Apparently it’s supposed to be refundable when you leave, but also the government is not expecting to issue many refunds?

I’m surprised that such a tourism-crushing policy was not in the news (or at least not in the news that I saw) before the bill passed.

Back in grad school we had to stage an intervention for one of the other students who thought he looked good with just a mustache.

Then we had to stage another intervention for him when he thought it was ok to microwave fish in the common room. It turned out that he had meal-prepped a week’s worth of frozen fish lunches.

For years, my dog had one ear that would stand up and another that would flop down. He looked like he was wearing a beret.

Then he got an ear infection in the floppy ear and after that was cured, the ear wasn’t floppy anymore. He was still cute, but less cute…

I still don’t understand how this is supposed to work even in principle. Clearly the sort of people who voted in the primary prefer Mamdani by a wide margin. Is Cuomo expecting to be elected by people who didn’t care enough to vote in the primary but do care enough to vote for him despite the fact that he’s not the Democratic candidate? Does he think that there are more people like that than there are people who voted for him in the primary but will vote for Mamdani in the general election?

I don’t understand the long-term purpose of a cease-fire. Is it an admission that Ukraine will not be able to retake occupied territory and an attempt to limit further losses?

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Kill them with kindness.

Plenty of people want to inflict pain or see pain inflicted, as long as it’s on the appropriate victims, and these people aren’t all on the right. It’s a common human trait.

The Hobbit trilogy. It’s hard to understand how Peter Jackson could mess up movie after movie after movie like that.

In my admittedly limited experience, women willing to kiss a guy are still often going to be reluctant to do something that they think might hurt that guy, even if the guy insists otherwise.

But if there are no bisexuals, there are no unicorns…

the official app doesn’t have a way to save images from comments anymore

Now even the web interface doesn’t make it straightforward to save images. “Open image in new tab” and “Save image as” don’t work.

I assumed that the VC is talking about small startups, the sort that have a dozen employees and just one project.

I do generally lean towards lowercase-L libertarianism (I don’t support the Libertarian party) but running a huge deficit isn’t libertarian. Taxes shouldn’t be lower than spending in the long term.

Temporarily having the body of a woman would let me learn the answers to some interesting prurient questions, but if I had my choice of temporary body then I would definitely pick to be a bird and experience what flying feels like.

(I don’t identify as much with my body as some other people apparently do. It’s the only flesh I have ever been incarnated in so it has a lot of sentimental value but it fundamentally isn’t me. It’s a thing that I have.)

I didn’t mean to imply that Trump’s overall budget is a good one - maybe the cuts could be justified as part of a serious effort to reduce the deficit, but I don’t support them when they’re accompanied by even bigger tax cuts and the deficit grows.

And here I am stuck babysitting an inferior human baby.

So far, Milei has been right and his critics have been wrong. I assume he’ll veto this again.

The thing about government spending (and I’m seeing it come up a lot in the context of Trump’s budget cuts too) is that pretty much all of it is important to someone sympathetic who will experience hardship without it. Reducing spending means taking money away from people who need it, but reducing spending is still sometimes necessary for long-term national prosperity.

they can just hire more people

In software development, it’s not that easy. Having multiple people working on the same code adds a lot of overhead. Also, finding another excellent programmer is slow and expensive. (The “fast, cheap, good: pick two” rule applies.)

Plus, do you want two software developers with a good work/life balance and fulfilling ways to spend their free time, or do you want one software developer with mental issues that, among other things, leave him with nothing to do except work and no source of meaning in life except getting work done? The first option is more dependable, since the guy in the second option is crazy. However, if you’re building a startup then you need to take risks and the second option is the one more likely to create something amazing. (IMO, of course.)

The funny thing is that I empathize with the robot here - there’s no point in doing something like drawing a picture yourself if a machine can do it better, faster, and cheaper. Despite that, I insist on driving a car with a manual transmission. Let robots have art, but they’ll never take mechanical linkages from me! Using a lever to control which gears engage with which other gears is what it means to be human.