I immediately watched it. It’s great to have him back.

Braess's paradox

Dietrich Braess, a mathematician at Ruhr University, Germany, noticed the flow in a road network could be impeded by adding a new road, when he was working on traffic modelling. His idea was that if each driver is making the optimal self-interested decision as to which route is quickest, a shortcut could be chosen too often for drivers to have the shortest travel times possible. More formally, the idea behind Braess's discovery is that the Nash equilibrium may not equate with the best overall flow through a network

“Slay” is the male equivalent of slay. It’s from drag culture - particularly ballroom. I get the joke, but just wanted to point that out.

Just for those unaware - the social security pay-in is a percentage of your income, but the maximum amount of your income subject to social security withholding is capped at a fixed level that increases annually. The last time I looked, the cutoff was somewhere around $138k. So if your cumulative income for the year hits $138k in, say, June, you are no longer subject to SS withholding and your weekly paycheck goes up by a couple of hundred dollars or so as a result. Most people don’t hit this amount, but enough do that were the cap eliminated, it would increase solvency and possibly allow for an increase in payouts.

On the flip side, your payout from social security is proportional to what your pay in was. It’s still capped, and it’s not really enough to live on. Those who hit the cap typically have multiple other sources of savings for retirement and could easily contribute more to the national program.

Anyone who has had their bike stolen or car broken into or otherwise be victim of a crime the police don’t really care about knows this is not the case. You’ll be told to come in and fill out a form, or if you’re lucky you might have someone call you and fill out the form for you. They’re not going to send a cop out for that, and the form doesn’t really get acted on, it’s just for records keeping.

Not from my office window per se, but on my way into work I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. That was weird and messed me up for a bit.

The weirdest one was probably back in March/April of 2020 when we were in a total covid lockdown, and an ice cream truck - completely alone on the street and the only vehicle seen for days - slowly drove by while playing Christmas music. That was some Twilight Zone shit.

“This deal keeps getting worse all the time.”

I’ve been quitting streaming providers left and right. I lost count of how many services I had, but it was probably up to $150 per month or more. Because I like the ability to just watch whatever I want, I’d sign up for a service to get a particular show or movie, then just not cancel. I’d forget I had a service, then find some movie in a search, and suddenly remember I had showtime or shudder.

Once they started banning family sharing of accounts and increasing prices, I was done. I could have gone on for years like that - I love movies and I binge television shows, but one of my main uses is watching in remote sessions with isolated family members.

As part of the deal, she will serve six years of probation, will be fined $6,000 and will have to write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents. She also agreed to testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials.

They gave her what barely amounts to a slap on the wrist. I hope they did so in exchange for some pretty damning testimony.

I’m blocked from the article, but as someone who used to work in the industry I’m going to hazard what I think is a safe guess, and which is an under discussed aspect of intelligence.

If you put 5 cctv cameras in the worst parts of the city, you can pay someone $20/hour and have them monitored 24/7. The person’s one job is to call in a crime when it occurs and vector in police. As long as they’re not terminally addicted to instagram, you have that area covered.

Bump that up to 10,000 cameras and you run into a problem. You’re not going to hire 2000 people to watch them. You’re going to try to come up with something clever, maybe, that allows you to track back to a crime that was otherwise reported, but real time responses are out the window.

Even those that supported the development of the levels of surveillance that Snowden exposed have to acknowledge that looking at everything means you’re looking at nothing. The signal to noise ratio goes to absolute shit. It’s actually worse than useless because you’re thinking you’re monitoring, but you’re really not because you’re drowning in noise. It’s like they teach every yuppie in B school - if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. There’s a known phenomenon in defense and intelligence to center in on the gee whiz aspects of technology and lose sight of the actual mission.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist and as much as I dislike the current government of Israel, I don’t think this was some kind of nefarious plot. I think it was a massive fuck up thats going to have a body count in the tens of thousands and that will change the history of the region for a decade.

In any given exchange of violence for these actors, it is a pretty reliable bet to say that there will be about a 10:1 ratio of Palestinians versus Israelis killed. I expect that we will see between 10k and 20k Palestinians killed, and probably somewhere less than 2k total Israelis killed. I think there will be fewer people killed by bombs and bullets than by the blockade. I suspect 90% of the casualties will be civilians. I think that all of the people who die in fear and pain while hiding in their homes as well as those who die on the barricades will be forgotten in a year or so.

I also suspect that the remaining checks on Bibi’s already significant power will end, and that Hamas will effectively cease to exist as a political power.

Still not a drag queen.

I think my gmail account by itself is of legal age.