https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/09/experts-authoritarian-regimes-trump

Turkey:

«“[Autocrats] declare themselves as beyond politics,” said Temelkuran. “[They say:] ‘Politics is corrupt. Parties are corrupt. We’re clean.’ They create a movement, not a party.

“When you despise politics, that means that you are probably going to do something to democracy itself,” she added.»

El Salvador:

«“You cannot make authoritarian leaders the center of your narrative,” said Ortiz. “You have to make the people the center of your narrative, and you have to be passionate about it.”

She said that means doing more to engage with citizens – and being prepared to be surprised by what they say. “A part of the cure for this is listening to people,” she said. “Don’t be so certain about what they want, what they need. You have to ask.”»

Whee!

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/grand-jury-declines-indict-ny-attorney-general-letitia-james-less-two-rcna247310

«A separate source familiar with the matter said there “should be no premature celebrations.”»

Reading an article in a magazine that wants to be taken seriously, or at least put a bunch of ads in front of you, and I ran into this:

I wrote my first “Hello world” in an awful thing called Java, but programming only began to feel intuitive when I learned JavaScript

Ok, I’m out.

Figures in dollars (2023).

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34525/w34525.pdf

via this stupid website: https://heatmap.news/economy/climate-costs-insurance

Which I found on Mastodon and will probably never re-visit because they are such pills.

Anyway. Took a while to track this down, what with more important things like doing my job, dealing with life and generally wasting time, but…

| Category                           | More Conservative | Less Conservative |                       |                        |
|                                    |           Average |           Average | 90th Percentile Costs | 90th Percentile County |
|------------------------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-----------------------+------------------------|
| Insurance Costs                    |                78 |               356 |                   598 |                    764 |
| Indirect Insurance Costs           |                32 |               145 |                   244 |                    312 |
| Flood Costs                        |               142 |               142 |                    75 |                     -9 |
| Energy Costs: Quantity Increase    |                11 |                11 |                    32 |                      9 |
| Energy Costs: Price Increase       |                14 |                24 |                   135 |                     18 |
| Indirect Energy Costs              |                13 |                21 |                   119 |                     16 |
| Costs Borne by Governments         |                41 |                77 |                   103 |                     75 |
| Crop Losses                        |                 0 |                 0 |                     0 |                      0 |
| Mortality Costs: Temperature       |                 1 |                 1 |                     2 |                      1 |
| Mortality Costs: Wildfire PM2.5    |                64 |               103 |                   200 |                    118 |
| Mortality Costs: Natural Disasters |                10 |                21 |                    21 |                     21 |
|------------------------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-----------------------+------------------------|
| TOTAL                              |               406 |               901 |                       |                   1325 |

https://fedi.garden/

Ok, my (somewhat grumpy) thoughts:

WAY too much verbiage.

s/An easy and stress-free way of joining Mastodon and the Fediverse/How to sign up on Mastodon/

“Easy” implies it’s hard; “stress-free” implies it’s stressful. “Fediverse”… c’mon, you can be geekier, but it’ll take a little effort. Don’t provide solutions to problems; that implies the problems exist.

We’re after people who really don’t want to think, right? (https://bookshop.org/p/books/don-t-make-me-think-revisited-a-common-sense-approach-to-web-usability-steve-krug/ad7b7eb124318416?ean=9780321965516&next=t)

Drop “non-corporate”. No screeds, not even by quiet reference. (Maybe assume whoever’s referring somebody to the website has already given that pitch.)

Make an animation. People broadcasting messages and other people tuning in. Maybe like little radio waves. Then zoom out: that’s one server. Each server is its own radio station and other servers tune in. (Maybe just show two or three servers and draw lines between them.) Zoom out more: more servers and lines, maybe one connected by only one line, maybe two in a disconnected cluster with angry lines between them (say, red instead of blue). Maybe little lightning bolts radiating from the angry servers.

People love happy, silly (-ish) cartoons. No, I don’t know how to do it, but I bet I could figure it out. Something something SVG, I’m guessing. No, I’m not volunteering.

s/follows and followers/friends and contacts/

More unnecessary geekery.

On the full list of servers, I’d make (Server Type) the last button. Newcomers probably don’t care, and their nephew who’s guiding them through this can point them to that button if it’s important to them (the nephew, that is, probably not the newcomer). (Ok, that last part was probably unnecessarily sarcastic.)

Actually, the rest of this looks pretty good. I can tell you’ve put in a lot of effort removing everything that isn’t elephant.

Although… If somebody clicks “show me a good server” and signs up and then clicks “ok I signed up, now what?” without going much farther, you’ve done well. 🙂

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/american-economic-association-imposes-lifetime-membership-ban-lawrence-summers-2025-12-02/

Ouch. The *language*.

https://defector.com/the-conservative-grievance-business-is-always-hiring

This was a fun article.

So. I tend to jump into replies. I try not to be a pill, generally, but I’m so full of myself I can’t always tell. (And, tbh, there is a certain amount of shitposting, because some of y’all… smh.)

Here’s the thing, though. I (currently) have ~350 followers on Mastodon, a good chunk of them bots and monitors and hucksters and dead accounts, I think.

Other folks have 2.8k, 13k, 85k (ok, I stopped sampling here) followers. I’m guessing follower count is an exponential distribution. If I want my toots heard (and I do, for most of them), I’m going to be in the reply wake along with the rest of the seagulls and fish.

Every post by a “personality” is its very own nanoscopic village green, automatically filtered (roughly) by folks who are actually interested.

I get you might not want random strangers jumping into your replies, but I think them’s the dynamics. I’m not necessarily replying to YOU, just the more general audience that are your followers and boosters. (Ok, well, sometimes you.)

You can already post to local or just your followers (and, for all I know, you already are), and I guess at some point, Mastodon will implement a limit on who can reply. There’s already a limit on who can quote-toot.

So, that’s all. Just a little post here. A thought I’ve been wanting to get out for a while.

Someone wrote a novel about my toots.

«No one who resists, as Wilkes notes in his afterword, leaves a lasting mark. A postal carrier who quits the Nazi Party escapes punishment—but her act of defiance makes no meaningful difference. A low-level con artist who is wrongly accused of distributing the postcards will not concede his guilt; he ends up dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after being given the choice between that and drowning. The members of a small, rebellious cell who begin the novel with grand plans to take down the government end up ineffective and disbanded. And like their real-life counterparts, Otto and Anna are caught, convicted in a sham trial, and sentenced to death by guillotine; their postcards also have none of their intended impact.»

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/every-man-dies-alone-hans-fallada-novel/684958/?gift=ly-h2TZGdDJyaoFv6n-KaTVtk4RxpN50T0RSs8tFoOk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share (gift)