Nick S

maura quint @mauraquint.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 11:41 UTC

when I was a child, I thought smart people were in charge. when I got older, I realized you didn't have to be smart to be in charge. but the piece that was hardest to learn is that no one is really in charge at all. no one's going to fix it beyond us.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 04, 2024 at 00:45 UTC

tbh in this case I think he legitimately likes sandwiches, there’s nothing of the gourmet about him.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 14:03 UTC

Very pleasing comments there about Tory Boy / Truss dead-ender Simon Clarke.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 13:25 UTC

They are bad sandwiches. The American deli sandwich comprising one pound of stacked sliced meat is a bad sandwich.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 03:26 UTC

That letter is wild, especially when you consider that it was written when J. was in Paris and all that 1789 shit was going down:

founders.archives.gov/documents/Ma...

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 21:06 UTC

Sure, DM it. I have my own recipe -- the 'artisan bread in 5 minutes' one, adapted a little -- but I tend to avoid using the oven in the summer.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 17:36 UTC

Where I am it's something like: $3: completely terrible mass-produced bread $5: less terrible but not good mass-produced bread $6: ok bread from local bakery $8: good bread from local bakery When I was back I bought a Granary loaf (which you can't get here) for £1.85.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 04:59 UTC

In passing: the cost of a 'decent loaf of bread' in the motherland (basically £2 or $2.50) is less than the cost of a shitty loaf of bread in the US. The dysjunctions have always been weird but they were especially weird this time round.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 04:45 UTC

Roberts fundamentally thinks that elections are things the little people do and that jan 6 was just a little people thing.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 04:41 UTC

Roberts thinks elections are beneath him and for the rough folk.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 04:35 UTC

I devoted a decent chunk of my life to the 18th century and have long said that Americans basically overstate the powers of George III, he wasn't fucking Louis XIV, and the presidency still retains a lot of George III powers. Except the US president is now Louis XIV.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 04:21 UTC

Modern presidential systems have typically ended up with at least one president locked up. The problem with the American presidential system is that it isn't really a presidential system, it's a latent 18th-century monarchy where nobody was quite willing to do full dress-up.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 02:00 UTC

He should have been dragged out onto the White House lawn that evening and shot in the back of the head in front of the cameras, and the nation would have recovered from it faster than it ever will from this.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 01:56 UTC

Twat.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 16:46 UTC

I know. But it was sunny enough for me to mow my dad’s overgrown garden, and that’s what mattered.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 16:30 UTC

(I’m not saying that I brought the summer with me for a fortnight because that would mean apologising for it going away.)

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 20:00 UTC

Partly -- thanks for all 187MB of that! -- but I remember reading somewhere a while back that commentators got a more detailed packet with all those factual snippets for the landmarks. Perhaps now it's part of the real-time feed sent to the commentary booth?

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 19:21 UTC

(Another aspect is that there's no single play-by-play / color team: there's a biggish group and everyone takes half-hour shifts so you get slightly different interpersonal dynamics throughout and the smalltalk never gets repetitive.)

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 19:14 UTC

There is a huge book -- a ring-bound thing, I think -- that ASO issues to every TdF live commentator every year with details of every landmark on every stage.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 19:12 UTC

Cake and pigeons, but not cake made from pigeons.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 19:11 UTC

In a way it's like baseball commentary because of the pauses. 5-day Test commentary is the best for tangents because there are long periods of attritional play. You can easily listen to it in the background. Watching Test cricket live is also continuous partial attention plus beer.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 16:06 UTC

I'm not sure whether the long reference to Mehdi Hasan's tactics against a Gish gallop is totally Wikipedia-suitable but it's a good addition there.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 21:43 UTC

I like the theophite theory that Dems will start answering their phones.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 10:08 UTC

We sickos have to understand that normies have basically not heard the former guy speak outside of tightly-edited clips since he was president. I think the weirdness here is collective amnesia -- especially around covid but also the day-to-day craziness of 2017-21.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 02:20 UTC

‘Dana and Jake have let one participant lie the entire time, this was an executive decision by CNN.’

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 02:12 UTC

The moderators could have been replaced with computer-generated voices, which seems suboptimal.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 02:03 UTC

He really thinks he’s going to win the big cities and will say they were stolen from him.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 02:02 UTC

What part of ‘it privileges the liar’ is causing you difficulty?

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 01:54 UTC

A debate that is ‘blatant lies’ vs. ‘refuting lies’ privileges the liar.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 00:55 UTC

We sickos kind of forget that the low-attention normies who are sufficiently inclined to watch it are basically being reintroduced to him long-form and unedited for the first time since he was president.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 17:49 UTC

I think at somewhere like Aldi where you’re either spending $10 or $150 self-checkout has its place, but I’ve noticed that regular supermarkets in the UK have more checkout staff and I’m glad of it.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 11:43 UTC

On a lighter note, I have bought all the blackcurrant things to take back with me. Also: malt loaf.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 11:28 UTC

It is profoundly depressing to see an elderly relative's entire cultural life now dictated by the YouTube recommendation engine and knowing that I can't do a thing about it.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 26, 2024 at 18:09 UTC

Got a genuinely apologetic customer support response about my inability to turn on the lights and electricity in a windowless hotel room because I had no idea how this stuff now works in Europe and nobody told me.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 21, 2024 at 13:45 UTC

As predicted by everyone who saw that there is no sweet spot on these systems between letting stuff through and false positives.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 21, 2024 at 07:30 UTC

Just a flying visit, alas.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 20, 2024 at 17:16 UTC

The heatwave has redirected the Gulf Stream and finally brought some sun to the British summer though I’m taking personal credit for it. (Not the heatwave.)

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 20, 2024 at 17:13 UTC

One of the things noted about Starmer is that he was the chief prosecutor managing a department of 8,000 and he regularly visited every regional office specifically to speak with lower-tier staff. It’s very very unusual for a (soon-to-be) prime minister.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 20, 2024 at 16:00 UTC

I still remember his reading of Middlemarch on his Atlantic blog where he took something very unfamiliar to him and — as the most generous reader — took it for what it is while weaving in all of his wide and deep knowledge.

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 20, 2024 at 15:06 UTC

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 20, 2024 at 13:35 UTC

earlier I was hanging out with this family:

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Nick S @holgate.permanent.red [ View ] Jun 20, 2024 at 13:33 UTC

I am drinking a cheeky half of Yorkshire bitter in a tiny pub in the middle of my home town and I’m okay with it, even though I feel like a ghost haunting the old place.

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