that Elon Musk was not the leader of that organization. Therefore, the fact that he said he has departed from Washington would not affect that organization.

    Of course we know that he was leading it, and the president has said as much, and the above claims are all being contested in court by quoting the president. But anyway, if you want the official answer, now you have it.

    But the official answer also changes over time. Because if Musk was not the leader of that group, then many of the actions that he claimed to take and many of the actions that people attributed to him would now be actions of a private individual, which would expose him to massive civil liability. Therefore, we can be sure that the government’s lawyers will continue to change their story about when and where and how he worked for the government.


  • Definitions are important, but you don’t get to unilaterally choose them. Depending on the person you’re talking to, sometimes it’s more effective to ask them to define the terms first, or to ask them which dictionary they prefer.

    So depending on the situation, it might be more beneficial to bring in the quotes from various Israeli leaders about how they’re trying to get Palestinians gone, and how they’re happy with Palestinian death, and then bring in those graphs that show the numbers of the dead, and ask whether they think that’s acceptable.

    Another way to think about it is that sometimes questions of definition can distract us from questions of morality, and if the person that you’re trying to talk to is running away from the issue. By doing so, you can reasonably adjust your focus back to the facts.








  • YouTube took down the video because of its own policies, not because of copyright law. So we should be blaming YouTube.

    I think it’s easy to see exactly why if you consider how YouTube treats small content creators. If I post a video and companies claim copyright on it, the video gets demonetized and I might lose my account. I can respond and contest the claim and maybe I can win but I still lost money in the meantime, and perhaps more significantly, the companies that made their copyright claims will never face a consequence for attempting to burn my channel. In other words, if I get things wrong a few times I’ll lose my channel and my income source, but if they get things wrong a million times, they face zero consequence.

    And you might be inclined to blame the media companies. But again, this is YouTube doing what YouTube wants to do of its own volition, and not something that’s required by law. If YouTube valued small-scale content creators and end users, it would create different policies.


  • It’s certainly true that the system is broken, but at the same time you’re suggesting we should forgive HR employees for the bad stuff they do, and I don’t think that’s how morality works.

    Not only that, we all understand that sometimes employees don’t have control of a situation and they’re going to follow company policy or go along with their bosses. But we can see through their words and their body language how they feel about it, and we can recognize small actions that they could take to make a bad situation slightly less bad. In my experience it’s very rare that you will encounter such behavior in HR, because the vast majority of HR workers are perfectly happy to f*** us over as much as they can.


  • Last year I was talking with a veteran coworker who was worried about where the company was going to end up in 10 years, but my contract ends in a year and will not be renewed. I told her openly, they’re not paying me to think about 10 years from now, they’re paying me to make the next year a good year, and I don’t really care about the long-term future cuz I won’t be here. She was furious, but she wasn’t furious enough to go get me a long-term contract. I think she never saw the hypocrisy; even today she still thinks that I’m a bad worker.




  • Remember that they are both lying even now about almost everything. Narcissists don’t believe in some underlying reality, because they make up reality every second of their lives, so the fact that they’re feuding now doesn’t mean they actually had some kind of permanent fallout. You could say that they are acting at this exact moment just to deflect attention away from Trump and his big beautiful bill, but it doesn’t really matter because they’re narcissists, and everything they do is an act.

    So, you shouldn’t cheer for either of them because they certainly are not genuine about anything and they definitely will never be on your side, ever.