advocacy

Joe Manchin Has Wrecked the Biden Presidency—Perhaps He’ll Also Liberate It | The New Yorker

Joe Manchin Has Wrecked the Biden Presidency—Perhaps He’ll Also Liberate It | The New Yorker:

If you’re the President, there’s no need to prove to Manchin that you’re going to be “tough on spending,” so why not call off your plan to start collecting student debts again? Why not use every power still at your disposal to do what you can for the country while you’ve got some power? Acting boldly carries risks. With the Senate split fifty-fifty, if you give Manchin reason to switch parties you lose your ability to appoint more judges, for instance; the power that comes with even a tenuous majority is very real. But using executive authority—and boldly—may be the only way that Biden will get anything done, as long as Manchin (and, perhaps, Kyrsten Sinema) block effective legislative action, alongside a solid phalanx of fifty Republicans. Points to Biden for trying, but, at some point, even in Washington, no really does mean no, and you need to move on as best you can.

[What a mess. 🤦‍♂️]

5 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job – Accidentally in Code

5 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job – Accidentally in Code:

Regardless, your current job is just a moment in your overall career, and it’s worth thinking critically about whether it’s serving your longer term career goals. So, here are five reasons why you might want to think about quitting.

[I’m not suggesting that you quit your job. I’m suggesting that you consider what’s important to you, and whether your life, as currently set up, is serving those goals and desires. If so, cool. If not… start taking the steps that will get you where you want to go. This is, after all, your responsibility.]

Why Daytona is a game-changer

Why Daytona is a game-changer:

I laughed out loud when the result came back. Yes, that’s exactly what I was looking for. It wasn’t in a place a user would have looked, and Google never would have found it.

The point is this — it’s past time to take responsibility for finding the stuff we write, and if we do it well, and Daytona does, all of a sudden blogging works so much better, and the incentive to write stuff, to document, to narrate our work, to index everything you can, makes total sense.

[I’ve built a number of apps that integrated search. Each time I had the same thought. Relying on the Big Search Engines is *so* much worse than doing it yourself. Kudos to Dave for making this happen for his stuff.]

Source: Scripting News

…it wasn’t a vague VC pyramid scheme

I was there for the early web, it wasn’t a vague VC pyramid scheme. The web was a reduction of all the crazy complexity of tech platforms, web made it so you could write a network app in an afternoon. It was the opposite of the FUD that they’re calling “web3.” I’ve yet to hear a coherent explanation of why it should be called web-anything. Selfish beyond belief.

[Selfish is the new crazy.]

Source: Scripting News

Fixing the date

“Fixing the date forces you to commit to shipping, no matter how much polishing you think it still needs.”

“We don’t go on because we’re ready, we go on because it’s eleven o’clock.”
—Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live

Don’t Not Eat at Bros

Don’t Not Eat at Bros:

In Lecce, Italy, there is a Michelin-starred restaurant called “Bros”. Recently, Geraldine DeRuiter and her friends had an amazingly awful experience there.

Recommendation: Do not eat here. I cannot express this enough. This was single-handedly one of the worse wastes of money in my entire food and travel writing career bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha oh my god

You should not visit Bros. You shouldn’t go and not eat there, as DeRuiter and her friends did. But you should read DeRuiter’s spectacularly funny write-up of their bizarre “meal”.

You never know what you never know…

Dear Liberals, Stop Trying to be the Good Guy. | by Julianne King

Dear Liberals, Stop Trying to be the Good Guy.:

Stop talking about the altruism of food stamps and start referring to it as national security. Hell, move the food stamp budget over to national security because, and here’s the kicker guys, IT IS. When people eat, they tend to be a little slower with the pitch forks. It’s no coincidence that 25 percent of the insurrectionists had recently declared bankruptcy. Poor people are desperate. Desperate people are dangerous. FEED THEM.

“This not going to go the way you think…”

‘Bad Company’ by the Group Bad Company, from the Album ‘Bad Company’ – Lost Art Press

‘Bad Company’ by the Group Bad Company, from the Album ‘Bad Company’ – Lost Art Press:

Two lessons: Big business will try to bully you. They will try to decide when to pay you. They will decide how your pricing should work. They will ask for special treatment compared to your smaller customers.

Don’t give in. Once you start treating your customers differently, you are in for a world of drama and deceit. Whenever we get asked for special treatment, I simply remember what Jennie Alexander always said: “’No’ is a complete sentence.”

The second lesson: Pay your vendors on the day you get their invoice. When someone drops off work they did for us, they leave with a check. When an invoice arrives, John pays it the same day.

Vendors remember this. And if you’ve wondered how we kept so many of our products in stock during the pandemic shortages, you now have your answer.

These folks are such a pleasure to deal with, and they produce (and write) some of the best works in the field. The books themselves are a joy, beautifully designed, printed and bound. I must repeat this line… it’s so important! “Jennie Alexander always said: “’No’ is a complete sentence.”

Say Yes: Mel Brooks at 95

Say Yes: Mel Brooks at 95:

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out”… You say yes, and you never do it.

This seems like quite the win as a life hack…