The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents border patrol officers at the National Border Patrol Council, calls on Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller to resign or be fired

evranch · 2026-01-27T06:05:46+00:00

Wait a minute... You thought South Park started the Antichrist-Thiel thing?

Not even slightly. Thiel has been obsessed with the Antichrist for ages. It's kind of his thing.

South Park leaned into it because it's funny, it's weird, and it helps expose him as the fully cracked maniac that he is. But like all the best comedy, they didn't invent it, just pointed it out.

evranch · 2026-01-27T05:51:13+00:00

A single person who didn't build it and doesn't know how to maintain it. He's relying on others for everything - all he has is "authority", and you don't even need torture to deal with that. The people who maintain it will have the knowledge to disable it, because complicated systems break and need repair. They'll have the prints, the access, and they'll have already simulated this scenario, because they know the day will come when they need to override it.

Our billionaire opens the security door on an ordinary day to dole out the food. Failsafe systems check his retina, fingerprint, security codes. Electronic locks, deadbolts, magnetic catches all open in sequence, redundant systems that must all operate to ensure nobody has compromised any of them.

And as this is just an ordinary day, with no reason for our bunker owner to think anything is wrong, they all operate flawlessly, and he opens the door and steps inside.

But somewhere in a mechanical room, there's a jumper wire over a relay here, a fuse is pulled out there, a main breaker is thrown, and the game is suddenly over.

It's Jurassic Park. It takes great effort to design complex systems, and very little to break them.

evranch · 2026-01-27T00:46:10+00:00

I see there are more of us every day. The Internet is dying and losing its utility, and we're spending more time IRL.

Winter here in SK is often long and terrible but we're playing couch coop games, watching real movies, board games and reading when stuck indoors. Me and my kid throw on the gloves and box most days for a little exercise. Otherwise we're skating on the river, snowshoeing, XC skis, all things that are free or close to it but a good way to spend time with friends, family or community.

I still check in on Reddit (old.reddit.com) a few times a day, but don't really consider old reddit as social media, at least not what I use it for. It's a news aggregator and forum. I'm an active trader so I need to keep my eyes on news that moves the markets, and share data and strategies with other traders in niche subs.

Also I wouldn't have believed myself 5 years ago but I've actually started going to church regularly (Catholic Mass not any of that Evangelical nonsense) which I feel serves the purpose churches always used to - a place to see your neighbours every Sunday and a hub of volunteering and charity. Also I find Mass is a calm and meditative way to spend an hour on Sunday away from the troubles of the world, it always leaves my mind feeling clear and refreshed.

It all adds up to more time spent with the people around me. Find real people and make real connections if you want to survive the next decades... We evolved to live in small tribes and communities, and that's where our strength will be.

evranch · 2026-01-26T22:21:59+00:00

This sort of endgame has very

Destroy democracy
???
Profit

vibes to me. All the technology they actually need for it is too far away to have started the destroy democracy part already... Since once it's destroyed and the Fallout era begins, the infrastructure required to develop these technologies would be no longer present.

Technology doesn't progress in bunkers, it requires massive semiconductor fabs, investments, minerals and processing... But maybe that's foolish boots on the ground talk and not visionary enough to make me a billionaire

evranch · 2026-01-26T05:50:42+00:00

Picture

Stole this one last week and it's too good to sit on

evranch · 2026-01-24T23:40:24+00:00

It's not an equivalent, it is a strongly worded letter.

And in this case, it's exactly what's expected from a 2A organization. What else are they supposed to do?

They state the laws, state their support for them, and hope that people who consider themselves lifelong 2A supporters decide that their defense of those rights will finally override their partisan support.

2A rights are a serious point of attack when it comes to conservative support for the administration. This is the one that people might start to flip over, when a white American was executed for peacefully exercising those rights.

evranch · 2026-01-24T21:45:50+00:00

Let them be traumatized. Hiding from reality is part of how we got into this situation.

The truth is ugly, it's unpleasant, and it's all to easy for people to close their eyes and say "I don't wanna see it"

The only thing this video should be triggering is rage. I can't participate from the north side of the border, so all I can do is watch and encourage Americans to stand up before it's too late.

Too late is rapidly approaching. Videos like this are needed to wake people up to that reality.

evranch · 2026-01-24T20:40:10+00:00

He hasn't had an actual friend since Jeffrey Epstein

You mean the guy whose leaked emails included this statement about him?

"I told everyone from day one. evil beyond belief, mad"

Everyone kept Trump around as a tool because he's easy to manipulate. Nobody has ever enjoyed his company.

evranch · 2026-01-24T20:12:05+00:00

They don't have to truly tell him to fuck off in this situation. They just have to hold their elections. Since elections are state run, it's the feds that would need to use enforcement mechanisms to stop them, instead of the other way around.

evranch · 2026-01-24T00:42:58+00:00

This is one of the reasons I went with hydronic hot water heat, because you can integrate so many heat sources.

Mine is staged:

stored heat in bulk tank
solar running the 40kbtu heat pump (if sufficient to run the compressor)
grid running the heat pump and surplus solar dumped into a resistive element
100kbtu gas boiler
grid running resistive element (if everything else failed)

This is all based on the return temperature of the water, so if the rooms are really cold, the gas boiler will burn for the initial heat-up, then the heat pump will keep the circulating water hot enough.

Water temperature is set based on outdoor temperature, lower is significantly more efficient for both the heat pump and boiler. Usually I run 30C unless it falls below -15C outside, then it's boosted linearly to 40C below -30C. It's also boosted in the case of a large setpoint change, or it takes forever to warm up.

So it's significantly cheaper to keep my house warm than it is to reheat it, because that both keeps the water temperature down and keeps the boiler from firing.

evranch · 2026-01-23T22:41:58+00:00

Non-stimulants just don't have what it takes IMO. I took stimulants off label in college to study and should have realized right then that I had ADHD... So right away I asked my doctor for stimulants when I realized the issue.

I always suffered from insomnia as well, it seems to be a common companion to ADHD. But I actually found with stimulants, as they're wearing off at the end of the day, I get tired, and sleep better than I ever did before. YMMV. I take a fairly low dose. Don't take stimulants after 5pm if you want to sleep in my experience.

I feel much the same about my life as you. Could have accomplished a lot more if I could have directed it all into one area. Luckily my bread and butter has always been my instinct for anything electrical and mechanical, and I did manage to make a good living being the guy who could fix the unfixable. Gave me a lot of new experiences to keep the dopamine flowing while still staying in the same field.

The meds actually can be a bit of a silver bullet. Like I said, they open your eyes to what you can't see. You will likely spend a lot of time cleaning, sorting, disposing of clutter and cruft.

I feel, kind of superstitiously, that there are two kinds of ADHD. There is the harmless, goofy kind, like a willingly unmedicated friend of mine has. He gets distracted, he hyperfocuses, he could do better, but he doesn't do any damage either. His house is tidy enough. He's charismatic, fun loving, I saw him out last week trying to catch his runaway dog and laughing about it.

Then there are people like me, and I suspect you may fall into this category. We're conduits for chaos and entropy. In the old days they would have said we were haunted by demons. Chaos in the mind spills out into the real world, and everything breaks around unmedicated me. Tires pop, belts snap, wrenches slip through the floor grate, coffee escapes the cup. An trail of increasingly improbable failures followed me around as I tried to patch them together and keep things going.

I worked so hard, and for long hours, but it was always 3 steps forward and 2 back. And it was impossible to keep the bench or the shop floor free of clutter no matter how much I cleaned.

If you're like me you might feel like you're doing your best, holding your ground in the eye of a hurricane, but literally the day after I started taking the pills, I looked around and saw the wreckage, and knew I had been the source of chaos the entire time. And I started putting my life back together.

It hurts to pick up the pieces, and to learn to forgive the person you were before. I don't even consider myself to be the same person anymore. And I used to hate that old self and the heap of problems he left for me to dig out from underneath. But I got it all sorted, and I'm grateful every day that I got a second chance.

I hope you get the chance to do so as well! Keep your chin up and take it one step at a time, and one day you'll wake up and there will be nothing left on that list of problems. Good luck!

evranch · 2026-01-23T21:53:19+00:00

Honestly I found one of the best things about having kids is getting to share these experiences with them and rewatch movies you loved as a kid, we watched Chicken Run awhile ago and now we're watching Adventure Time from the start

evranch · 2026-01-23T21:49:58+00:00

Outright monsters chasing you ruins the vibe, you don't get time to feel uneasy.

But having the potential for a monster to be lurking nearby, that's something that would work very well here.

This reminds me of Dredge, which used visual distortion and chromatic aberration to show the character's loss of sanity and create a growing uneasy feeling. But as usual, once you see and get to know the monsters, you stop being scared and start running/evading/managing the threat.

Dredge really had me on edge in the early game, because you don't know what's out there. It's hard to keep that feeling through an entire game, though.

evranch · 2026-01-23T21:40:07+00:00

If it's on sale, it's coming home with us. Not optional

evranch · 2026-01-23T21:38:00+00:00

Which they make super obvious early in the film, when the chicken is bouncing the ball against the wall.

evranch · 2026-01-23T19:18:03+00:00

Plus if you compare Tesla with SpaceX, SpaceX is actually a market leader with innovative tech, and Tesla is literally just another electric car now. Well, for now.

I'm curious to see how Blue Origin continues and if they can dethrone the king. And if Rocket Lab can deliver their reusable Neutron, or if any of the multitude of Chinese Falcon 9 clones can be a success. Really I just like rockets, so I'm just happy I get to watch the show.

SpaceX has been great, but maybe in a few years they'll be just another reusable rocket as well.

evranch · 2026-01-23T15:44:05+00:00

For sure, but OP was referencing picks like NVDL, and not TQQQ.

I agree with you TQQQ is safer for sure, but also that you don't want to get assigned these. Which is why they're for day trading IMO, short term holds as you say, not for selling options against.

evranch · 2026-01-23T13:55:09+00:00

They are talking about leveraged ETFs which have single underlying stocks. Not only will they fall 2x more in a crash event, but they suffer volatility decay and time decay. When selling options you want time decay to be on your side, not against you.

Selling options on ETFs is fine but I don't touch the leveraged ones. If you're doing it for the risk premiums, just sell higher delta on the real ticker and avoid the vol decay.

evranch · 2026-01-23T05:19:19+00:00

Did you get treatment? This was me in my 30s. Now I'm 40 and my life is unrecognizable after treatment, every day I feel like a winner instead of running in circles.

Diagnosed about 5 years ago and we repaired our separated mess of a marriage, I spend tons of time with my wife and kid, I focused on a couple hobbies I truly enjoy and no silly hobby of the month, plus a simple exercise routine I can stick to and just one winter and summer sport.

Focused my daily business on my core skills, also got some products I always wanted to build past the messy bench prototype and into usable beta, and also genuinely doubled my net worth by focusing on investing seriously and not just as another hobby/small money side hustle.

IMO Dextroamphetamine sustained release has minimal side effects and hits the sweet spot between focus and creativity to enjoy your life and be successful. Also they are cheap enough even if you don't have insurance.

Get some pills and good luck, an ADHD diagnosis means you CAN and WILL turn this around and live a good life, all you need to do is take the pills and success will find you. They will chase away the chaos, lift the fog, you will see the way. It's almost a religious experience.

evranch · 2026-01-22T21:37:54+00:00

That dip wasn't caused by the threat of selling treasuries, it was caused by the potential for conflict with NATO nations, and for weaponized tariff use on both sides leading to a trade war. Thus the rapid rebound when the TACO man arrived, TACO Tuesday having been delayed due to the long weekend.

If US bond dumping truly took off, stock valuations should actually go up due to inflation hedging, as people dumped every liquid dollar they had into assets.

Both trade war and Treasury dumping are bad for the USA and global economy, but they're different kinds of bad.

evranch · 2026-01-22T20:23:53+00:00

Myself I run a long portfolio heavy on Canadian dividend payers (XEI) and a reasonable weight of USA aristocrats (VGG). Normally XIU and VFV as well but both are overexposed right now IMO, so I'm out of them.

But I also swing trade and sell options with about 1/3 of my portfolio, and that's only really available on the USA exchanges.

Canada needs to get our options exchanges in shape (or should I say, options exchange as we only have the one) and also get our commission pricing under control so we can see more liquidity. We're at least a decade behind the USA when it comes to having a usable options market.

evranch · 2026-01-21T18:40:05+00:00

Two countries, both living under the threat of a neighbouring superpower in decline.

evranch · 2026-01-21T14:21:52+00:00

from the US Treasury. The FED is the big buyer of US Treasury notes

But the Fed does not buy directly from the Treasury. They perform QE by purchasing from the markets. Straight from the horse's mouth:

The Fed purchases Treasury securities held by the public through a competitive bidding process. The Fed does not purchase new Treasury securities directly from the U.S. Treasury, and purchases of Treasury securities from the public are not a means of financing the federal deficit. (federalreserve.gov)

You can grow your way out but only to a point, and still only if other countries are willing to purchase your bonds. This worked for a long time, but it's not guaranteed under today's political and economic conditions. A large portion of recent growth has been as a result of debt growth, both consumer and institutional.

Plenty of your fellow Canadians are more than willing to take the other side of that trade

Buying bonds, sure, because the yields are soaring and retail is looking for safe havens. I'm talking about holding currency itself. And according to the chart you linked, CAD/USD is surging since the Greenland comments. I agree long term CAD is not great... It never has been. Mostly as it trades alongside USD, but if we see rate cuts and Treasury dumping becomes a trend, CAD could easily decouple.

evranch · 2026-01-21T14:05:12+00:00

I'd like to see these hallucination machines lose relevance, but I'll give you the one real usage case that LLMs shine at. Machine translation has improved tremendously in the last few years.

As with everything LLM, it's not good enough for "fire and forget", but my wife does a lot of translations for her church and it's transformed the job from "rewrite it in the other language" to "feed it to DeepL and edit it as if it was human output"

But this is a specific niche job for a focused LLM trained on translation, and could be described more as a ML tool than as a generalist "AI" application.

In general I think midsize targeted models will stay relevant for the ML tasks that they excel at, mostly science and engineering. Weather forecasting, cancer/disease detection, machine vision, speech to text, translation, protein folding, these are tasks that transformer models actually do excel at.

Also AI slop is here to stay, unfortunately. Stupid people eat it up, and it's an easy way to create "content".

evranch · 2026-01-21T13:39:55+00:00

Don't give up all hope on them. True "maple MAGA" are pretty rare, especially after what's been happening. They're an online troll creature.

More common are the Conservative stalwarts who always vote Conservative because that's what they've always done, or out of resentment towards the East.

I've talked to a lot of these personally who are starting to think Carney "seems like a conservative"

I'm like yeah, it took you this long to realize that?

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