THERE ARE PLENTY OF ALTERNATIVES TO ADOBE:
Photoshop is SPYING on you now.
This is nuts. @Photoshop has new terms that require you allow them to view everything you create, and reserves the right to deactivate your @Adobe software if you make stuff they don't like. Of course they say "for legal purposes" but we all know… pic.twitter.com/LsZejsE77u
— Grummz (@Grummz) June 5, 2024
I hate software-as-a-service and end-user license agreements are even worse.
HUMAN NATURE NEVER CHANGES: Amazonian Tribe Gets the Internet, Predictable Results Follow.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Consumers say they’re pulling back on tipping servers, drivers and hair stylists.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Follow the Money: Cal State Los Angeles SJP promotes terrorist organization and plane hijacker in fundraising poster.
SPACEX STARSHIP LAUNCH IS SKED FOR 8:50 AM EDT: You can watch here. “Today is just a test, the fourth test of many to come.”
UPDATE: Launch was good, Super Heavy did soft splashdown in the Gulf, Starship now in space.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Soft splashdown for Starship in the Indian Ocean. Some heat damage to flaps and camera, but everything continued to work to the end, and they got data the whole time. Big win. (Bumped).
The embattled governor was keen to trumpet a Fortune Magazine story suggesting that 57 of America’s biggest firms now call the state home, overtaking Texas and New York and putting California at the top of the list for the first time in 10 years.
‘More than Texas. More than Florida. 57 incredible and booming companies, right here in the Golden State,’ he boasted.
But many were keen to point out that people have been heading in the other direction with 340,000 more leaving than arriving in 2022.
Los Angeles has 340,000 fewer people than it did in 2019, while San Francisco, San Diego and Santa Clara counties are each around 40,000 people short.
Florida meanwhile gained nearly 250,000, while Texas had 174,261.
California’s population is 1.2 percent less than it was in 2019 will not reach pre-pandemic numbers until around 2032 on current trends.
The ratio between the number of people who receive benefits to those whose taxes pay for them is worsening, too.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Water Shoes for Women Men Quick-Dry. #CommissionEarned
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Dem ‘Convicted Felon’ Eunuch Chorus Isn’t Gaining an Audience. “Ever since former President Donald Trump was handed a kajillion bogus felony convictions for the equivalent of a handful of parking tickets, his haters have been squawking ‘Convicted felon!’ like short bus parrots. The insane repetition of the phrase is obviously intended to cause damage to Trump’s reputation and election chances.”
MORE ON THE COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW CONTROVERSY: “If you’re a student editor and distrust the leadership, you try to “preempt” it by acting irregularly, as the editors here did by rushing the article online. If you’re on the board and you distrust the student editors, you use that action to justify shuttering the website altogether. If you’re a student editor and distrust other editors, you strategize against them with leaks and so on. And so, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, it goes. The value of routine practices, even at law reviews, is that they help stave off the war of all against all.”
Yes, one of the legacies of the New Left is the repeated thing that routine practices should fall when set against the overwhelming importance of The Current Thing. This is almost always a mistake with dreadful consequences, but the New Left is all about mistakes with dreadful consequences. One might even say that it’s made those mistakes into a routine practice of its own.
GODSPEED…
Now targeting 7:50 a.m. CT for launch of Starship’s fourth flight test. Weather conditions are 95% favorable. The webcast will go live ~30 minutes ahead of liftoff → https://t.co/bJFjLCiTbK pic.twitter.com/Qf8bnsvysd
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 6, 2024
IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE SATIRE, BUT . . .
White House Claims Your Inability To Afford Groceries Is Misinformation https://t.co/9y4Oe29m05 pic.twitter.com/kljLoXTqnq
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 4, 2024
CDR SALAMANDER: I’ll take 10…of everything. Show me you are serious about war west of Wake.
If war should come in the western Pacific against the People’s Republic of China, it will not be a short war. It is delusional to think otherwise.
It will be a maritime and aerospace war. Aircraft will be shot down in significant numbers. Warships – which we do not have the industrial capacity to replace – will be hit and will need repair.
We don’t have the ability to service that need. We have run out of time – our leaders have dithered away precious time.
We no longer have the luxury of appreciating the problem and nit-picking every possible option – much less ignore it.
We will have to find good enough fast enough.
The “unsexy but important” are the key to sustaining the fight, as we continue to ignore them at our strategic peril.
We are in the position of Japan in World War Two — a well-equipped Navy that can’t sustain and replace losses over time.
SPLC IS A HATE GROUP: SPLC Warns of ‘Christian Supremacy’ as a Fundraising Gimmick.
STANDING UP AGAINST BIGOTRY AND VIOLENCE: Indiana Rep Jim Banks Tells WNBA: Protect Caitlin Clark From Assaults. “‘Indiana is a basketball state. We don’t wince at aggressive defense, but this was not an example of playing “tough”; it was a cheap shot that could have resulted in an injury and should not be tolerated,’ Banks said.”
LEFTISM ALWAYS BRINGS HATE, WHATEVER ITS GUISE: Salena Zito: Is Pittsburgh Still Stronger Than Hate?
A little over five years after the deadliest attack on any Jewish community in the United States, barefaced antisemitism has emerged from the darkness with a blatancy and boldness that is breathtaking to behold.
Mistick said that in the aftermath of the shooting, a Christian church opened its doors for Jewish congregants to pray and the Muslim communities raised funds for funeral costs for the mass shooting victims. At a vigil the day after the attack, Wasi Mohamed, the former executive director of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, said, “These are our brothers and sisters … these are our family.”
And seemingly everywhere you went, the Pittsburgh Stronger Than Hate logo, which cleverly had the Steelers’ distinctive mineral elements as part of the design, was on T-shirts, kippahs, lawn signs, hoodies, and more.
This past week, however, Pittsburgh became the site not of strength and unity, but of hatred and division. A group of over 300 far-left activists established a Gaza solidarity encampment on the private property of the University of Pittsburgh, and the community has not been the same since.
The activists, some involved in local Democratic politics and a few actual University of Pittsburgh students, erected a barricade and set up a fence around an encampment filled with small and large tents. The encampment has also included defacing the Cathedral of Learning, blocking the entrances, and defacing the Frick Fine Arts Building with antisemitic graffiti.
Leftism is all about hate. And the “punch-a-Nazi” crowd now sides with Nazis ideas.
RECESSION + STAGFLATION: Is This Something? Tax Receipts Down.
Down means there is less economic activity. Down means less money is being made. You can see in other points on the graph, “down” led to a recession.
We had a recession early in Joe Biden’s term though the press and radically normative economists deny it. A couple of negative quarters of GDP growth is a recession. We have rebounded, but it would not surprise me to see us slip into another one. Of course, you always see it in the rearview mirror since data takes time to get compiled and reported but there are signs.
Tax receipts are one sign. The recent JOLTS number was another. Chicago PMI was another.
The White House informs me that this is all misinformation and that everything is fine.
Flashback: Stagflation is staring Biden in the face — but he refuses to change course.
GRADUALLY AND THEN SUDDENLY: How Debt Ate Chicago.
According to the group Truth in Accounting, Chicago continues to live up to its moniker “Second City” in at least one respect: it has the second-worst debt load of any big city in America—about $43,000 per taxpayer, or almost $40 billion in total. The first is New York City, but Chicago residents also have to deal with Illinois’ debts, which total $42,000 per taxpayer, third worst in the nation. Thus, a family moving to Chicago suddenly becomes the inheritor of almost $85,000 in liabilities. By this metric, Chicago is no longer second but has by far the worst debt burden of any major city.
Chicago’s accumulating debt might be bearable if the city had low taxes and therefore room to raise them and pay down some of the liabilities. But taxes in the Windy City already rank among the nation’s harshest. According to a national study, Chicago’s combined city and state taxes would eat up over 12 percent of a U.S. median family income. The only large cities with higher proportionate taxes are Rust Belt towns with much smaller populations, such as Detroit and Newark. Chicago imposes the highest sales tax of any major city (10.25 percent) and punishing property taxes, too.
Chicago’s taxation is also brutal on businesses. A recent study of 53 cities found that Chicago’s tax on industrial properties was nearly double the average of other cities. Chicago’s commercial property-tax rate, at more than 4 percent per year, was by far the worst of any major city and more than twice the average.
High debt and taxes might be manageable if the city’s economic fundamentals were strong. They’re not. Chicago relied for years on commercial properties, especially downtown offices in the Loop, to power its economy and fund the city’s excesses. But those jobs are fleeing. Downtown Chicago’s office vacancy rate recently approached 24 percent, a record high. Boeing has moved its headquarters from the Loop to Northern Virginia. These white-collar firms will not pay the city’s higher taxes in the future; they won’t even pay their existing leases.
Making matters worse, Chicago’s population is shrinking.
That last item requires no explanation.
YOU WOULD NEED A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: Ibram X. Kendi Thinks a Big Problem at His Anti-Racism Center Was All the Woke Employees. “Yesterday the NY Times Magazine published a lengthy piece trying to make sense of Kendi, his theories about race and the failure of his center despite the mountain of donations it received in 2020. Read the whole thing if you have time. I would describe it as a partial success. It portrays Kendi as a kind of conflicted character. He is someone who dresses in eye-catching suits but who also seems perpetually afraid of the attention he gets from critics. Along with Robin DiAngelo, Kendi became a leading guru of a new kind of self-help approach to racism. And like all self-help gurus, there was always a sense that a big part of this was the desire to market his insights to as many people as possible.”
They’re the left’s version of Joel Osteen.
A choir girl cast into the Pit through an egregious clerical error
Her strapping Guardian Angel
A condemned hitman
… and Derek–a crossroads demon who’s been secretly storing up power for millennia.
He wants revenge on everyone on his extensive list, from Lucifer all the way up to Daddy and every devil and angel between. It’s a frankly impossible goal for a low-level guy like him, but “dream big” is his motto and sheer spite keeps him going.
Now he’s stuck escorting three idiots through Hell—and Derek has a history with the angel, thanks very much.
An infernal rebellion looms along with a premature Armageddon, and the black and withered thing Derek used to call a conscience rears its stupid, stupid head. He’s faced with a choice.Rescue friends he never thought he’d make from a boss he never really thought he’d defy, at the possible cost of his life, such as it is…
Or let it all burn and dance in the ashes.
JUNE 6, 1944 — BY THE NUMBERS, BY THE MEN: The Great Crusade Was Greater Than You Know.
WHY DO THESE PEOPLE ALL LOOK LIKE COMIC BOOK VILLAINS? Meet the sex-obsessed, gay ‘activist physician’ in charge of vaccines, COVID at the CDC.
Flashback: Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ brought us crazy instead — like Sam Brinton.
AS THEY SHOULD HAVE: NFL got its Butker kicked.
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