I'm concerned that the way the finances for this are constructed, there's no way for it to burst at smaller than a "take out 15% of the economy" level.

Like the lesson the financial engineers took from 2008 was "just ensure that you're too big to fail before the bubble pops".

Except for killing USAID, which was on Elon's wish list from day 1.

"Time after Time" is the perfect foxtrot song. Even if you're not used to thinking about rhythm in songs, the beat shoots through that song as clearly as if there were a metronome in the background.

I think there's still time for us to get a pandemic going on here too.

Possibly relevant (sorry for the link to the NY post and the pictures the link preview will pull in)

nypost.com/2025/10/22/h...

So this makes me think two things:
1) She's seeing something that makes her think now is a good time to bail on full-throated MAGA
2) All the totally wild antisemitic stuff about space lasers was not the result of her being indoctrinated, but a deliberate and considered choice to go there.

My mother-in-law would always do it when she could, and the fact that it just happened without her asking was one of the few things that could convince her to come visit us across the river in NJ.

I have been looking at binoculars for birding; there the recommendation is to go for 8x or 10x. For tourist reasons you might want a bit less magnification.

Anyway, the "champaign" model I've been eyeing is the Nikon MONARCH M7; economy but weatherized is also Nikon, the PROSTAFF line.

My mother's summer job in either high school or college one year was making TripTiks at the local AAA office.

People would have a start and a destination, and she'd cut out pieces of different map books to give them a customized map of their route.

Nothing too exciting: some small business had won a judgement against another small business and was serving everywhere that might be holding funds for the loser to garnish them. I contacted the legal email alias, they gave me a FedEx account number, and I went and over-nighted them the papers.

It does make me wonder which piece will be the first card to collapse when the AI bubble falls apart.

Will it be OpenAI itself? Meta? NVidia? Some data center holding company no one had ever heard of? Somehow Lehman Brothers again, back from corporate death?

Yeah, the one consistent message from all of South Park is that caring about things is the ultimate sin.

Even the most non-pro bird photography hobbyist: lol, sob.

$500 for a cheap starter body+lens setup buying all equipment used, minimum, and I'm here contemplating when I can go ahead and drop $2000-2500 on a particular new lens+body I've been eyeing, and *none* of that is "pro" gear.

Oh, sure; also "church corona gas lighting" (no quotes) works at first and leads to a wonderful page by the National Park service on "Gaslighting in America" that is one of those pages that was vandalized by DOGE and all the gorgeous illustrations gone. (you need the wayback machine to view them)

Though my attempt at stacking multiple images into an HDR image failed, the stacking did do cool things with the gas flames.