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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • NYT says this switch to pagers has been recent, after the Oct 7 attacks last year, when Hezbollah suspected that Israel was spying on the cell network, and using it to locate targets for strikes. So all these pagers got distributed to Hezbollah-affiliated people in short order . This system doesn’t use commercial networks, and has been called a “closed” network by the NYT.

    If all that is true, then that means anyone with one of these closed-network pagers got it from being involved with Hezbollah in the first place.


  • What I really want out of Google Maps is a way to ask about particular alternate routes. I know it will suggest alternates if it thinks those will save time. But I want to be able to ask it “Should I take the Whitestone or the Throgs Neck”, evaluate both routes, and tell me which one is better (and by how much). It already knows where I am going after all.

    Bonus points if I can teach it what I prefer. So, I want to be able to tell it how much I hate the Cross Bronx, and that it’s OK to send me on a different route if it’s 15 minutes longer, if it means I am not stuck on that.




  • The equity structure for these tokens will be that 20% of the project’s tokens are allotted to the founding team, which includes the Trumps, 17% of tokens are set aside for user rewards, and the remaining 63% of the coins will be made available for the public to purchase, said founder Zak Folkman.

    I don’t think there’s any guarantee at all that all 63% of the coins “allocated to the public” will be released at first. They will probably release a fraction of that, and the constrained supply will not be enough to meet the demand from the Saudi and Russian governments looking to funnel money to Trump.

    So the price will zoom up, and then they will decide whether to sell their own stash or more of the public stash into that surge. The end game is to harvest as much cash as they can from these foreign actors. And if any loyal Trumpists happen to lose their piddly life savings in the meantime, that’s a chance Trump is willing to take.








  • The guy only threatened to use the knife after they stopped him for turnstile jumping.

    I should say that there are transit cops that check tickets in L.A. If you don’t have one, all they do is escort you out of the station. And this is the LAPD we’re talking about.

    The first step to “escorting you out of the station” is stopping you, is it not?

    My whole point is that the cops didn’t get belligerent until he pulled the knife. It also sounds like he might have boarded a train with the knife out, too. (It was the L train, though, I’m sure the riders have seen worse.)

    They didn’t start shooting because he jumped the turnstile. I bet if he didn’t have a knife they would have just wrote him a ticket and made him leave.

    You dont think your LA cops would have treated their fare evader a bit differently if he pulled a knife?


  • It sounds like the guy had a knife and threatened to use it. It also sounds like the cops tried to taze the guy first, but it didn’t work.

    We can argue whether the cops really needed to shoot the guy. But they weren’t shooting at a fare evader, they were shooting at a guy with a knife who also happened to jump the turnstile.

    I’d argue that the real problem is that the cops didn’t know how to de-escalate the situation without shooting. It’s like the tazer was their only “non-lethal” option, and when that didn’t work, they panicked. (I could also believe that they were simply incompetent, and couldn’t work the tazer properly.)



  • And I don’t think we can assume that the lower bound to Trump’s support is just the hard-core MAGAts.

    There are also the die-hard Republicans who treat their political affiliation like a sports team. They will reflexively vote R no matter what, even if they don’t approve of Trump’s behavior.

    Then, paradoxically, there are also the low-information voters who actively avoid politics. In prior years, these tended to lean Democratic, but this year is a bit different. We are finding that many of these people are in much worse shape vs 4 years ago financially, and since they never paid attention to political stuff to begin with all they know is Biden was President for all of that. We know the economy is in decent shape, and we avoided a post-pandemic recession. But the benefits are extremely uneven, and there is a large base of people who are still screwed (and doubly so if they ever want to buy a house).