I was agnostic for a fair part of my life. I thought myself too logical, too much a believer in science to be tricked into begging a bearded sky wizard for genie wishes. I thought I was enlightened, and that this was the enlightened view. Coming to faith, for me, started with realizing demons are real. Not in a Hollywood horned monster under the bed sort of way, but in a way that can be seen in the chaos and temptation in the world, that can be observed with science, if not directly, at least indirectly. A common question that people struggling with faith ask is "if God is good, why does he let bad things happen to good people?" Religious people have explanations for that, and nonbelievers sometimes chuckle at those explanations as fairy tales. Some religious people may say it's a way for God to challenge people, or that the Lord works in mysterious ways, or maybe they'll blame demons. Nonbelievers will shrug and say "shit happens sometimes." An exceedingly logical person will start going into an explanation of entropy that religious people chuckle at as a denial of the supernateral. But what if they were both sort of right? Demons, or what I believe humanity attributes to demons, are a force for entropy. Are they supernatural? Do they have voices? Do they talk to people on ayahuasca and lead them toward madness or enlightenment based on nothing more than a whim? I don't pretend to know, but making that connection felt right to me. Entropy... it's a science word. Entropy is a coin flip. Something is just as likely as it isn't. Science observes that the universe wants to pull things into a state of homogenous disorder. It's not good or evil, or maybe it is, but whatever morality it may or may not have across the universe, entropy is a real force. But we're not existing in a primordial soup, we're existing as unique beings on a planet with an atmosphere and, above all else, an arrangement or order that allows human existence and defies that universal pull toward entropy, at least long enough for us to get into arguments with strangers over the internet. If there's a pull toward disorder and chaos, and we don't exist in a state of disorder and chaos, there's got to be a pull in the other direction, toward order, toward humanity. Cosmically, we're just specks of dust everso briefly arranged just so in a vast ocean of chaos. But we are arranged just so. We can use religious and cultural words to describe that arrangement, and we can also use religious and cultural words to describe the entropy that disrupts that arrangement. Once I started seeing that, I started finding and understanding faith in a way that made sense to me. I don't know if there is an organized religion that approaches faith in this sort of way, but I'm figuring it out myself, for myself. I consider myself a Christian, I don't know if other Christians would recognize the way I approach my faith, but it doesn't matter to me. I understand the teachings of Jesus in a way that makes sense to me, not because he's this hippy in flowing white robes doing magic tricks like I was sort of taught in Sunday school as a child, but because there are forces for disorder and forces for order and he was an emissary and declarant of the power of that order. I took the long way around the barn because I needed to, and I'm content with being on this journey the way I am. ... and it all started with demons.

@ZynJamesHunt If it was original, it would simply be a smug midwit take, but like most of what Tyson does, it's borrowed without attribution from a more clever and entertaining person who said it decades ago.

@neiltyson Jeff Stilson called from 1989, he wants his joke back.

@OldHollowTree A lot of people can go their entire lives and never stray outside of the reach of doordash, Uber, 5G service, and fiber internet. They understand there's a need for connection in their lives... just not what they should strive to be connected with.

RT @WallStreetMav: 🤣🤣🤣

Might be dirty data. The IT sector has become bloated with people who never learned how to code, administer a system, or manage a database. If the most important part of your job primarily consists of sitting in meetings, moving sticky notes around on a conference room wall, or filling out spreadsheets, you're not in IT. If those things are the part of your day that's keeping you from actually doing your job, that's more likely to be IT.

Shock and awe about fraud and anti-Trump outrage is driving the news now, but if and when DOGE gets to modernizing the IT systems, it's going to open up a different level of fixing the way government works.

@Defundmedianow @EndWokeness Wait... is this the same person or did all the grants go to green haired grad students with noserings? Neither one would surprise me.

@EndWokeness How is a green haired grad school girl with a nosering whose personality revolves around "diversity" considered "diverse" at UC Berkeley? If you asked me to draw a stereotypical student at UC Berkley, I'm pretty sure that would be it.

@CNviolations If it helps, the original backing track was "Goodbye Horses"

@MikeBenzCyber What percentage of redactions in the JFK files were to protect USAID cover operations?

I can't find the actual grant from the NEA for this arts festival, but it looks like other grants and awards that kind of overlap with this arts festival were for the sub-$100k range, usually $40-50k Festival is still several months away. If they really have 300k visitors each year to this festival as their marketing materials claim, this is less than a dollar per visitor that they're out. There's plenty of time to find donors or raise funds for that amount of money with an event this size. This festival wasn't cancelled because of Trump's war on culture, it was killed because the organizers of this festival: a. wanted something public to blame on Trump so the public would be angry at Trump. b. didn't want to put in work to close the funding gap (looking at their anemic sponsor page form, I'm pretty sure this is at least part of it) c. both.

There are two sides to this: 1.) to a nontechnical layman, an Inconel bushing that was precision ground to a tolerance within microns looks exactly the same as one made from stainless steel, or aluminum that was stamped out of a machine that can have half a mil of slop in it depending on how hot the stamping machine was that day. That $90,000 bag of bushings almost certainly doesn't represent government waste as much as it does a part that has design specs that jack up the price. This could have multiple reasons, and some reasons are not great reasons, but at this point in history, outright fraud is unlikely. 2.) Because of companies being concerned primarily on cost, one way job shops still thrive in America is in industries that have regular orders of parts that for one reason or another can't be bought from overseas. Maybe you don't like the price you're paying for your bag of airplane engine bushings, but the money is paying American workers to make airplane engine bushings in America, it's not funding terrorists overseas or going into the pockets of lawyers for the airplane bushings lobby.

If you really want to see American manufacturing take off, these facilities shouldn't be fed by traditional universities or even trade schools, they should be the universities and trade schools. One summer apprenticing, doing machine setup and learning how to program parts would be worth as much as two years at community college. Two years working the line here would be worth as much as a four year degree. Educators and classrooms can still have a role in filling in theory and supporting knowledge, but if you're in an Engineering technology program, you're paying for four years worth of schooling when about two semesters worth of it are what you need because that piece of paper is still being treated as important.

It can be a little troubling, especially if you feel like you have 15 minutes to convince a stranger to not destroy your career, but it doesn't have to be shameful. If you actually do stuff for a living, maybe you don't feel like you should have to justify your existence, and maybe you don't have an elevator pitch for your job ready, but you should quickly be able to come up with a description to others about what you do and why you think it's important. Interviews are a textbook part of a lean assessment so the assessing organization can understand business operations, and the flow of data, decisions, and information.

@amuse @Rain_Cosmetics Seems actionable.

@ESSYFB Not saying I have all the answers, but Iodine, selenium, iron, etc... deficiencies all affect the thyroid. Even chicken nuggets probably have some trace nutrients added in to enrich the trace nutrients and McDonalds fries definitely have iodine added.

@BowTiedTrance I'm old enough to remember when liberals thought senators in their 80s should shut up and retire because they were screwing over the youth of America by protecting their institutions and their income streams.

@BowTiedGrey @civic_enjoyment A lot of so-called adults mentally never left the mean girls table in high school. Many were never even pretty enough to make it to the mean girls table while in high school so their adult life is spent cosplaying as high school mean girls.

Defense contractors also get their claws into defense projects early and convince requirements managers that the product they offer is the only way of solving a problem the military has. The KC45 was probably the most glaring example of a contractor getting caught doing this (and then using political pressure to get away with it), but it happens all the time. I don't know how you identify fraud on the surface when the paperwork is designed to match up perfectly, and it's so pervasive that it would probably be more difficult to find examples where it didn't happen. Maybe best to assume that it's all dirty and not worth saving, and restart defense procurement over from scratch.