Month: April 2025

Future Decline

Chill Evil, Political Economy, Prediction

US economy shrinks in first quarter of Trump 2.0 amid sweeping tariffs.

This is the beginning of the beginning of the depression that is on the way. This quarter of economic decline didn’t occur because of tariffs, but rather due to business uncertainty. That is actually worse than tariffs and as long as Trump makes random unaccountable decisions the economy will only get worse.

Too much is up in the air at the moment for more substantive claims, but we are definitely going to be in a depression for a while. The best case scenario is 2-3 years. I give this a 30% chance. The most likely case is 5-8 years of depression followed by low growth. I give this one a 60% chance. And the apocalyptic case is complete destruction of the economy with further Trump-like figures succeeding him. This would perpetuate depression conditions (even if there is some intermittent growth occurring due to how great was the decline) for 20+ years. This of course has a 10% chance of happening.

We are living in terrible times. They’re already here. Most people just don’t know it yet because they can’t see that the plane has already lost all power and the mountains loom in the distance.

Chill Links

If you think Americans are mad now, just wait a few months. Living in a refrigerator box by the side of the road does tend to make people pretty mad.

Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week as China tariffs start to bite. This is going to be very, very ugly.

Trump’s Economic Calamity Is a Political Opportunity. That the Dems will no doubt utterly squander.

Escaping the Simulation. Social media addiction, algorithms, and how to reclaim our agency.

Instagram’s AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed Therapists.

Flares from magnetized stars can forge planets’ worth of gold.

We Need More Optimistic Science Fiction.

Chill Links

‘60 Minutes’ Chastises Its Corporate Parent in Unusual On-Air Rebuke. Actual resistance.

Nonzero: Trade edition. The real cost of protectionism.

As RFK Crusades to ‘Make America Healthy,’ FDA Suspends Milk Quality Tests.

The Present Crisis and the End of the Long ’90s.

MAGA doesn’t build.

Shipping Collapse: Port Workers and Truckers Wait for the Ships to Come In.

The US Is Already Losing the New Cold War to China. Well, of course. Our sole plan was “throw random tantrums.”

Tsunami Inbound

Chill Clowns, Evil, Political Economy

This is going to be worse than I initially thought, so I bought more crap than I had originally planned. It’s the last chance now and in the next week or two.

Then, many many things will be vastly more expensive or impossible to get at all. It’s coming. Be warned. Or don’t. Either way, I’ll avoid doing the stupid. Maybe we should’ve immigrated, but too late for that now.

We’re here and are as ready as we can be.

Inefficient

Chill Annoying

Roughly 90% of the security meetings and consultations I have with customers are completely useless. All the questions have already been answered in provided documents and diagrams, and often also in follow-up responses. The meetings are pointless nearly all of the time.

And I have been in hundreds of those meetings, often with 30+ people on the other side1. Thirty-one people in a an hour-long meeting discussing already-provided information equals a whole lot of wasted time.

But that’s life in “efficient” corporate America!

  1. That’s the “fun” part of being a small company and dealing with Fortune 500 corps.

Chill Links

The human mind really can go blank during consciousness, according to a new review that challenges the assumption people experience a constant flow of thoughts when awake. My mind goes blank all the time. That this is a “discovery” is mystifying.

Federal work shaped a Black middle class. Now it’s destabilized by Trump’s job cuts.

The gulf between Gen Z men and women on political and cultural issues is far wider than it is in older generations.

AI Helps Unravel a Cause of Alzheimer’s Disease and Identify a Therapeutic Candidate.

China Deploys J-10 Fighters To Egypt.

Intel Removed All CPU information pages before 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processors. Intel continuing to get worse and worse.

Who’s a Carthaginian? Genetic Study Revises Ancestry of Rome’s Ancient Nemesis.

DOGE is not about waste and efficiency—it’s about privatization. Yep.

Useful Glob

Chill Tech

Because cracksmoking MacOS likes to change the names of drive mounts unpredictably (mostly by adding things like “-1” and “-2” to them) when it gets confused, I had to use globbing to reliably identify a mounted volume/directory in my Bash scripts. Here’s what I did:

for VOL in /Volumes/myvol*; do
    # Check if it's actually a directory
    if [[ -d "$VOL/mydl/thisdir/here" ]]; then
        DEST="$VOL/mydl/thisdir/here"
        break
    fi
done

This finds the first item named “myvol” and in a later part of the script not excerpted here slaps what you want in there. But warning: this snippet like Cisco stuff takes action immediately on the first match only, so if you might have more than one match just be aware of that and modify as needed.