Important meetings? During his presidency, Trump skipped most of his daily intelligence briefings.

Forget staying awake, Trump doesn’t even show up.

It’s obvious that it doesn’t work from the moment you first hear about it.

You don’t become the wealthy elite by accident. You do it by hoarding money.

So if someone gives you more free money, you’ll just hoard it like you’re already doing.

Reminder that Trump doesn’t endorse people because they’re good for the country or even because they’re good for the party.

Trump endorses people only when it benefits himself. For example, he might force them to pledge personal loyalty to him, like he tried to do with James Comey.

“I have not yet begun to defile myself.”

These lawyers are trying to speak to the public through the court. It’s an irresponsible use of the court.

But that inevitably leads to the next question: How did he expect to make this joke in 1949? He should have known that Jimi Hendrix hadn’t even started playing guitar by then.

How did he expect that to work, when it doesn’t even have an amp?

Really, there’s nothing specifically wrong with having a low birth rate. On a large scale, we have an overpopulation problem, and there’s not really a negative for each person having fewer children. Of course, smarter people will decide to have fewer kids. But eventually, it will all balance out.

This idea is a complete non-starter from a practical standpoint. Parents would complain about it either way. Either they wouldn’t want girls in school early or they’d want boys in school early, too.

It’s just much easier to treat children all the same.

Also, I personally think this plan would backfire. Girls graduating wouldn’t want to have to be adults earlier than boys, so they’d stay in school longer. And from what I’ve heard, the most reliable way to reduce birth rates is to educate women more.

I think everyone also knows how to ethically increase the birth rate. Make having children easy and affordable. Lots of government assistance. Make sure everybody has access to cheap or free childcare.

And there’s also the generational problems. Young adults can see the problems that the previous generations caused. You can’t go back in time to fix those. It will be expensive to change this sort of thing.

But quick fixes aren’t going to change the underlying problems.

Because this is politics, and the US has only two possible options in November, it is good to remember that Trump told Israel that it should “end the problem” of Gaza.

Even if you don’t like Biden on this issue, it is imperative to vote for him in November. A non-vote for Biden is almost as bad as a vote for Trump.

I can guarantee MAGA will have no qualms voting for Trump despite his genocidal tendencies. If you don’t vote for Biden and Trump wins, you will be responsible for a lot of suffering.

More background on this “non-partisan” commission.

The CPD was established in 1987 by the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Parties to “take control of the presidential debates”. The commission was staffed by members from the two parties and chaired by the heads of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul G. Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf. At a 1987 press conference announcing the commission’s creation, Fahrenkopf said that the commission was not likely to include third-party candidates in debates, and Kirk said he personally believed they should be excluded from the debates.

It is not non-partisan. It is bipartisan. That’s an important difference. Saying that it’s nonpartisan is misinformation.

Third parties have often criticized exclusion of their candidates from debates, due to the CPD’s rule (established in 2000) that candidates must garner at least 15% support across five national polls to be invited to the national debates. The last candidate from outside the two major parties to participate in a CPD-sponsored debate was Ross Perot, who polled sufficiently high in his 1992 presidential campaign to debate George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton in all three debates; Perot’s running mate, James Stockdale, also participated in the vice presidential debate. When Perot ran again in 1996, the CPD declined to invite him to the debates, finding that the Reform Party candidate had no “realistic chance to win” the election.

So, it’s an organization run by the two major parties that explicitly tries to keep third parties from participating in the debates.

Our obsession with what celebrities think can really cause problems. There’s really no reason to care what a guy like Butker thinks about social issues, other than maybe to feel sorry for his wife.

Inflation is out of control. Housing is unaffordable. The healthcare system is broken. Everyone is drowning in student debt. Ecosystems are collapsing. We’re constantly on the brink of war.

This is a better description of Trump’s presidency than Biden’s, especially right now when inflation is not out of control, and Biden has done everything he can to forgive student loans.

Also, any number whose digits sum to a multiple of 3 is divisible by 3. For 51, 5+1=6, and 6 is a multiple of 3, so 51 can be cleanly divided by 3.

The stupidest part is that both Republicans (in Utah at least) and Democrats have seen, first hand, that Housing First initiatives are actually less expensive for the government than just ignoring, then displacing inconvenient homeless populations.

Research in Seattle, Washington, found that providing housing and support services for homeless alcoholics costs taxpayers less than leaving them on the street, where taxpayer money goes towards police and emergency health care.

Both morality and fiscal responsibility agree on certain issues, and this is one of them.

I’m not saying that housing first is the ultimate best remedy, because I don’t know all of the alternatives. Just that clearing homeless camps is proven to be expensive and ineffective.

They give a bit more context in this video. (from 2017)

By the way, I got that link from an article in The Guardian, and I can’t find anything in either of those two articles that really adds on top of what was known in 2017. It could just be hard for a layperson to understand, and so was oversimplified?

TLDW is that researchers have known for decades that this tablet showed the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean Theorem for 1000 years before Pythagoras was born. So, that part isn’t new.

They seem to be saying that what’s new is that they understand each line of this tablet describes a different right triangle, and that due to the Babylonians counting in base 60, they can describe many more right triangles for a unit length than we can in base 10.

They feel like this can have many uses in things like surveying, computing, and in understanding trigonometry.

My take is that this was a very interesting discovery, but that they probably felt pressure to figure out a way to describe it as useful in the modern world. But we’ve known about the useful parts of this discovery for forever. Our clocks are all base 60. And our computers are binary, not base 10, just to start with.

We overvalue trying to make every advance in knowledge immediately useful. Knowledge can be good for its own sake.