iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The theory that I've heard is that this is a scam to sell off .si (normally Slovenian) domain names at inflated prices, that some anonymous entities have mysteriously bought up in the last ninety or so days.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

It's all religion with the serial numbers filed off. All unbelievers are just yearning for the Word of God, the obstacles in your way are because of Evil and backsliding, and if you believe hard enough than all is possible.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This is a really serious problem for translators and interpreters. Do you translate what he actually said and sound like a crazy moron, or do you clean it up and sanewash him.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

There's also the possibility (although I wouldn't bet money on it) of a complete nonlinear GOP collapse, but if people's only political experience is the US they've never seen one and don't think it's possible.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I dunno. Lame duck GOP senators seem to turn on Trump immediately, and there's probably a wild story behind that.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yep, looks like this district skews considerably whiter than TX as a whole (54/27/8% white/hispanic/black). So if the GOP Hispanic meltdown is real, than this is GOP best case shift.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Yes, the real underlying characteristic of the genre is the truly deep mindbending hatred of the player and the unending attempts to drive them insane.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It looks like this was a scam to manipulate the price of .si domain names, and a whole bunch of anonymous entities cleaned up. Roman Sheremeta on the Bad Site has the receipts.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Right, and low propensity Rs are on the radar now. They're not the mysterious political dark matter anymore. If anything, the dark matter would be mad-as-shit 18-30 year old Ds. We know that historically the kids haven't turned out, but if there's one group that might this year it's them.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I guess we're not allowed to do that at an interview anymore either.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It's generally equivalent to being in international waters, because that's what the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 was based on. The vehicle is the responsibility of and under the jurisdiction of the nation that it is registered to, but it doesn't mean it falls under the same national laws.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

As someone who interviews candidates, I honestly don't remember, because bringing a coffee to a meeting is beneath notice.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I also think the media expected another huge surge of scared libs to subscribe like in 2016, when said media put out a bunch of lofty BS about fighting the power. Didn't happen in 2024 because we all figured out they were part of the problem actually.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It is a terribly shitty approach to politics, but has amazing predictive ability when applied to GOP voters.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

That's true, but Trump never really joked. He does this kidding-on-the-square joking-not-joking bullshit and punches down with insults, but never had the capacity for humor. His filters, such as they are, are indeed gone.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Ethnic diversity is "you get to have your funny costumes and yummy dumplings but don't get any ideas" and gender equality is "we've got female engineers but guys still aren't doing the dishes ever."

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

In the Soviet days, the dig against the US was how racist it was against Black people, but the Russians were too so the anti-US Soviet propaganda was the most ludicrously condescending shit you ever saw in your life.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

There are a bunch of pro war ultra nationalists who do exactly that, openly, and got away with it for a while because of the politics involved, but now the Kremlin is cracking down.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

From experience with hurricanes, actual disaster aftermaths are mostly extremely boring and uncomfortable, and you're the last people in the country to know what the hell is really going on.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

There's that, but I think there's also a horseshoe-theory kinship between a number of bubble-dwelling authoritarians On Here who think in the same way and believe the same sorts of things about The Masses, and so think it could work.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is the MAGA equivalent of "the rural masses yearn for socialism" with the same motivations and cockroach unkillability.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

In Canada, small towns and villages like that are policed by the Mounties (equivalent of the FBI) under provincial agreements. I'm not sure why, historically, but that's the solution.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

One of Trump's few actual skills is sniffing out the weakness and greed in other people and exploiting it. Insisting on (illegally) putting his signature on COVID checks was a stroke of evil genius.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

It seems to be a general rule that when some enterprising cabal invents a new brain cooking machine, the first brains that get cooked are their own.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

That was my thought too. This isn't complicated at all, societies have been dealing with liability issues forever. My dog bites your kid, it doesn't matter that I didn't bite your kid, or I didn't want the dog to bite your kid, it's clearly my fault.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Another American who lived a decade in Europe, and yep that's correct. Just some jaw dropping shit randomly out of the blue. American racists are almost always more circumspect about it, but in Europe hoo boy.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I did grad work in time series analysis: most of it is voodoo and crude digital filters, but you certainly can make the case that it could work if enough other people in the market think it could work and act on that. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

AI Tiktok video of a fat orange Trump handing a big Price Is Right novelty check for $5000 to a bearded guy with pink hair in a sundress.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Being government-adjacent and taking the mandatory Insider Threat course during DOGE days was a bit of an unpleasant experience. It turned out to be a What Are They Doing Today checklist.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

In Germany, it was just assumed that the stay-at-home wife would handle the shopping during the week, so there was no need for evening or Sunday shopping.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Hey, at least you get academic freedom. Unless some nutbag president looks at your administration funny and they axe your whole department in a panic, which would never happen because oh yeah right

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Yep, your average schmo just feels that things are going badly and puts technical words on it that they don't understand, which then confuses people who know what those words mean.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Frankly, having lived in Europe, that's because Carrefour sucks. In my multinational experience the produce sucks and the bakery sucks and the rest is meh with average prices. I did read some story about Carrefour's attempts in the US and shoppers simply didn't like them.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

As an American who lived a decade in Western Europe, it's also a drastically simplified model of single payer healthcare that only sort of applies to the UK and Canada, and when you start talking about individual countries' complexities and issues they all seem to lose interest.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

This is whatever the opposite of milkshake duck is.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

But they only think that because Trump got obsessed with it in the completely atypical 2020 COVID election which reversed the historic mail voting patterns. Previously this was assumed to benefit the GOP.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

In my experience, for many languages there aren't a lot of non native speakers: you either always hear people speak it fluently or not at all. So you don't know how to process someone who talks with errors and just give up. English is, uh, not like that.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

This is the truth. I worked on some government data project a few years ago, and it was a given that any data that wasn't critical for people getting paid properly was inevitably a complete mess.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Yes, and depending as well on whether you can interact with the past in any way besides monitoring it, or if the universe "resists" this sort of interference in any way. Lots of possible scifi plots.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Time machine is invented, uncountable number of beings instantly (?) travel to and change past, past becomes (?) completely unstable until by chance the only stable state is reached: no time machine is ever invented anywhere.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Larry Niven noodled about the social and crime implications in his Gil Hamilton (I think) stories. Mazes in houses to foil intruders, murdered bodies being beamed around, et cetera.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

As he can reach any high shelf and open any jar known to Man, he is clearly prime marriage material. Unless he leaves the toilet seat up.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

From a process point of view, PhD graduates are the waste product of the academic system.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

There's also a different dynamic now: renewables aren't little fuzzy chicks in incubators now; they're real businesses with real money and starting to throw their weight around. Big Sun already knifed Andy Ogles in his primary and left him for dead, so they're now a separate force to be worked with.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

No, even in Europe daycare costs vary wildly from country to country, and places like Switzerland, Netherlands, and the UK can be very expensive. Other countries like Germany are on paper cheap but have serious supply/demand problems (look up KiTA discussions with Germans).

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Yeah, I lived in western Europe for quite a while, and it didn't seem to come up very often in the local news. This is all done at the state level and not EU level, and more or less tracked FDA approvals so less excitement I think.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

In European countries, there is a state formulary where the government does the same cost/reward calculations as any insurer does for each treatment or drug. It's far less visible than in the US because every doc knows what's covered and what's not so anything not covered is just not discussed.

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ericblair @ericblairnotreally.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I think the Times was super stoked and popcorn-ready for the moderates/liberals to crash out and stab AES in the back, but everybody publicly lined up and supported him two seconds after the race was called. So, moving right along reality be damned they decided it must be happening anyways.

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