That’s not negotiation! That’s not deal making!

It is. Just not in your interest. Might be worth asking what Trump thinks he’s getting out of it. Did someone at a Russian bank just pick up another $50M in Trumpcoin recently? How will a brokered peace enrich Trump’s family and friends?

The US isn’t Ukraine and Trump isn’t capitulating to an enemy, he’s carving up Ukrainian territory alongside an erstwhile ally. He’s making deals, he’s just not on your side of the board.

He was coaching them on how to convince YOU, Mr. Trump, on how to manipulate YOU

He’s an agent of the Trump administration selling a deal brokered by Russia to his boss, presumably by promising the kind of quid pro quo Trump would endorse.

What’s notable is how sloppy and slapdash the dealmaking was for the benefit of the public at-large. Trump’s team might have gotten out cleaner if the authors of the deal hadn’t just chucked it through Babblefish to get an English translation.

I wish it did. Unfortunately, conservatives seem to rule our world far more often than not.

Barely on the cusp of calling it “Fake News”

Rising American anti-Semitism isn’t a foreign influence operation.

If I’m not allowed to blame Putler for this, why should I even consider it a problem?

Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl

Oh boy, excited to hear his opinions on Israel-Palestine.

The War Israel Was Ready to Fight: The strategy that led to the October 7 disaster is the same one fueling Israel’s current successes.

Yee-haw!

A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland

Shrug

The Eastern Block got the same fuzzy treatment from NATO that countries like Afghanistan and Columbia and Iran enjoyed.

Americans love a color revolution when your government aligns with Russia or China. But they have zero tolerance for dissent once their friends are in charge.

Sure, that’s a work around. But it relies on a trusted third party, along with wiki mods who don’t yank the entry because they don’t recognize the archived source as a valid citation.

It isn’t a feature integrated into the encyclopedia.

40 years ago poland was the most progressive country in europe regarding homosexuality because unlike everyone else they never criminalized it.

Damn, that’s wild. What was Poland like 40 years ago?

flips open history book

Omg, you’re a fucking tankie! TANKIE! TANKIE! Mods, get this guy out of here!!!

I still have my dad’s 1957 edition sitting on my childhood bedroom shelf.

It is genuinely kind of wild to read through that thing, in light of modern history.

I mean, just having the ability to roll up your own Wiki is very handy.

I would appreciate a way to archive the citations, so that a link-break down the line doesn’t cause the raw data to be lost. But that’s a problem with copywrite and IP more than anything Wikipedia does natively.

That’s Free Markets, baby!

It can’t pop if the US Treasury just keeps dumping tens of billions of dollars into it as a backstop.

The Infrastructure Reinvestment Act kicked this mess off, but it didn’t pad the wallets of the right people to the right degree. So now Trump is just cutting idiots and assholes across the VC Tech Sector ten-digit checks to keep doing what they’re doing.

We’re increasingly operated as a Planned Economy that exists to turn natural resources into AI slop, because this is what the federal government’s leadership believes they need to maintain the illusion of control over the public.

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS SO MUCH!

Conservapedia already did this something like twenty years ago. It missed the entire purpose of the project, which was to invite a kaleidoscope of specialists and journalists to document the volume of known information categorically, primarily through citation to other online works.

Instead, you had a basket case of ultra-orthodox ideologues carving out a very niche set of contrary opinion posts that weren’t well documented or continuously maintained.

Conservapedia isn’t a right wing vanity project because of it’s hot takes on Hitler, it’s a vanity project because of the yawning gulfs in it’s data set. Nobody engages with the site, because it is so heavily censored.

I get the sense Grokapedia will suffer the same fate. If a subject doesn’t tickle Musk’s interest, it’ll either go undocumented or be a naked plagarization of some other online encyclopedia. And as soon as Musk loses interest entirely, support for the service will go the same way as so many private vanity projects.

Incidentally, Wikipedia’s fate is also an open question. What happens when Jimmy Wales can’t administer and fundraise for it anymore? How long until some hacks get their hooks in and corrupt it like so many other private media outlets?

Unpopular American Opinion

is there some other alternative

Plenty. But then tend to be local and they vary in content. Houston has a number of programs run through the Children’s Museum and the various universities (Rice, in particular) for aspiring engineers and nature lovers alike. The YMCA and the JCC both have youth programs for fitness and sports. Soccer is always popular.

We got a lot of German refugees in the late 1940s

It was thick with MLMs and reactionary evangelicalism. Didn’t hurt that the Mormon Church was heavily embedded in the national leadership.

Imagine thinking it’s true.

The Boy Scouts of America had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century by way of multiple sexual abuse scandals, a dwindling membership, and repeated bankruptcy.

This isn’t DEI, it’s a desperate appeal for more warm bodies in the program to shore up a dying movement.

It’s BAD in the sense that Scouting has largely become (arguably always had been) an MLM run by and for the benefit of a few connected business savvy insiders. And drawing in more grist for the mill only delays the inevitable failure of this corrupt and sclerotic institution.

Even if you considered it safe to bike (which it isn’t, the dedicated bike lanes are pretty limited), it’s impossible to avoid the weather.

The MKT gets you all the way from 610 to downtown with virtually no interaction with cars until you’re actually in the city proper.

I’ll spot you weather, but I’ve biked in the rain before. A poncho is all you really need shy of severe weather. And if I’m taking an Uber to and from work once or twice a month, that’s far cheaper than owning a car.

I’ve known only a handful of people who’ve tried doing carless in Houston and only one of them long term

I think “carless” is much more difficult. But “one car house” is very possible. You don’t need a vehicle for every member of the family.

Children aren’t some sort of luxury.

Daycare is, though. What you’re really talking about with daycare is paying for servants to watch your kids while you work or otherwise spend your time elsewhere.

There’s a real economic benefit in socializing the cost of care and professionalizing child care as a profession. But daycare prior to Pre-K is primarily occupying the child’s time and energy until the parents return. It’s a hard trade off between your time and someone else’s.

I don’t agree with all of this guy’s numbers but you absolutely should include the cost of children in the poverty line.

I think the point he hits on is the bizarre math of denying public child care to middle class Americans specifically. And I’m all for citing it as bad policy.

But it’s a very separate thing from household poverty, precisely because being unemployed (or relying on someone who is) effectively solves your child care cost problem.