Posts tagged “politics”

  • Italy has embraced a novel approach to integrate olive oil into its tourism industry through oleotourism, an initiative that invites visitors to engage with the olive oil production process, offering experiences that range from guided tours of olive groves and mills to tasting sessions and educational workshops.
  • Don't Let That Shadow Touch Them: Buy War Bonds -- WWII Poster“In the final analysis, the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind. Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
  • Scottie Scheffler, 2024 PGA Tour Player of the Year, missed the first two tournaments of the season because he needed surgery to repair his hand after slicing it while attempting to make homemade ravioli on Christmas Day.
  • A growing number of US government websites have gone offline as of Saturday, including several related to USAID and others focused on youth programs, Africa, and more.
  • A newly discovered asteroid has a tiny chance of smacking Earth in 2032. It’s very unlikely, thankfully, but what should be truly concerning is that nobody was even aware of it until two days after it made its last closest pass to us.
  • A dire prediction: “[W]hen NIH and other health agencies emerge from the current freeze they will have been emasculated and politicized, prohibited from releasing information and research whose implications the Trump administration doesn’t like, banned from making policy recommendations that are inconvenient for Trump or at odds with the prejudices of the MAGA base.” – via Jodi Ettenberg
  • When I was a kid, most of my possessions were very inexpensive, but tremendously meaningful. A baseball hat or an action figure or a comic book only cost a few dollars, but meant the world to me. My kids have tremendously expensive possessions that are very meaningless. An iPhone or iPad or AirPods cost hundreds or thousands of dollars but have essentially zero sentimental value. I’m sure this says something important about capitalism, but I don’t have time to think about it at the moment.
  • Chris Coyier wrote a little about the pros and cons of maintaining your own website that’s worth a read. (And he mentions POSSE, which is something I love.)
  • Here’s a cool statistical analysis done to determine whether NFL referees unfairly favor the Kansas City Chiefs. (Spoiler: Yup.)

Open Carry? Try Viagra!

  • Axios has put together a handy list of which companies are rolling back DEI policies and which are standing firm.
  • Related: One of my favorite podcasts is The Rest is History. A recent episode highlights an incontrovertible fact plainly obvious to anyone who’s ever had to deal with a toddler. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with a schoolyard bully, a demanding client, a political rival, or Hitler himself. Appeasement never works.
  • If you have an Apple computer, you can click the command key and the plus key to increase the font size in (almost) every app. And command with the minus key makes the font smaller, natch. It might seem like a silly tip, but I can’t tell you how many times someone has been delighted when I show them this.
  • Put your Taylor Swift musical knowledge to the test. – via @lilmisssunshine
  • “Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible.” – John Lennon
  • If you got a new laptop for Christmas, you should grab (at least) one of these 5-in-1 USB-C / HDMI hubs. I keep one in my computer bag and the other is (essentially) what I use as a docking station at home.
  • “Artificial Intelligence will finally have arrived when my laptop can tell me specifically which process is actually still accessing the flash drive I’m trying to eject after closing every open app on the machine.” – via @kiplet

In episode 28 of the Hardcore History Addendum podcast, Dan Carlin discusses how one of the important lessons to be learned from the study of human history is to avoid political extremism like the plague. It seems, though, that — as a species — we are doomed to never learn this lesson, especially since we have extremely recent evidence which shows humans do not even have the capacity to avoid an actual plague like the plague.

Older Entries
Newer Entries

What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.