I’m less worried about the closure of offices than Musk thinking he can modernize the SSA administration’s computer systems in 3 months. None of his lackeys have ever worked on anything of this scale/complexity and I’m pretty sure none of them know COBOL since they’re apparently mostly around 25. (And retired COBOL experts likely don’t know more modern languages well enough to translate.)

Don’t get me wrong, the public and private sectors should modernize aging, critical systems that use code written in languages almost no one under 60 has learned, much less mastered. But 3 months probably isn’t even enough time to get through the planning and hiring stage of a project like this. If it were cheap and easy to update those systems, it’d have been done already.

You gotta spend money to lose money.

All the amendments were also weirdly worded on the ballot when I voted today. I do at least a little bit of research before I vote in our elections and they were trying to sneak some power grabs past voters. But no state trusts its politicians less than Louisiana. We have the finest record of both corruption and ignoring laws in North America, if not the hemisphere.

Nola.com has a paywall now but this one should be free: https://lailluminator.com/2025/03/29/louisiana-amendments-3/

American cars are going to go up in price even without profit maximizing (which they’ll obviously also do). It’s a global supply chain. Infotainment screens and other parts aren’t made in America. Foreign manufacturers already produce cars in the U.S.

France is an interesting choice as the first ones to threaten. They might be the country most willing to tell America to fuck off and spend an evening lighting Teslas on fire.

DEI initiatives don’t really exist there like they do in the United States. Their constitution already bans employers from making distinctions based on race, gender, religion, etc. The closest thing France has that I know of is a requirement for corporate boards to be 40% women. They aren’t going to change that law because Trump threw a hissy fit.

Plus, DEI doesn’t even really mean anything specific in the United States anymore. It’s just a dog whistle (like “woke”) Republicans use to signal that they’re racist and sexist and stir up racial animus. They use it when it doesn’t even make sense. Trump blamed “DEI hires” when an ARMY helicopter crashed into a passenger jet even though all the pilots and the air traffic controllers were white men. He blamed the LA wildfires on DEI.

Kristi Noem kills puppies and I’ll debate with you about whether that makes her a hideous troll who eats Billy goats under a bridge. But Marjorie Taylor Greene is haggard and I feel no remorse when I reduce her to someone who looks like a Family Dollar ass Shrek toy.

You’re right. Possums are the last surviving marsupials in the western hemisphere. Game recognize game. I also survive in the Western hemisphere.

I forget who but someone in Trumpworld is dating her and I threw up a little bit in my mouth imagining that concept. She looks like a possum that no one asked to prom.

I think it’d be better but not ideal. America obviously needs reforms but a 4 year reprieve from the dumbest dumbfucks in recorded history trying to annex Greenland and cut off funding for cancer research would be nice.

Gov. Beshear could absolutely be president if we still have free and fair elections in 2028. I, personally, wouldn’t be thrilled by a centrist Democrat bringing us further to the right via compromises where the left gets a shit sandwich. But he’s very good at being a politician.

Well, I guess the mission was successful if you don’t care about civilians. The 23 year-old pilots were apparently very competent. Houthi leadership gets no sympathy from me and I hope they go home and be family men.

I wouldn’t have made that trade-off, though. I don’t care if there’s 40 of my worst enemies holed up at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I wouldn’t bomb it, much less treat it like a game. That’s sociopath behavior.

For the record, I’m from Louisiana so I hate Texas. Especially Texas A&M. There’s a small part of me that wants to bomb anyone wearing a cowboy costume who lives in a suburb and has never even touched a cow. I hate all their sports teams. But if they catch a hurricane, we go help them. They help us when tragedy strikes. That should be the maximum level of hate people have toward each other. I hope Texas A&M explodes with no civilian casualties. (The students who cosplay as fascists are fair game. Grow up.)

I was raised in a very Catholic region. Our football team is called The Saints. We called the (then new) Protestant church “Mary Queen of the Parking Lot” because it was in a strip mall. Even now, I have no idea what the Protestant megachurch by the interstate is called because everyone calls it “Six Flags Over Jesus.” I’ve been to weddings there and I don’t know the name.

I say all that to say no one is weirder than people who convert to Catholicism. I’m agnostic and I try to follow the teachings of Jesus (as a philosopher) more than weird ass adult converts like JD Vance. Like, help the poor and turn the other cheek. Forgiveness is as much a blessing for you as it is for the person you’re forgiving. And JD Vance is like, “The Crusades were cool.” No! They sucked!

The most cringe part is JD Vance saying he’ll pray. Pray for what? That no fighter jets crash? That the bombs intended to kill one guy only destroy a few apartment complexes of civilians?

I don’t know if the strike was a good or bad decision or how precise it was. Adding a journalist to the group chat was bad enough. Don’t bring God into the group chat about killing people. Vance converted to Catholicism and I’m pretty sure there’s a line in the Catholic version of the Bible about how thou shalt not kill. It’s not an ambiguous verse like Deuteronomy where you can convince yourself it’s fine to eat crabs because of the New Testament.

I swear to God (good version), the only people who read the Bible are curious atheists and priests. Self-professed Christians are there for the potlucks and networking opportunities.

If we can’t count on corporate lawyers to have ethics, principles, and bravery, who can we count on?

Everyone else, I guess. I know a guy who sells frog legs and catfish and he would never do me wrong. If someone tried to fight me in front of his shed, he’d step in. Paul Weiss won’t fight for themselves, much less for you.

Jeffrey Goldberg should lose his job too but for unrelated reasons. Good on him for publishing this responsibly but he sucks too. He was arguably the main cheerleader for the 2nd Iraq war.

I don’t run a magazine so I couldn’t report it but I was included on a top secret Signal group chat where administration officials talked about how long you should wait after Trump or Elon absolutely explodes a White House bathroom. A friend at OSHA accidentally added me.

The younger staffers were given a map of nearby Starbucks locations because sometimes, it would take hours for the West Wing loos to be re-certified as a safe workplace environment. And if the inspector forgot his Geiger counter, forget it. Bathrooms were off limits that day.

A jambalaya v.7.3 ratio spreadsheet exists:

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/food-and-drink/latest-fandd-board-cookbook-parts-1-and-2-plus-the-jambalaya-calculator/110548628/

Here’s the food/drink topic section:

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/food-and-drink/

It’s insane (compliment) and also insane (derogatory).