San Diego Union-Tribune: ‘It’s cold, wet, exhausting.’ Homeless people have few options when it rains.
San Diego homeless shelters are overwhelmed, leaving many people risking cold rain, flooding, and temperatures falling to the 40s. Staying dry is difficult—and essential to staying alive.
By Gary Warth.
Why the [expletive] can’t we travel back in time? [Ars Technica/Paul Sutter]
No known law of physics forbids time travel to the past.
Either time travel to the past is possible, or there’s some fundamental, basic physics we still don’t understand.
Either possibility is exciting.
“It’s obvious that the Universe is telling us something important… we just don’t know what it’s saying.”
I saw this dog at Lake Murray. He would like to say hello, and for you to admire his eyebrow.
Coolio talked about ancient aliens, and making big investments in the metaverse and crypto, in an impromptu podcast interview before his death. [Billboard/Gil Kaufman]
The Coolio interview was bonkers—and poignant. The rapper said he expected he’d be long dead before climate change became a concern. Then he died a month later.
I expect climate change to be a concern long before I’m dead, and I’m only a year older than Coolio. It’s already a concern.
I’ve googled for more about the hidden continent occult belief that Coolio discusses. I haven’t found anything.
The podcast series, Crypto Island, was excellent. Sadly for the host/creator, PJ Vogt, most of the work on the series seems to have been done before the FTX debacle, so series is now obsolete.
The holiday break is over. It’s time to get back to work.
Apparently you can re-use 2017 calendars this year, which is funny to me because I have a 2017 calendar hanging up on the wall next to my bed. I stopped turning pages April of that year, and it’s been April, 2017 in the vicinity of my bed ever since.
The book Shift Happens tells the 150-year history of keyboards, from primitive typewriters to smartphones. Glenn Fleishmann @GlennF raved about this book on John Gruber’s @gruber@mastodon.social’s The Talk Show podcast—sounds interesting.
I saw this SUV while walking the dog. I feel better knowing we’re protected.
My car keys got hidden in a fold in the pocket of my rain jacket after I was done walking the dog this afternoon. I spent 15 minutes looking for them—on the ground, peering into the car window to see if I’d locked them in, patting my pockets over and over.
It was past dusk, so I was losing the light fast. I didn’t have a proper flashlight, just my phone. And it was raining. And I still had the dog with me, of course.
Also, as a middle aged man, I can’t go more than two hours without peeing, and I was past my limit.
And that’s Jan. 1. The year is going to get better, right?
I saw this house flying a Starfleet flag. I was tempted to ring the doorbell to express my approval.
Portland Startup to Mine Artisanal Bitcoin Using Only Slide Rules and Graph Paper
“… powered 100 percent by avocado toast, ethically sourced kombucha and acai bowls.”
While walking the dog, I saw this tasteful Christmas decoration.
By the time New Year’s comes around, I have holiday exhaustion. New Year’s needs to be in March. Not a lot of holidays between January and May.
Quintessence is a “barebone Nuzzel clone” for Mastodon, in open beta.
It’s pretty simple: if you follow the @quintsns@mastodon.uno bot account, each day at 23:00UTC it will send you a direct message containing 10 links that have been shared in the past 24 hours by the people you follow, ordered by the number of different people you follow that have tooted/boosted the link.
Brilliant! I’ve signed up.
The exiled chief rabbi of Moscow says Jews should get out while they can. [The Guardian/Stephen Burgen]
Pinchas Goldschmidt says that, historically in Russia and the USSR, when things go bad, the government scapegoats Jews.
Jews have been fleeing Russia for a century. In 1926, there were 2.7 million Jews in the USSR, 59% of whom were in Ukraine. “Today only about 165,000 Jews remain in the Russian Federation out of a total population of 145 million.”
My own grandparents bugged out of Eastern Europe around 1900. Poland on my father’s side, Lithuania on my mother’s.
Also:
Ukraine has a long history of antisemitism from pogroms at the end of the 19th century to facilitating Nazi massacres during the second world war. The most notorious of these was the murder of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv in 1941.
Given this history, Goldschmidt said it was remarkable that Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who made no secret of his Jewishness, was elected Ukraine’s president with more 70% of the vote.
That fact made a nonsense of Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine was being governed by neo-Nazis, the rabbi said. “Show me another country that is in the grip of Nazis where the Jewish community is thriving.
“However, I don’t know how Jewish the president [Zelenskiy] feels. He plays the Jewish card to ask Israel for help.”
I imagine Zelensky’s Jewishness is much the same as my own. I am not observant, nor do I have a religious preference in my associations. But am I Jewish? Hell, yeah.
Goldschmidt also noted that while Russia’s Jews faced an uncertain future, antisemitism was on the rise in what had long been seen as a Jewish sanctuary, the US.
In 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Last year the Anti-Defamation League recorded a record 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the US, ranging from assault and harassment to vandalism.
“For many years, Jews in the US believed that it was an exception, that whatever happened in Europe and other countries could never happen there,” Goldschmidt said. “But over the past three years there have been more attacks on Jews there than in Europe.
I have not been alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism in the US. It still seems like a lunatic fringe. But perhaps I should be alarmed.
Hooters tried to recruit Elon Musk to refute rumors that it was closing down because of a study showing millennials don’t like boobs. [Mediaite/Zachary Leeman]
Julie and I saw this sign 11 years ago today.
Sign on the restroom door at Shakespeare Pub & Grille, San Diego, where we had Christmas dinner.
Musk’s Twitter cuts include a data center, janitors, and toilet paper [NYTimes/Kate Conger, Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac]
With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.