Saturday Evening Post

It will never stop being funny to me that their most revered cover image, , is a guy protesting against funding public schools. It’s Hitler Monthly.

I shouldn’t look for patient files, search for patients

Be really careful with this. All searches are logged. If the care team is hit with a HIPAA violation or malpractice case, they’ll pull up those access records and you risk being caught up in it.

ER culture is trauma bonding. They have to set themselves apart from the rest of the hospital because it’s playing Russian roulette for 12 hours straight and any lapse in concentration risks killing someone. A decade later I don’t take breaks in a completely different field because there’s that nagging voice that says downtime leads to chaos. But it isn’t your turn to give a fuck, so you’re not tied to their culture and there shouldn’t be the same expectation. They’re the asshole in a way that can’t change without them disconnecting from the job. When they go to a new job, they’ll be seen as the asshole who’s too motivated.

With any unfamiliar water source, I just brew tea on a long boil. One cup with the same green tea bag refilled 5+ times is safe and the caffeine content dissipates by the third pour. I’ve never had issues with water when travelling, backpacking, or camping by sticking to this.

I would vote for Hamas over AOC because they’re honest and don’t reflexively support genocide.

I vote for ballot initiatives and then use the DSA’s voter guide for local elections. For president it’s always PSL. Voting for a DSA member isn’t getting an ML revolution, but it is sewer socialism at a local level. Sewer socialism is powerful in a country where the little infrastructure that does work still drives a 20th century society. Americans are radicalised into fascism twice a day on their commute.

Would you ever vote for someone like Trump just to make things intentionally worse in the hopes of sparking off a revolution?

Accelerationism falls into the same wishful thinking category as adventurism. Not wanting blood on my hands is why I don’t vote for democrats. If I throw a chaotic evil boomerang by voting for a fascist, that’s just voting for a democrat and hoping it blows back on enough people to do something before hitting me. The closest thing I’ve found to a good ML path is what the Black Panthers were doing in the 1960-70s. Electoralism and existing power structures might have been cynically engaged, like funding the mutual aid initiatives or electing a politician who might give them breathing room, but power came from organising in their communities and building up dual structures that linked intersectionally with other orgs. Revolution was putting up a stop sign where the city wouldn’t so that the residents watching learned that they had power. It was feeding hungry kids while their parents were engaged in discussions about their issues. Those things can’t be trusted to electoralism because politicians are temporary and usually replaced by their opposite.

I think homeschooling is great. My resume isn’t particularly impressive and I have a mediocre GPA from a mediocre school. When I apply for jobs in today’s economy, there’s so much competition. It would be awesome if they could look at the next resume and see “education: school of life, professor mom, A+ and ten stickers for chores”. I would get that job easily.

Even living so close to the ranches and dryland wheat farms that they poison my water, I can’t afford beef and bread has increased in price by like 40% over the past few years. Cow demons going bankrupt will increase my food security because I can buy their land to homestead on and use their water rights for humans.

wake up, look at the sports score, my team lost 0:2

sigh, go back to my coffee, hope the rest of the season goes well

It’s what drove me out of emergency medicine. My inner Puzzle Demon was completely satisfied by an environment where the puzzle is doing creative, emotional, technical, moral, manual labour for a noble mission. Keeping track of a dozen metrics and half a dozen textbooks, a constant stream of new puzzles, I got to indulge my need to compulsively read and analyse. But I also felt like a vampire because the US medical system means I save a life only to saddle a profoundly disabled person with an unpayable debt. The only non-Puzzle Demon route I could find was being an MSF doctor right as the west decided that bombing MSF hospitals was okay.

It’s also what drove me into public sector horticulture. I get to spend all day in the sun solving puzzles. Every kind of labour involved except for emotional, but all of that Puzzle Demon energy goes into making meaningful public gardens. With those budgets shrinking and my pay freezing below subsistence level, the better-paying alternative is to be a private landscaper and poison my neighbours while stealing the water from their mouths. The richest assholes in the city get another trophy that I can’t even visit after work and it raises the surrounding property values. All roads lead to Puzzle Demonology without the disarmed public sector providing a sustainable alternative.

Human intuition about what STEM stuff is useful is very poor.

Funding streams are my big concern here. Government research is mostly toward non-profitable things. I like that NASA takes a decade to develop a robot and cancels the launch repeatedly to make it as safe as possible. Plenty of derived consumer tech will come out of that project and it has the least chance of exploding over my head. Corporate research is mostly toward profitable things. It further enshrines corporate power, limits more technology behind patents, and creates exploitative technologies to generate the most profit for their time. Our intuition goes so haywire with things like tech industry hope-ium, in the opposite direction of NASA considering lots of problems in its slower public research. The best version of an organisation like that is a slow trickle of good data for every field and products for consumer use without restrictions.

China is even more STEM-intensive than the US. I would love to study at a Chinese university, but I would be the worst student there. My parents didn’t demand I score well on puzzles as a child so my inner Puzzle Demon is satisfied by grand strategy games but intimidated by anything beyond basic algebra. China has utilised its Puzzle Demons to do so many good things in recent years. They’re supporting their Puzzle Demons in state institutions and as a result they’re the only country able to actually address climate change or field a domestic space station. The Soviets democratised Puzzle Demon science and made their farmers and factory workers participants in projects that weren’t building more lethal drones. They were collaborating with their neighbours to do the little spreadsheet and crunch the numbers and see the result that benefited their neighbours.

The US gives its Puzzle Demons hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and says the only way to actually pay that off is indentured corporate servitude doing something evil. They numb themselves in the moment to deal with it and find ways to justify it after. Their career history pushes them further into antisocial jobs where they can stomach the philosophical side because they weren’t required to take philosophy classes and were told to look down on humanities students.

Give 'em NASA and sure it’s expensive. Sure most of the results are just cool new space pictures I’ll look at a few times. Sure I’d benefit more from social spending. But I can’t enjoy those parks if the Puzzle Demons are building murder robots that anyone can fly. I want them building really complex rockets that only a handful of heavily screened PhD-tier astronauts can fly. I don’t want them going to SpaceX and making profitable things because that profit enables Elon Musk and restricts development to short-term goals and marketable products. I want them in a strictly regulated government lab using their little graphing calculators to crunch the numbers and be some other planet’s problem. Not the one I have to live on.

edit: And every satellite pointed outward is one that isn’t pointed inward. It’s the same job to build and control either. Fund the ones that point outward and make all the Science Kids want to grow up to look at cool space pictures instead of surveilling their neighbours.

There’s a special kind of nerd that I call Puzzle Demons. They have big brains and they get satisfaction from solving puzzles without thinking about them. It doesn’t matter what the puzzle is so long as it’s a challenge to solve. They’ll look back on their work with satisfaction because they solved the puzzle, regardless of what that work is.

Puzzle Demons in the 1940s built V-2 rockets. We gave them space travel and the puzzle became making the rocket leave the atmosphere instead of hitting cities. That space travel made helpful consumer technologies to survive in extreme environments, things that were otherwise too expensive for commercial R&D.

Then we killed NASA in the 1980s. The Puzzle Demons had no socially positive puzzle. They built the tech industry instead. I dated a Puzzle Demon whose fun little puzzle to solve every day was designing the UI for smart locks that go on the bunkers of the wealthy. She was thrilled to make locking herself out of the bunker more user-friendly. There are Puzzle Demons at the social media websites whose entire job is making them more addictive for children. Puzzle Demons gave us crypto, guided missiles, murder robots, AI slop, and corporate efficiency consulting.

We need space exploration to pacify the Puzzle Demons. Without it, the population is still encouraged to go into STEM but most of the STEM jobs are profoundly evil. You stick them in a NASA office and they’re just building useful things. Otherwise the prestige jobs are with defense contractors, tech companies, and multinationals.

What kind of silly baby are you?

:so-far: $4/gal so far

[Live August 2026 reaction:] I wish I had bought an ebike before the normal summer fuel price increases and this unprecedented supply-side crisis with no clear resolution combined to make unaffordable fuel I can’t find. There was a better stock of cheaper ebikes back then, especially before the same oil availability impacted maritime shipping and the economic crash cost me the job I need to pay for my car I can’t use. Then I would have at least been able to reliably travel 80km on my own schedule no matter how bad it is.

how bad it is so far

Horticulture is nice. You get most of the benefits of a trade and honest manual work (outside of union protections in most cases), but it’s also a deeply interdisciplinary science that lets you impact the world in a lot of different ways while forcing you to touch and understand grass. With the same garden I get to do creative, intellectual, manual, and political work with really interesting spatiotemporal angles. There’s public education and anthropology and ecological utility in choosing one plant over another based on analysing the site across all the physical sciences, then lifting heavy rocks to achieve something that benefits my neighbours and wildlife pets. Most of my coworkers are natural scientists of some kind so we spend all day in the sun having interesting conversations about the landscape and urbanism.

I faced this problem a lot on reddit when my subreddits took off. The closest I got to identifying a cause was with the volume of posts. At a certain point, the daily volume is so high that posts have to compete for attention to get on the front page. The quicker a post can be read, the faster it will be upvoted and the more the algorithm will weight it because it got early interaction. This gives posters an incentive to make memes, images, and jokes instead of an effort post that takes ten minutes to read. New users attracted to the snowballing population see a page full of these posts being upvoted, so their default incentive is to post what already works. Old users are turned off by the stale regurgitation of the worst posts and leave, so you only have new subscribers posting references to things they weren’t there for.

Hexbear has remained pretty consistent even back in the 2016-2020 r/chapotraphouse days because it’s consciously meta-modernist. We’re coming out of irony-poisoned postmodernist forums like reddit and hate how that shaped interactions. The in-jokes have their role but aren’t the feature, with effort posts being something the community rewards. Usually comment threads will have good discussions because they’re niche topics that the users are passionate about, and removing downvoting helps to discourage anything but discussion even when you disagree with someone.

That’s my default for most dishes with the addition of mushroom powder for extra umami. It’s a versatile base to expand on for the specific flavour profile of the dish, and alone it’s enough to improve any generic thing I cook without dominating the flavour.

Something about Matt Elliott’s Only Myocardial Infarction Can Break Your Heart, especially with the main track “The Right to Cry” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8x1GX8dKvs), always stood out to me as such a vicious title.

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

MLK’s perspective on centrists is perennial. They’re Judas goats.