2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.

2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.

2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.

I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?

1. When I get a weekly Scarecrow Video pre-order email, extract a list of movies and use my Letterboxd rating history to determine which of them might be interesting to me. Let me know what I should pay attention to.

I tested this on five of the pre-order emails I had sitting around; it was useful for attention conservation.

2. On a daily basis, check Beacon Cinema's list of upcoming movie series and send me a note if there's a new one.

So useful that when I turned off openclaw, I vibe coded a general purpose RSS bridge (yeah, I know about the PHP one and the existing Python ones) and added a scraper for the Beacon page.

My general paradigm, which is not the only available paradigm, is that the claws are strongly useful as information filters. The risk is that they filter out the wrong thing, of course.

My point is that closing two lanes of the interstate for over a year is a failure of maintenance, rather than anything about light rail vs. driving.

I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(

b) The current administration is extremely unlikely to make vaccine approvals faster. If anything their instincts are the other way around.

1997. The War on Terror has a lot to answer for.

https://youtu.be/tH0bTpwQL7U

(I'm not endorsing any of that article's conclusions, but it's a good overview of the pattern.)

I still think there’s value to encouraging the arts that isn’t purely financial, but I don’t think there’s an easy way to answer yes to your last question.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds a bit like you've got a pre-existing opinion of the value of artists vs. however you're defining working poor.

The income program provides €33,800,000 a year (2000 participants, €325 a week, 52 weeks in a year). Double that to account for cost of managing the program -- that seems too high to me, but I want to err on the side of caution for this analysis.

Some percentage of that money flows right back into the economy, of course.

Meanwhile, ignoring windfall corporate taxes, Ireland ran a €7.4 billion deficit in 2025. So the cost of the program, ignoring the money flowing back into the economy, is under half a percentage point of the budget? Those small amounts do add up, but I can't see this as relevant competition to the cost of shoring up health, housing, and transport. I don't have good estimates of how much those costs are, which is why I'm using the deficit as a relevant proxy, but still -- we ought to avoid the trap of seeing numbers which are large to you and me and forgetting that other numbers are larger by orders of magnitude. (There's a term for this which slips my mind.)

I have thoughts on how we're defining value as well, but others have covered those.

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/money-and-tax/tax/inco...

What you can do if you're uncertain -- and my language was sloppy, good point! -- is say "hey, I'm not sure what you meant here; can you clarify?" And I say "yeah, I was unclear. I meant that the question was related to treaty status but after digging in, it's not required by treaty for that elected position to only be occupied by someone of a specific heritage. Thank you for pointing that out."

(I might not have said thank you, to be honest, and of course you're welcome to assume I'm just covering up because you called me on the phrasing.)

Not that anyone's reading this but what a great example of the tired old trick of attempting to use social justice language as a rhetorical lever.

This was an indigenous people treaty case, and when mothballed says "certain public elections" they mean "a single election for a position in Hawaii which was established in negotiations with indigenous Hawaiians in the 1970s. Not, however, a treaty obligation.

I don't know that I agree with RGB here, but I don't find that to be a racist opinion.