Incorrect. Voting has worked in several cases in the 20th century alone. The problem is, that voting has to be followed by imprisonment of the fascists and all of their supporters, and it seems like nobody is willing to do that.

(In fairness to Brazil, they at least got this half right)

Well, true. But it sounds like the library didn’t own the book either, all things considered.

Exhibit A for “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.”

I feel like, back in the day, they used to say “in theaters September 9th,” which basically meant “[this movie will be] in theaters [starting on] September 9th.” But then with the rise of streaming they wanted to make clear that the movie would not be released on streaming initially, so they awkwardly tagged an “only” to the beginning of the statement. You’re right that the “only” was meant to modify “in theaters,” and not the date, but I don’t remember that construction independently before streaming.

Re-watch it if you don’t believe me.

Why on earth would I not believe you? Nobody legitimately makes the distinction unless it’s ambiguous, and to Trump’s tapioca pudding brain, it’s far from ambiguous because the US dollar is the only dollar that exists.

This is a weird attempt at a gotcha, when the reality is that he has no intention of fulfilling this promise and no intention of justifying his failure to do so. If the GOP retains control of the legislative branch, the checks will never be mentioned again.

That’s a good question, and I absolutely don’t mind you asking. Honestly, I didn’t even make the connection between the “threenager” phenomenon and the fact that all three of our bad ones happened when they were new siblings until I was writing up that earlier post, so take my half-decade old memories here with that particular grain of salt; the real reason may well be “oh we never really thought about the connection.”

When we decided to go for our second, I think it was the fact that our first was a really easy one-year-old at the time, so we were feeling the hubris of new parents with an easy kid. He had been a slightly tricky newborn (medically), but then he turned into the sweetest kid, so we figured we were over the hump; he didn’t become difficult behaviorally until right around the time our second child was born. We also knew we wanted to have more than one, and had seen some research (and had some personal experience) that suggested a two-year age gap was best for sibling bonding and closeness, though I think I’ve heard that data has been questioned more recently.

And then our second was born, and life was kind of hell for a little while because she wasn’t sleeping and he was a threenager (and so you’ll note that the gap between the second and third is definitely bigger than between the other two gaps), but just like it got bad at the same moment, they both straightened up at more or less the same moment, too; he was potty trained, she started sleeping better, and they were suddenly really good friends, so we knew (or thought we knew) that the hard times would end and that we could make it through more or less unscathed.

At that point, we switched from the hubris of new parents to the hubris of parents of a big family, so after the third’s infancy was more or less fine and we made it through the second’s threenager phase, we went for a fourth, assuming we knew the drill. We didn’t; our third child’s absolutely horrible year from 2½-3½ was like nothing we’d experienced before or since. But it also ended, eventually. We had already decided even before the last one was born that we were done at four anyway, so we knew that it could only last for so much longer.

So I guess the tl;dr answer would be, ignorance at first, and after that confidence (hubris?) that we could handle it. In hindsight now, I don’t regret it. I honestly don’t even know if I’d warn new parents not to do it the way we did it if they wanted to, though I would give them the heads up that it’ll be tough for a while, and strongly recommend that they get a good community around them.

I don’t know you or your family at all, of course, so I wouldn’t counsel you either way; but I will say that the people who are unsure about whether they’re up to the task are, in my experience, the people who are most up to it. The people who are confident about it all are probably going to crash and burn, and the people who are sure they aren’t up to it are probably right. But if that worry about the first year overlapping the third is the only thing holding you back, maybe the assurance that it ends eventually will help.

(Sorry about the novel! Hope that helps.)

“So where are you going on vacation?”

“America.”

“Again?”

“Oh, no, not that America. I’m going to America.”

“Wait…the one next to America, or the one inside America?”

“The one just outside Super America.”

“Wow, nice. How are you getting there?”

“I have a flight out of America on Americaday and then I’m going through America by way of America to America, where I’m America-ing a rental America to America.”

“America America America America?”

“America America, America America. America America America America America America America America America America America America America America. America America America America America, America America…America America America America America America.”

“America. America America!”

“America!”

I’m a dad to an 11-year-old, a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 4-year-old. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I have felt all the ways you’re feeling now and so I do have some thoughts.

First of all, yes, it does get easier. You’re at or near the absolute hardest part of having a young child. For my kids, I won’t sugarcoat it, the hardest part was when they were three (we called it “threenagers”), so you may have another year or two yet to go (though if you look at our age span, you’ll see that we always had another baby right around that time, too, right up until the last one who was the easiest, so take that as you will). But after that phase, I will honestly say that my kids have become four of my best friends. It’s a weird friendship, but it is a very rewarding one.

Second, there are different kinds of hard. You mentioned the rut, the exhaustion, the amplification of existing depression and anxiety, and the feeling like you aren’t strong enough to do a good job; that’s a great summary of the four different ways it gets hard. Not all of them get easier all at once, but they do all get easier. Kids grow up. That’s both a blessing and a curse.

Third, part of the way it gets easier is that you just learn better ways to deal with the stuff that’s hard. I needed a routine so that my days didn’t become a rut, and I needed to journal (my form of journaling is heavy on photography right now) so that I could see all the ways I was actually doing a good job. It sounds like you’re already medicated and in therapy (it took me four times as long in parenting to get to that point, good on you). I will be honest, I still haven’t really found a good way to get enough sleep. But I have it on pretty good authority that teenagers sleep a lot, so I’m hopeful that it’ll sort itself out soon.

Overall…well, I’ll put it like this: Last year, my oldest beat me at chess, 100% legit, for the first time. My 9-year-old is maybe the most thoughtful and empathetic person I’ve ever known. My 6-year-old just learned how to read (a bit late), I think mostly so he can play Pokemon for the first time. My 4-year-old is just so excited about everything and anything. They’re making friends and having a life outside of me, they’re helping out around the house, and they’re coming together as siblings.

Being able to write a paragraph like that is what makes it worth it, and what really makes it easier in the long run. Sometimes the greatest accomplishment is just keeping them alive for twenty-four hours (and I don’t just mean right at the beginning), but eventually you get new and different problems and they start helping with the solutions.

At the end of the day, you obviously care a lot, and that’s the #1 clearest characteristic of a successful parent. So it sounds to me like you’re on the right track.

That’s a wide opening for a lawsuit, though. This is the kind of thing they’re probably telling the truth about, at least in as much as what they intend to do.

Hmmm. Interesting, I hadn’t thought of that. So maybe there’s a need for a bike horn that’s super loud and that you can trigger with a finger while you’re braking.

You could probably get a ton of mileage out of an aerosol air horn, if those are available in your area.

Oh, I remember this one. I kind of buy it.

Ok, so in the TV show Stargate SG-1, the Stargate program is an Air Force initiative to use an ancient alien device to send teams through a wormhole to planets in distant reaches of the galaxy where they interact with aliens and humans from other worlds.

One of those humans, having become a refugee on Earth after losing a war to aliens, creates a television show which essentially “files off the serial numbers” of the actual Stargate program.

When the Air Force learns about this, they allow the show to remain on the air, because that way if the story of the Stargate program ever leaks, anyone who hears it will dismiss it as the ravings of a fanboy who got too into the show, or of a conspiracy theory who can’t tell fiction from reality.

So the first part is, I think that the US Government could totally be using this to hide something really wild. Maybe there actually is an Upside Down (“oh really? Like in Stranger Things? Suuuure.”) or maybe aliens really do exist (“bro, you’ve been watching too much X-Files.”) and maybe not only do they exist but they’ve formed this whole secret subculture on Earth (“dude, that’s literally just the premise of Men In Black.”).

But see, now we run into a truly Heller-esque bit of circular logic, because with me even saying that, now the government can just say, “come on buddy, that’s just the plot of season 5 episode 12 of a TV show you’re on the record as a fan of.”

This also helps to explain why Trump and his cadre hasn’t blabbed about aliens in the past decade. They were told about the secret government program, but then they were also told exactly which TV shows and movies have been made to discredit the truth, and exactly how the conspiracy would make them look like laughable idiots if they revealed the truth.

tl;dr: superheroes are real, they’re way more like The Avengers than you’d think, they have an airtight plan to discredit anyone who leaks it, and “Wormhole X-treme!” is part of the conspiracy

I mentioned two of those above, and the third is one of the six I was thinking about (alongside System76 and Slimbook, etc; Pine is getting out of the game for the time being, iirc). I own a Framework and love it, but none of them are mid-range brands. None of them ship worldwide. Apple is…well, arguably worse than Microsoft, and they literally only have one mid-range laptop SKU. Likewise, Acer and HP (and maybe Dell?) each have, like, one laptop that will ship without an OS.

This is what I’m saying. Trying to buy a laptop without Windows installed means accepting that you’ll either be buying at a higher rung on the pricing ladder (not that it’s never worth it, but not everyone can afford to climb), or you’ll be buying a disposable machine.

Ok. But for people who need a laptop today, they don’t have the luxury of waiting for us to live in a more just world. They have to deal with the world we’re currently living in, and this is a fair way of registering our frustrations with the OEMs about the state of affairs they’ve put into place.

There are like six manufacturers that let you buy a full-featured laptop without a Windows license included in the price, and one of them is Apple. None of them are budget-friendly brands, except the Chromebook manufacturers who are selling near-e-waste. Microsoft has done a gigantic amount of work signing deals with OEMs over the past forty years to make sure that Windows is the default and keeping it off the device is hard.

Even refurbishers and second-hand resellers often put Windows on a device by default. It’s massively easier to buy a device without an OS at all than it used to be, and even with that, you have to either pay for a more expensive machine or settle for something really underpowered.

Skip today’s Windows 11 update

Way ahead of ya, champ.

Ah, I thought you were doing the “I can’t believe that only 60%…” thing. Sorry about that.

And 21% of Americans don’t like apple pie. At some point you have to recognize overwhelming support when you see it.

Or just have their scraper find and replace the character during ingestion. They’re probably already doing it for common misspellings like “teh” anyway. In either case, you’re right. It’s not even costing the LLM any measurable time or energy.