Those Zambians and Peruvians and such sure will be surprised when they get their first US federal income tax bill.

“ba” and “ma” are probably the easiest syllables to utter when your brain is still figuring out your mouth and vocal chords, which is probably why they tend to be words for the parents.

They named an airport after LaGuardia. Maybe one day they’ll name a high-speed rail terminus after Mamdani.

If iOS and macOS 26 were about AI everywhere, making them the “fuck around” release, 27 can be the “find out” release. Freeze new features and focus all effort on making the system as RAM and space-efficient. Cut the fat, and replace the convenient, memory-heavy data structures we use today with old-school lightweight alternatives (i.e., never use a string when a word-sized numeric value will do — and on a 64-bit machine, it’ll do a lot of the time, coalesce multiple booleans/enums into bitfields, replace top-heavy formats like XML where there isn’t a good reason for them, and so on).

Move over General Winter, here comes General Plate Tectonics.

You can catch passenger trains that go on ferries between mainland Italy and Sicily. (There also used to be one between Hamburg and Copenhagen, but the rail connection was torn down to build a tunnel under the Baltic.)

Padme: “…and then they’ll drop, right?”

There’ll probably be several to choose from on AliExpress at that price point.

That’s not entirely fair. DogeCoin was, by all accounts, created by fairly decent people as a low-stakes joke, before Space Trump settled on it as his ticket to being popular and liked and, after spending some pocket change on a Shiba Inu for display, barged in and skunked it with his musk.

Russia. Putin, as Lenin‘s heir, is of course the guarantor of liberation from imperialism.

lol

Germany for one would be bound by its paraconstitutional Staatsräson to refuse, which would end NATO and give Putin his old empire back on a silver platter.

Meanwhile, AAPL is more or less steady, and certainly not plummeting in formation with the hyped AI stocks. I bet their investors are feeling good about being left behind.

The Dems will choose her as their candidate before letting any of the Squad get close to power.

Brave G-men smash an Antifa supersoldier cell

This is like a Far Side cartoon: “how many times do I have to tell you lunkheads? These are the therapy ferrets, those are the pest-control ferrets, don’t mix them up”

A modern dystopian version would involve him having incurred the six million dollar debt for the costs of rebuilding him, with each episode being him taking on some kind of risky job to help pay part of it off. The finale would reveal that the sinister megacorp has no intention of letting him walk away with his bionics debt-free and set up the classic sort of action-movie confrontation

Will he be serving his sentence in an ordinary civilian prison like any citizen convicted of the same crime, or will they designate a palace as a prison and lock him in it?

It is an unwritten social rule that prison is a place of punishment for transgression, and as such separate from the free population. Opening spare prison cells to free people in need of shelter (whether the unhoused, or paying tourists/seasonal labourers, or low-income tenants), with some residents having different privileges than others, would violate this separation and the symbolic significance of prison.

A similar policy would be to make housing double as a low-security prison: have the locks be configurable so that apartments can be reconfigured as cells. This would make it too easy to go between freedom and imprisonment, though: in a free society, this process is meant to have a lot of friction. Of course, there is currently due process meaning that your leaving-the-house privileges can’t be revoked summarily over, say, unpaid bills, though they are now a matter of policy and can be changed as such.

It goes around in cycles, and “postmodernism” is just the name we gave to the idea of borrowing superficially from movements of the past without submitting to the deeper totalising meanings that the aesthetic/stylistic details in question emerged from, at that point in history. (It was so named because it contrasted with 20th-century high modernism and its belief in overarching systems and the possibility of universal meanings.) Looking back in history, you find postmodern-style epochs of stylistic appropriation/recontextualisation at various times, such as the rediscovery of classical aesthetics during the Renaissance.

It could be argued that postmodernism emerged from an unspoken universalising ideology: the me-first individualism of the baby-boom generation and the market-oriented neoliberalism that took charge in the US and UK at the start of the 80s and proclaimed its victory for all time when the USSR fell (as in Fukuyama’s “end of history”); to wit: there are no universal truths, only individual opinions, all overseen by the invisible hand of the market. Since then, history has loudly restarted, and the eternal consumerist utopia of the 90s feels as retrofuturistic as an episode of The Jetsons. Parts of postmodernism will be absorbed into what follows where useful (i.e. the idea of novels having metanarratives, or sampling/appropriation by mechanical reproduction as a creative tool), others will become a stereotypical period feature, in the way that that art-deco font signifies the 1920s or angular motel signs the 1950s, and the cycle will resume.

Having said that, with history having restarted, various kinds of Romanticism and/or Neue Sachlichkeit-style realism could emerge; though, of course, not in the same form as past versions.