Aron Roberts
98.1K posts
@aronro
Consults with @BetterShowers, making great showerheads & @landimprinting, restoring damaged lands. Semi-retired after 31 years in IT @Cal. Opinions mine alone.
The US tech industry would be a shadow of itself without immigrants. First 10 examples that come to mind: 1. Elon Musk (South Africa) 2. Andrej Karpathy (Czechoslovakia) 3. Sergey Brin (Russia) 4. Jensen Huang (Taiwan) 5. Satya Nadella (India) 6. Ilya Sutskever (Russia) 7. Sundar Pichai (India) 8. Lisa Su (Taiwan) 9. Fei-Fei Li (China) 10. Sanjay Mehrotra (India)
@billyjhowell The Bortle scale is the amount of light pollution in a night sky
Another analysis finding that wealth taxes are problematic, in part due to potentially arbitrary - and changing - valuations for a massive variety of tangible and intellectual property. twitter.com/nytimesbusines… HT @Svse4Y
อะไรเป็นเหตุผลให้รับแมวตัวนี้มาเลี้ยง
@Suspect_81 @mls1776 @tedfrank Wouldn't these be logical next steps? - Recognize bad actors (D, R, or any other stripe) will exploit available means to reward allies & cronies. - Remove or at least mitigate them, to the best of our ability. Federal settlement abuse (as here), pardon/commutation excesses, etc.
Amid major backlash from the GOP, Trump defends the new $1.8 billion DOJ fund.
Nothing “quiet” about it. We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.
Americans are numb to infrastructure dysfunction washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…
Keepseagle + Cobell + Pigford II + Garcia + Love + Sweet + Volkswagen diversions from Treasury payments + diversions from various mortgage settlements for which there still hasn’t been a full public accounting as far as I can tell + diversions from other settlements that no one has systemically compiled as far as I can tell because the Obama DOJ stonewalled House investigations. The government *won* Garcia and Love (which suggests the government would have won the materially identical Pigford and Keepseagle if they hadn’t collusively settled) and paid $1.33 billion in 2011 dollars anyway.
The Obama and Biden administrations gave away tens of billions of dollars to political allies without meaningful judicial or Congressional review, often in cases they had already won (Cobell) or cases where the agreed-upon billions of relief was literally illegal (Sweet). Internal DOJ memos singled out conservative organizations as NGOs who shouldn’t get the money. Court review was for whether the *plaintiffs* were being treated fairly, not whether taxpayers were—taxpayers had no standing to challenge the settlements, and it was assumed that DOJ was looking out for taxpayers even when it was obvious they weren’t. Cobell even got a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom for her role in ripping off taxpayers. In 2017, House Republicans passed a bill to stop DOJ slush fund settlements. (I had testified for a version of the bill a year or two earlier.) It got no material Democratic support and Senate Democrats killed the bill. Trump could do six settlements as large as the weaponization settlement, and he still wouldn’t have done half as much damage to the rule of law and the taxpayer fisc as Obama and Biden. These are the rules Democrats in Congress and the presidency insisted upon.
the cost of getting into manufacturing is willing to be and look really really dumb
