If only. A bad tenant with a dog can do an obscene amount of damage to a property. The people who leave a place with torn up walls and urine+feces throughout the carpet tend not to be the kind of people who will gladly pay extra fees for the damage they caused.

The landlord can sue them, but that's a slow expensive process and there's a good chance they will never recover enough to pay for the damage.

This seems right to me. Nuclear proliferation could very well end up being the most consequential legacy of this administration. Their malicious incompetence in this area has dimmed the outlook for humanity to a material degree.

The amount of countries with nukes is going to increase dramatically in the medium term. That will mean exponentially more opportunities for a nuclear conflict to break out. I think there is a very good chance we see a nuclear war in the next couple decades, and the odds are dramatically higher than they were pre-trump.

The only spot I sort of disagree is that I think it's an uncomfortably short hop from a moderately sized nuclear war to a global nuclear war, and I think the chances of the latter are uncomfortably high now as well.

Calling people's anger purely psychological is simply wrong and extremely out of touch. Perhaps you personally are in a privileged position where this is all great, but most people aren't. Most Americans work a regular job and don't have a huge amount of wealth. They make the same amount they did at the beginning of the year, but all of their expenses have increased by a significant amount since then.

Maybe down the line they'll be able to enjoy marginally cheaper socks or TVs or whatever, but that does nothing to help them afford higher gas and grocery prices this month.

Beyond speakers, this is great advice for anyone whose public work you appreciate that isn't a major celebrity. I've sent questions and compliments to creators of all kinds of work I enjoy and more often than not gotten a genuinely thoughtful and appreciative response back. It could be a small website creator, a researcher in a field outside my own, an author, or an open source project maintainer.

My sense is that not many people do this and anyone who is not mega-famous rarely hears from strangers who like their work.

Cloudflare has gotten out of hand for me lately. Not even solving a challenge will get me through many times, I'll just get straight up blocked from normal browsing. I guess because I do crazy things like use Firefox and block some trackers I get punished more than the average internet user.

I don't like the way things are heading. The free and open internet might be fully dead before we realize it.

There's a great episode from the Search Engine podcast about this. The gist is that it takes a lot of concerted effort to make something great, otherwise it will probably suck. The host got interested in a restaurant that seemed obsessive about doing things well and talked to the owner about it. The episode title is "How to pursue excellence ... in noodles".

Yep. I had a recurring contract with a local service company that got bought out by a larger one. Old company had an email that I could message and immediately get a useful reply back from a human. New ownership got rid of that, and their website messaging didn't work. The only way to contact them was to call on the phone.

Who is the phone answered by? A crappy AI voice bot. Getting past that wasted a bunch of my time, followed by talking to person who was useless. Then I finally got through to someone who could actually do something for me. At that point the only help I wanted was to immediately close my account and never do business with them again.

It's wild to me that a private company in a volatile industry like Google can borrow so cheaply for such a long period. I get that they have been wildly profitable and powerful in recent years, but modern history is absolutely stuffed with companies that seemed invincible at one point but then were dead or dying a decade later.

Tech in particular has an awful lot of churn. There's isn't a single tech company in the world that I'm highly confident will be reliably printing money 34 years from now.

Yeah, but on the other hand the borrowing is relatively small compared to the company, so even if the company shrinks by 90% it will still be serviceable. Many western governments including the US have ridiculous debt loads at multiples of their GDPs; such high debt loads push up their interest rates. If you look at a less indebted country, like say Switzerland (22% of GDP, vs 115% for the US), then the premium paid by Alphabet over government bonds is a bit higher: 2.04% on 25y Alphabet CHF bonds vs 0.71/0.62% on 20y/30y Swiss government bonds.

SimpleNote is outstanding. I've gone through countless note apps over the years and this was the only one that stuck long term. Every other option was either too complex for what I needed, got enshittified, or needless UX churn broke my workflow to an unacceptable degree.

Impeachment means nothing without convinction by a super majority in the senate. The republicans had a chance to convict trump and remove him from our politics right after he tried to murder them on Jan 6, but most of them were still to stupid or spineless to vote for it. No chance they are going to suddenly spring into action next year.

We're all stuck with two more years of an increasingly demented trump. The best Dems can do is highlight to incompetence/corruption, limt the damage, and get their own brand out of the mud so they can win a strong majority in 2028.