The only interesting people on there are trans furries

Somewhere, some trans non-furries and furry non-trans users looked miffed.

It might be interesting to create structures for more shareholder oversight over executive pay.

I’m probably far less concerned about executive pay in general than a number of people here, but my understanding is that in Musk’s case, there have been real questions about the board’s independence.

And Musk has had what I’d call some real errors. I am pretty skeptical about his high profile politicking being good for Tesla. Even if he wanted to support Trump, he certainly did not need to become the face of DOGE or be personally doing his $1m lotteries for voting. The Cybertruck flopped.

And he’s not doing Tesla as a full-time job. He’s also CEO, chairman, and CTO of SpaceX.

It’s also not clear to me that even if he can grow an early stage company, that he’s great at dealing with a mature one. Tesla has the largest market cap of any automaker in the world by a large margin. They aren’t a startup any more.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/largest-automakers-by-market-cap/

I’m dubious that Tesla couldn’t obtain a CEO who could do at least as effective a job for far less pay.

warrior ethos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartan_army

The Spartan army was the principal ground force of Sparta. It stood at the center of the ancient Greek city-state, consisting of citizens trained in the disciplines and honor of a warrior society.[1] Subjected to military drills since early manhood, the Spartans became one of the most feared and formidable military forces in the Greek world, attaining legendary status in their wars against Persia. At the height of Sparta’s power—between the 6th and 4th centuries BC—other Greeks commonly accepted that “one Spartan was worth several men of any other state.”[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_the_militaries_of_ancient_Greece

Homosexuality in the militaries of ancient Greece was a significant aspect across the ancient Greek city-states, ranging from being a core part of military life to being an accepted practice of some individual soldiers. It was regarded as contributing to morale.[1] Although the primary example is the Sacred Band of Thebes, a unit said to have been formed of same-sex couples, the Spartan tradition of military heroism has also been explained in light of strong emotional bonds resulting from homosexual relationships.[2] Various ancient Greek sources record incidents of courage in battle and interpret them as motivated by homoerotic bonds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_Japan

Samurai shudō

In contrast to the norms in religious circles, in the warrior (samurai) class it was customary for a boy in the wakashū age category to undergo training in the martial arts by apprenticing to a more experienced adult man. According to Furukawa, the relationship was based on the model of a typically older nenja, paired with a typically younger chigo.[1] The man was permitted, if the boy agreed, to take the boy as his lover until he came of age; this relationship, often formalized in a “brotherhood contract”,[12] was expected to be exclusive, with both partners swearing to take no other (male) lovers.

This practice, along with clerical pederasty, developed into the codified system of age-structured homosexuality known as shudō, abbreviated from wakashūdō, the “way (Tao) of wakashū”.[14] The older partner, in the role of nenja, would teach the chigo martial skills, warrior etiquette, and the samurai code of honor, while his desire to be a good role model for his chigo would lead him to behave more honorably himself; thus a shudō relationship was considered to have a “mutually ennobling effect”.[14] In addition, both parties were expected to be loyal unto death, and to assist the other both in feudal duties and in honor-driven obligations such as duels and vendettas. Although sex between the couple was expected to end when the boy came of age, the relationship would, ideally, develop into a lifelong bond of friendship. At the same time, sexual activity with women was not barred (for either party), and once the boy came of age, both were free to seek other wakashū lovers.

Like later Edo same-sex practices, samurai shudō was strictly role-defined; the nenja was seen as the active, desiring, penetrative partner, while the younger, sexually receptive wakashū was considered to submit to the nenja’s attentions out of love, loyalty, and affection, rather than sexual desire[1]d] Among the samurai class, adult men were (by definition) not permitted to take the wakashū role; only preadult boys (or, later, lower-class men) were considered legitimate targets of homosexual desire. In some cases, shudō relationships arose between boys of similar ages, but the parties were still divided into nenja and wakashū roles.[1]

I mean, if you asked me to make a list of militaries with a long-lasting reputation for military culture that echoes down even to today, those would be pretty high on my list.

Probably anything that a bunch of low income people in SoCal do is going to affect California a lot more than the Trump administration. Heck, might even help the administration. The administration has been trying to paint cities as being overrun by crine and disorder and requiring the administration’s involvement.

Nick Fuentes says

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Fuentes

Nicholas Joseph Fuentes (born August 18, 1998) is an American far-right[7] political commentator, activist and live streamer. He identifies as a Christian nationalist[6] and part of the incel subculture. His views have been described as racist,[8] white supremacist,[9] misogynistic, homophobic,[10] antisemitic,[11][12] and Islamophobic.[13] Furthermore, he has been described as a neo-Nazi[14][15][16] and a Holocaust denier.[17] His supporters are known as Groypers.

I’m not looking at what was proposed, but honestly, Trump’s tariffs might exceed the effect of a carbon tax on shipping emissions, in terms of making shipping more-costly than would have otherwise been the case. Doesn’t mean they reflect them exactly, mind — distance isn’t a factor with tariffs, and it is with any fee — but…

kagis

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/imports-seen-well-below-average-for-rest-of-2025

U.S. imports seen well below average for rest of 2025

NRF says frontloading, tariffs to squeeze container volumes.

The fact that some of that is frontloading is fair, and that doesn’t produce a longer-term reduction in shippings. Like, companies moved as much product as they could into warehouses prior to tariff enforcement going into force, to limit their impact. But over time, stocks in those warehouses are going to become exhausted, US tariffs at borders will start being passed on, and you’ll have higher prices and less purchasing of products with a higher price elasticity of demand.

Monthly import volumes through major U.S container ports are expected to slip below the 2 million TEU mark through the remainder of the year, according to Global Port Tracker data report released today by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.

“This year’s peak season has come and gone, largely due to retailers frontloading imports ahead of reciprocal tariffs taking effect,” NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold said in a release. “New sectoral tariffs continue to be announced, but most retailers are well-stocked for the holiday season and doing as much as they can to shield their customers from the costs of tariffs for as long as they can.”

The trade group said October is forecast at 1.97 million TEUs, down 12.3% y/y, and November at 1.75 million TEUs, down 19.2%. December volume is forecast at 1.72 million TEUs, a decline of 19.4% and the slowest month since 1.62 million TEUs in March 2023.

ICE has no purpose. They’ve only been an agency since 2003.

That was just when the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service merged. The people and infrastructure and all that were already there. I mean, okay, sure, you could probably return to that state of affairs, split them up again on an organization chart, but I’m assuming that that’s not what anyone saying that they don’t want to fund ICE is concerned about.

“Funding” ICE? Like, you’re saying that it shouldn’t have funding?

I mean, ICE is the US’s border control. Like, they enforce regulation of movement of people and goods. The US hasn’t had uncontrolled borders in terms of people just rolling in and living and working there since ~1870 and I don’t know if it’s ever had fully unrestricted movement of goods; historically, high-tariffs/low-tariffs was a major part of American politics.

I’m pretty confident that there’s no chance of an open-border US happening in the foreseeable future (and ditto for probably all developed countries, though you might get stuff like the European Union…but that’s more analogous to states in the US, where the EU just pushed border control to the outer perimeter of a collection of states that internally agreed to common rules on borders).

I mean, I’m serious. Like, it’s a big CRM platform that people use and I understand has an ecosystem of software that integrates with it, is well-established.

It’s like, someone may not like Photoshop. Frankly, I avoided it in favor of Gimp since the early 2000s, and I really don’t like the fact that it’s SaaS now.

But you can’t just say “Photoshop sucks, artists use charcoal sticks now”. You have to have that alternative, like Gimp. And even then, people are going to have some loss in experience and loss in integrated software (like plugins and stuff) in a switch.

I don’t do CRM. But my understanding is that it does matter and that that ecosystem matters, and “just throw one’s hands up in the air and tell people not to use a CRM platform” is probably not going to fly.

kagis

I thought that SugarCRM was open-source, but it looks like I’m a decade out-of-date — it started as an open-source project, but apparently the company founded around it took it proprietary. And I bet that it doesn’t compare in size in terms of people with experience with it or software that integrates with it.

kagis

https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-ecosystem/

The Salesforce ecosystem is an absolute behemoth. Salesforce employs around 70,000 people and is the biggest employer in Silicon Valley. They also have a market cap of a quarter of a trillion – pretty impressive, right?

However, when you look at the Salesforce ecosystem, there are 15M people involved in Salesforce’s community who work as end users, in consultancies, and for app companies. The Salesforce economy is also predicted to generate revenues of six times that of Salesforce by 2026.

Like, you’re not gonna move that overnight.

It could be that Salesforce sucks on a technical level as a platform. I don’t know, haven’t used it. But what I’m saying is that I suspect that for a lot of users, they aren’t in a great position to plop in an existing replacement overnight.

EDIT: It sounds like there’s a continuing open-source fork of SugarCRM, SuiteCRM. This is the first I’ve heard of it, though, so I kinda suspect that the userbase isn’t massive.

Is there a comparable CRM alternative?

When my uncle was president, the fertility rate in this country was 3.5%. Today, it is 1.6%. The replacement rate, in other words the amount of fertility that you need in order to keep your population even, is 2.1%. We are below replacement right now. That is a national security threat to our country and we know why this is happening, and President Trump is addressing the root causes through his MAHA agenda of reducing endocrine disruptors, the exposure to chemicals that decrease fertility.

Today, the average teenager in this country has 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man

I very strongly doubt that the limiting factor on the total fertility rate is male infertility.

EDIT: Also, RFK, Jr., it’s not “3.5%”, “1.6%”, and “2.1%”. It’s “3.5”, “1.6”, and “2.1”, as in, children per woman. Okay, maybe that’s being pedantic, but I’m also not the Secretary of Health and Human Services with speechwriters and a ton of experts advising me announcing focuses in national policy.

My understanding is that basically the political issue is that as we shifted to a more-specialized set of people working in various areas, experts — usually people with a university education in a particular relevant area — became the decision-makers. That led to some other people feeling disenfranchised, feeling that they had no input, because nobody cared about their positions.

That became exacerbated on things like homosexuality, where you had the reclassification of homosexuality in the DSM causing domain experts to be touching on things that some felt to be value questions, things that should not be a matter for specialists.

So what the Trump administration is doing is letting people feel that they’re getting to have their input, even though they aren’t some elite domain expert. Democracy has been restored, because now Joe Blow gets to say things and be have his voice visibly heard, rather than just being condescendingly ignored by bureaucrats who make the calls.

Trump beating up on Ivy League universities is political theater putting them in their place.

Stuff like that. Makes people who felt disempowered feel like order has been restored.

“Fluoride disconnects one from God,” a listener with the username “Peter & Melissa BioHacking Stem Cells” wrote during one call.

One can but hope that Satan never discovers Yahweh’s Kryptonite.

I have, in the past, kind of wished that settings and characters could not be copyrighted. I realize that there’s work that goes into creating each, but I think that we could still live in a world where those weren’t protected and interesting stuff still gets created. If that were to happen, then I agree, it’d be necessary to make it very clear who created what, since the setting and characters alone wouldn’t uniquely identify the source.

Like, there are things like Greek mythology or the Robin Hood collection of stories, very important works of art from our past, that were created by many different unaffiliated people. They just couldn’t be created today with our modern stories, because the settings and characters would be copyrighted and most rightsholders don’t just offer a blanket grant of rights to use them.

That’s actually one unusual and notable thing H.P. Lovecraft did — if you’ve ever seen stuff in the Cthulhu Mythos, that’s him. He encouraged anyone who wanted to do so to create stuff using his universe. One reason why we have that kind of collection of Lovecraftian stuff.

But you can’t do that with, say, Star Wars or a lot of other beloved settings.

Nintendo shouldn’t be able to patent game mechanics

Those are patents, not copyrights. There are a bunch of different forms of intellectual property. Off the top of my head:

• Copyright

• Trademark

• Patent

• Moral (not very substantial in the US, but more-meaningful in France)

There is a class of products that consist of a hardware box that you ram your network traffic moving between different business locations in a company through that tries to accelerate this traffic. F5 is one manufacturer of them. One technique these use is to have private key material such that they can pretend to be the server at the other end of a TLS connection — that’s most of the “encrypted” traffic that you see on the Internet. If you go to an “https” URL in your Web browser, you’re talking TLS, using an encrypted connection. They can then decode the traffic and use various caching and other modification techniques on the decoded information to reduce the amount of traffic moving across the link and to reduce effective latency, avoid transferring duplicate information, etc. Once upon a time, when there was a lot less encrypted traffic in the world, you could just do this by working on cleartext data, but over time, network traffic have increasingly become encrypted. Many such techniques become impossible with encrypted traffic. So they have to be able to break the encryption on the traffic, to get at the cleartext material.

The problem is that to let this box impersonate such a server so that it can get at the unencrypted traffic, they have to have a private key that permits them to impersonate the real server. Having access to this key is also interesting to an attacker, because it would similarly let them impersonate the real server, which would let them view or modify network traffic in transit. If one could push new, malicious software up to control these boxes, one could steal these keys, which would be of interest to attackers in attacking other systems.

It sounds, to my brief skim, like attackers got control of the portion of F5’s internal network that is involved with building and distributing software updates to these boxes.

The problem is that if you’re a sysadmin at, say, General Dynamics (an American defense contractor which, from a quick search, apparently uses these products from F5), you may have properly secured your servers internal to the company in all ways…but then the network admin basically let another box, which wasn’t properly secured, into the encrypted communications between your inter-office servers on the network. It could extract information from your encrypted communication streams, or modify it. God only knows what important data you’ve been shoveling across those connections, or what you’ve done with information that you trusted to remain unmodified while crossing such a connection. It’s be a useful tool for an attacker to stick all sorts of new holes into customer networks that are harder to root out.

Apparently there’s competition for the same crowd.

https://www.dw.com/en/russias-anti-woke-visa-woos-western-expatriates/a-73214511

Russia’s ‘anti-woke visa’ woos Western expatriates

07/09/2025

Moscow’s “Shared Values Visa” welcomes conservative migrants who are against LGBTQ+ rights or globalism in general.

A reactionary was a rare and precious thing, something to be courted, lured, seduced.

I mean, any country that wants to do so could make the offer. It’s the destination country that makes the call.

The proposals also advise Trump to prioritize Europeans who have been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.”

“We don’t have enough white nationalists.”

Everyone looked glum.

“What about that Farage guy? He’s got some.”

Everyone brightened up.

It definitely is bad, but it may not be as bad as I thought above.

It sounds like they might actually just be relying on certificates pre-issued by a (secured) CA for specific hosts to MITM Web traffic to specific hosts, and they might not be able to MITM all TLS traffic, across-the-board (i.e. their appliance doesn’t get access to the internal CA’s private key). Not sure whether that’s the case — that’s just from a brief skim — and I’m not gonna come up to speed on their whole system for this comment, but if that’s the case, then you’d still be able to attack probably a lot of traffic going to theoretically-secured internal servers if you manage to get into a customer network and able to see traffic (which compromising the F5 software updates would also potentially permit for, unfortunately) but hopefully you wouldn’t be able to hit, say, their VPN traffic.