After following this insult to shitshows for the worse part of the afternoon (copypasta from The Guardian's live coverage brought tumbleweeds to the Discord server), we finally have a final story.

I want to be abundantly clear that we all have our opinions about Kirk and the circumstances surrounding his death. That is not what this thread is about; it's about the ... whatever that was. Ostensibly a memorial, it was obviously more political event than anything else.

But if you're playing Nazi bingo, get your card out.

Tens of thousands gathered in Arizona on Sunday for a public memorial to honor Charlie Kirk, the rightwing youth organizer who was fatally shot during an event at a Utah college.

Donald Trump gave the last of more than two dozen speeches, following emotional remarks from Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, and eulogies from the vice-president, JD Vance, four cabinet members and other senior White House officials, a reflection of the murdered activist’s deep imprint on the president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement.

Trump’s remarks were an awkward mix of eulogy and campaign speech, during which he frequently veered away from reading somber remarks about Kirk’s life and violent death to make offhand comments and jokes.

At one point, Trump mentioned that, shortly before he died, Kirk told a staff member he was not afraid of students who disagreed with him in the crowd at Utah Valley University. “I’m not here to fight them – I want them to know them and love them,” Trump quoted Kirk as saying. “In that private moment on his dying day, we find everything we need to know about who Charlie Kirk truly was.”

“He did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them, ”Trump said, before breaking from his prepared remarks to add: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”

Dude. You're the keynote speaker at a memorial (already an odd concept) ... you can't keep your remarks short and focused on the deceased?

I know you need to be in front of a camera, but you have cameras back at the White House. And on Air Force One.

ETA: Shame this didn't make it into the final cut from the live feed:

Several attendees were leaving the stadium while Trump continued his remarks in honor of Charlie Kirk – part remembrance, part grievance.

This happened just past 4pm local time (7pm ET), meaning some guests have spent more than 12 hours waiting for the speech. The president’s tribute started about an hour behind schedule.

Christofascists just like "fuck this, I'm out."

Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.

The proposed legislation comes as conservatives pay tribute to the murdered activist and podcaster, whose life will be commemorated by the president at a service in Arizona on Sunday, by comparing him to martyred political and spiritual leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and Saint Paul.

The Oklahoma bill, sponsored by state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto, specifies that the memorial site must be in “a prominent area” on the main campus of every institution of higher education in the state system, and must include “a statue of Charlie Kirk sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk and his wife holding their children. Designs for the statue must be approved by the legislature.

I have no words.

Last Friday, the Senate passed the final vote on Senate Bill 79 — the more homes by transit bill. The passage of SB 79 ranks as one of the largest upzonings in the country. This is the culmination of 8 years of legislative battle started by state senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco and the YIMBYs to allow dense housing by transit and to ensure that taxpayer investment into public transit results in a commensurate amount of riders using it. All that is left now is for the governor to sign it, which I imagine is all but certain.

I won’t make the mistake I have made before in implying massive change will happen because of this law. Compared to SB 79’s initial version, and compared to the original vision in 2018 when it was first proposed as SB 827, SB 79 has been considerably scaled down. But the scaling down was not in its effectiveness to build housing, but in scope and that’s a key difference than prior state laws passed in California.

SB 79 zones for multi-family housing near transit. If the transit is a heavy-rail line (a high capacity metro like BART, LA Metro Red-Line, or Caltrain), you can built multifamily homes as tall as 7 stories within a 0.25 mile radius of the station, or 6 stories within a 0.5 mile radius.

If the transit is light rail (small train vehicles like a tram or streetcar, or a bus service with a 24 hour bus lane), housing can be 6 and 5 stories within 0.25 and 0.5 mile radius, respectively. Providing that any portion of a parcel is within range of the pedestrian entrance of a transit station, SB 79 can be utilized. There’s going to be many legal questions as to what constitutes a transit pedestrian area or whether a parcel is in range.

Many suburbanites will be concerned about the tall height limits, but honestly, looking at the parcels on my map, the density limits are quite low. A 5,000 square foot lot (most lots in my city are around 4,000 square feet) allows for 13 homes near a high-frequency rail stop. 13 units in my city is a 3-story building. The tall height limits are ideal for large lots, not small ones.

When Tolstoy speaks of Christianity, he's referring to his more objective, philosophical, non-supernatural interpretation of his translation of the Gospels: The Gospel In Brief. For context:

This is a direct continuation of Tolstoy's Preface Of His Interpretation Of His Translation Of The Gospels The Gospel In Brief (Part Two Of Four):

"Everyone reconciled the differences in their own way, and such reconciling continues today; but in their reconciliation, everyone asserts that their words are the continued revelation of the Holy Ghost. Paul's epistles follow this model, as does the founding of the church councils, which begin with the formula: "It pleases us and the Holy Ghost." Such too are the decrees of the popes, synods, khlysts and all false interpreters who claim that the Holy Ghost speaks through their mouths. They all rely on the same crude platform to confirm the truth of their reconciliation, they all claim that their reconciliation is not the fruit of their own thoughts, but the testimony of the Holy Ghost. When one refuses to enter this fray of faiths, each of which calls itself true, it becomes impossible not to notice that in their common approach, wherein they accept the enormous amount of so-called scripture in the Old and New Testaments to be uniformly sacred, there lies an insurmountable self-constructed obstacle to understanding the teaching of Christ. Moreover, one notices that it is from this delusion that the opportunity and even necessity for endlessly varied and hostile sects arises.

Only the reconciling of an enormous amount of revelations can foster endless variety. Interpreting the teaching of one individual, who is worshipped as a God, cannot give birth to a sect. The teaching of a God who has descended to earth in order to instruct people cannot be interpreted in different ways because this would be counter to the very goal of descending. If God descended to earth in order to reveal truth to people, then the very least he could have done would be to have revealed the truth in such a way that everybody would understand it. If he did not do this, then he was not God. If God's truths are such that even God couldn't make them understandable to people, then of course there's no way that people could have done it. If Jesus isn't God, but was a great man, then his teachings are even less likely to give birth to sects. The teachings of a great man can only be considered great if he clearly and understandably expresses that which others have only expressed unclearly and incomprehensibly.

That which is incomprehensible in the teaching of a great man is simply not great and the teaching of a great man cannot give birth to a sect. The teaching of a great man is only great insofar as it unifies people in a single truth for all. The teaching of Socrates has always been understood uniformly by all. Only the kind of interpretation which claims to be the revelation of the Holy Ghost, to be the only truth, and that all else is a lie, only this kind of interpretation can give birth to hatred and the so-called sects. No matter how much the members of a given denomination speak of how they do not judge other denominations, how they pray communion with them and have no hatred toward them, it is not so. Never, going back to Arius, has any claim, regardless of its supporting dogma, arisen from anything other than condemnation of the falseness of the opposing dogma. To contend that the expression of a given dogma is a divine expression, that it is of the Holy Ghost, is the highest degree of pride and stupidity: the highest pride because it is impossible to say anything more prideful than, "The words that I speak are said through me by God himself," and the highest stupidity because when responding to another man's claim that God speaks through his mouth, it is impossible to say anything more stupid than, "No, it is not through your mouth that God speaks, he speaks through my mouth and he says the complete opposite of what your God is saying." But, all along, this is exactly what every church claims, and it is from this very thing that all the sects have arisen as well as all the evil in the world that has been done and is being done in the name of faith. But apart from the outward evil that is produced by the sects' interpretations, there is another important, internal deficiency that gives all of these sects an unclear, murky and dishonest character.

With all the sects, this deficiency can be detected in the fact that, although they acknowledge the last revelation of the Holy Ghost to be its descent onto the apostles and subsequent passage down to the supposedly chosen ones, these false interpreters never express directly, concretely, and definitively what exactly that revelation from the Holy Ghost is. Yet all the while it is upon this supposed continued revelation that they base their faith and by which they consider this faith to be Christ's.

All the leaders of the churches who claim the revelation of the Holy Ghost recognize, as do the Muslims, three revelations. The Muslims recognize Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. The church leaders recognize Moses, Jesus and the Holy Ghost. But according to the Muslim faith, Mohammed was the last prophet, the one who explained the meaning of Moses's and Jesus's revelations; he is the last revelation, explaining all that came before, and every true believer holds to this revelation. But it is not so with the church belief. It recognizes, like the Muslim faith, three revelations—Moses's, Jesus's and the Holy Ghost's—but it does not call itself by the name of the final revelation. Instead, it asserts that the foundation of its faith is the teaching of Christ. Therefore the teachings they propagate are their own, but they ascribe their authority to Christ.

Some sectarians of the Holy Ghost variety consider the final revelation, the one that explained all that preceded it, to be that of Paul, some consider it to be that of certain councils, some that of others, some that of the popes, some that of the patriarchs, some that of private revelations from the Holy Ghost. All of them ought to have named their faith after the one who received that final revelation. If that final revelation is from the church fathers, or the epistles of the Eastern patriarchs, or papal edicts, or the Syllabus of Errors, or the catechism of Luther or Filaret, then say so. Name your faith after that, because the final revelation which explains all previous revelation will always be the most important revelation. However, they do not do this; instead they promote teachings completely foreign to Christ, and claim that Christ himself preached these things. Therefore, according to their teachings, it turns out that Christ announced that he was saving the human race, fallen since Adam, with his own blood, that God is a trinity, that the Holy Ghost descended upon the apostles and spread via the laying on of hands onto the priesthood, that seven sacraments are needed for salvation, that communion ought to occur in two forms, and so on. It turns out that all of this is the teaching of Christ, whereas in Jesus's actual teaching there isn't the slightest hint of any of this. These false teachers should call their teaching and their faith the teaching and faith of the Holy Ghost, not of Christ. The faith of Christ can only rightfully refer to a faith based on Christ's revelation as it comes down to us in the Gospels, and which recognizes this as the ultimate revelation. This is in accordance with Christ's own words: "Do not recognize any as your teacher, except Christ." This concept seems so simple that it should not even be a point of discussion, but strange as it may be to say so, to this day, nobody has attempted to separate the teaching of Christ from that artificial and completely unjustified reconciliation with the Old Testament or from those arbitrary additions to his teachings that were made and are still being made in the name of the Holy Ghost." - Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel In Brief, Preface

When Tolstoy speaks of Christianity, he's referring to his more objective, philosophical, non-supernatural interpretation of his translation of the Gospels: The Gospel In Brief. For context:

This is a direct continuation of Tolstoy's Preface Of His Interpretation Of His Translation Of The Gospels The Gospel In Brief (Part Two Of Four):

"Everyone reconciled the differences in their own way, and such reconciling continues today; but in their reconciliation, everyone asserts that their words are the continued revelation of the Holy Ghost. Paul's epistles follow this model, as does the founding of the church councils, which begin with the formula: "It pleases us and the Holy Ghost." Such too are the decrees of the popes, synods, khlysts and all false interpreters who claim that the Holy Ghost speaks through their mouths. They all rely on the same crude platform to confirm the truth of their reconciliation, they all claim that their reconciliation is not the fruit of their own thoughts, but the testimony of the Holy Ghost. When one refuses to enter this fray of faiths, each of which calls itself true, it becomes impossible not to notice that in their common approach, wherein they accept the enormous amount of so-called scripture in the Old and New Testaments to be uniformly sacred, there lies an insurmountable self-constructed obstacle to understanding the teaching of Christ. Moreover, one notices that it is from this delusion that the opportunity and even necessity for endlessly varied and hostile sects arises.

Only the reconciling of an enormous amount of revelations can foster endless variety. Interpreting the teaching of one individual, who is worshipped as a God, cannot give birth to a sect. The teaching of a God who has descended to earth in order to instruct people cannot be interpreted in different ways because this would be counter to the very goal of descending. If God descended to earth in order to reveal truth to people, then the very least he could have done would be to have revealed the truth in such a way that everybody would understand it. If he did not do this, then he was not God. If God's truths are such that even God couldn't make them understandable to people, then of course there's no way that people could have done it. If Jesus isn't God, but was a great man, then his teachings are even less likely to give birth to sects. The teachings of a great man can only be considered great if he clearly and understandably expresses that which others have only expressed unclearly and incomprehensibly.

That which is incomprehensible in the teaching of a great man is simply not great and the teaching of a great man cannot give birth to a sect. The teaching of a great man is only great insofar as it unifies people in a single truth for all. The teaching of Socrates has always been understood uniformly by all. Only the kind of interpretation which claims to be the revelation of the Holy Ghost, to be the only truth, and that all else is a lie, only this kind of interpretation can give birth to hatred and the so-called sects. No matter how much the members of a given denomination speak of how they do not judge other denominations, how they pray communion with them and have no hatred toward them, it is not so. Never, going back to Arius, has any claim, regardless of its supporting dogma, arisen from anything other than condemnation of the falseness of the opposing dogma. To contend that the expression of a given dogma is a divine expression, that it is of the Holy Ghost, is the highest degree of pride and stupidity: the highest pride because it is impossible to say anything more prideful than, "The words that I speak are said through me by God himself," and the highest stupidity because when responding to another man's claim that God speaks through his mouth, it is impossible to say anything more stupid than, "No, it is not through your mouth that God speaks, he speaks through my mouth and he says the complete opposite of what your God is saying." But, all along, this is exactly what every church claims, and it is from this very thing that all the sects have arisen as well as all the evil in the world that has been done and is being done in the name of faith. But apart from the outward evil that is produced by the sects' interpretations, there is another important, internal deficiency that gives all of these sects an unclear, murky and dishonest character.

With all the sects, this deficiency can be detected in the fact that, although they acknowledge the last revelation of the Holy Ghost to be its descent onto the apostles and subsequent passage down to the supposedly chosen ones, these false interpreters never express directly, concretely, and definitively what exactly that revelation from the Holy Ghost is. Yet all the while it is upon this supposed continued revelation that they base their faith and by which they consider this faith to be Christ's.

All the leaders of the churches who claim the revelation of the Holy Ghost recognize, as do the Muslims, three revelations. The Muslims recognize Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. The church leaders recognize Moses, Jesus and the Holy Ghost. But according to the Muslim faith, Mohammed was the last prophet, the one who explained the meaning of Moses's and Jesus's revelations; he is the last revelation, explaining all that came before, and every true believer holds to this revelation. But it is not so with the church belief. It recognizes, like the Muslim faith, three revelations—Moses's, Jesus's and the Holy Ghost's—but it does not call itself by the name of the final revelation. Instead, it asserts that the foundation of its faith is the teaching of Christ. Therefore the teachings they propagate are their own, but they ascribe their authority to Christ.

Some sectarians of the Holy Ghost variety consider the final revelation, the one that explained all that preceded it, to be that of Paul, some consider it to be that of certain councils, some that of others, some that of the popes, some that of the patriarchs, some that of private revelations from the Holy Ghost. All of them ought to have named their faith after the one who received that final revelation. If that final revelation is from the church fathers, or the epistles of the Eastern patriarchs, or papal edicts, or the Syllabus of Errors, or the catechism of Luther or Filaret, then say so. Name your faith after that, because the final revelation which explains all previous revelation will always be the most important revelation. However, they do not do this; instead they promote teachings completely foreign to Christ, and claim that Christ himself preached these things. Therefore, according to their teachings, it turns out that Christ announced that he was saving the human race, fallen since Adam, with his own blood, that God is a trinity, that the Holy Ghost descended upon the apostles and spread via the laying on of hands onto the priesthood, that seven sacraments are needed for salvation, that communion ought to occur in two forms, and so on. It turns out that all of this is the teaching of Christ, whereas in Jesus's actual teaching there isn't the slightest hint of any of this. These false teachers should call their teaching and their faith the teaching and faith of the Holy Ghost, not of Christ. The faith of Christ can only rightfully refer to a faith based on Christ's revelation as it comes down to us in the Gospels, and which recognizes this as the ultimate revelation. This is in accordance with Christ's own words: "Do not recognize any as your teacher, except Christ." This concept seems so simple that it should not even be a point of discussion, but strange as it may be to say so, to this day, nobody has attempted to separate the teaching of Christ from that artificial and completely unjustified reconciliation with the Old Testament or from those arbitrary additions to his teachings that were made and are still being made in the name of the Holy Ghost." - Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel In Brief, Preface

A pipeline leak in northwest North Dakota has spilled an estimated 20,000 barrels, or 840,000 gallons, of crude oil and produced water onto agricultural land, the Department of Environmental Quality said Monday.

The spill about 4 miles northwest of Stanley in Mountrail County involved emulsion, a mixture of crude oil and produced water that emerges from a well before they are separated, the department said. Produced water, also known as saltwater or brine, is a waste byproduct of oil production.

...

It is unknown how long the leak went undetected by Hess Corp., which owns the pipeline. Bill Suess, manager of the Department of Environmental Quality’s spill investigation program, said the company first became aware of a potential problem Sept. 2 when they “started getting an indication their numbers weren’t right” – 10 days before the spill was discovered and reported.

"They went in and did some tests. The tests came back negative,” said Suess. “And then on the 12th they found the dead vegetation.”

Hess discovered and reported the spill on Friday, according to the incident report.

The cause of the spill has not been identified beyond “equipment failure” and remains under investigation, according to Suess.

The leak occurred from a 6-inch carbon steel pipeline called a “flow line,” used to transport the oil, natural gas and produced water from a well to a treater unit where the products are separated.

Regulators are still investigating the extent of the spill underground, including possible groundwater impacts, Suess said.

...

“We don’t know yet how deep the impacts go,” said Suess.

Good thing the government of North Dakota isn't functionally bankrupt and the EPA will surely jump into action and farmers are currently having absolutely no labor nor financial problems.

Or uh, thoughts and prayers for all the ground water under all that farmland, I guess.

Cross-posted from "TIL "Cognitive Sovereignty," which argues that modern psychopolitics—subtle control via digital platforms—exploits attention, supported by a 2025 PNAS Nexus study" by @Bidah@thelemmy.club in !technology@lemmy.world

Cross-posted from "TIL "Cognitive Sovereignty," which argues that modern psychopolitics—subtle control via digital platforms—exploits attention, supported by a 2025 PNAS Nexus study" by @Bidah@thelemmy.club in !til@lemmy.world

Bidah

2025-09-18 17:54:28

TIL "Cognitive Sovereignty," which argues that modern psychopolitics—subtle control via digital platforms—exploits attention, supported by a 2025 PNAS Nexus study

Cross-posted from "TIL "Cognitive Sovereignty," which argues that modern psychopolitics—subtle control via digital platforms—exploits attention, supported by a 2025 PNAS Nexus study" by @[url=https://thelemmy.club/u/Bidah]Bidah[/url] in !til@lemmy.world

---

Cognitive Sovereignty: An Introduction to Psychic Autonomy

Insights into the ability of a person, community, or nation to control and manage their own knowledge, thinking, and decisions.

^{Juan Ruocco 🧙‍♂️ (421 Broadcasting Network)}

Two new rules have been added to this community, and they deserve some explanation.

Inspired by this comment, I started thinking about why so many gaming spaces feel shallow or exhausting.

The problem is that they are rarely about video games themselves. Instead, they become about “being a gamer”—a label, an identity, and a consumer tribe. That identity is built on cycles of hype, outrage, loyalty to platforms, and endless talk of hardware or marketing. It flattens games into consumable products, and the people into market demographics.

That’s not the kind of community I want to build. I’m here because I see games as art, and I want to share that perspective with others who think the same way. If someone views games mainly as a lifestyle accessory, or if their whole identity is wrapped up in consumption, then this space will feel alien to them—and that’s intentional.

Which is why the first new rule is simple: “This is not a gamer identity space.” It sets the boundary clearly. We don’t need the baggage of gamer identity here. This community isn’t a loyalty badge, it’s a place for deeper thought.

The second new rule grows directly out of the first: “Talk about games as art.” If games are art—and they are—then the most interesting conversations we can have are about design, aesthetics, mechanics, and meaning.

What is this game trying to say? What choices did the creators make, and why? How does its structure, its tone, or its style affect the way we experience it? These are the kinds of questions that lift discussion beyond consumption and into critique, interpretation, and appreciation.

I added this rule because I’ve seen firsthand what happens when you try to talk about games in this way elsewhere. In another gaming community (which doesn’t need to be named), I made the mistake of approaching the medium with positivity and seriousness—treating it as art worth celebrating.

The reaction was hostility. People saw appreciation as “shilling,” and thoughtful discussion as a threat to their outrage-driven culture. That told me all I needed to know: rather than fight to carve out space in communities built on negativity, it’s better to establish one that starts with positivity and respect for the medium itself.

So that’s the point of these two new rules. They’re not just lines in a list—they’re the foundation for what kind of community this will be. A place where games are treated as works of art, not consumer trophies. A place where we discuss choices, meaning, and design, not just hardware wars or outrage cycles.

This is a place where positivity is not only welcome but expected.

I've had the misfortune of spending time in Renton because that was where Fry's (Electronics) was. Not exactly a bastion of fun and frivolity, and this is in the '90s.

Four people – including three teenagers – are accused of a hate crime in Washington state after being arrested in connection with an alleged attack on a transgender woman that left the victim hospitalized, according to authorities.

The Renton police department said the four suspects in the case first argued with the 39-year-old woman on Monday evening – then beat her after she saw them again later. Investigators say they hurled homophobic slurs at the victim, who was attacked on a street near a transit center in Renton and suffered serious injuries.

“They chased her, knocked her to the ground, and repeatedly assaulted her,” police said in their statement.

Police documents obtained by ABC elaborate, recounting how the woman told officers she first encountered the group while telling them to stop “harassing” people at a local transit center. That drew the group’s attention, and they began “charging towards her”, the police documents alleged.

Surprising absolutely no one, our education system is shit.

The average reading and math scores of American high school seniors fell to their lowest levels in two decades in 2024, according to new national data released last week.

The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), found that, on average, reading scores for 12th graders were 10 points lower in 2024 than they were in 1992, when the test was first administered, and that math scores fell to their lowest levels since 2005, when the math assessment began.

The test, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is part of the US Department of Education, assessed roughly 19,300 12th-graders in math, 24,300 in reading and 23,000 eighth-graders in science between January and March of last year.

The report found that 35% of seniors “performed at or above” the NAEP’s “proficient” level in reading, and 22% were at or above that level in math.

It also stated that 45% of 12th graders scored below the NAEP’s “basic” level in math, marking a five percentage-point increase from 2019. In reading, 32% of students scored below the basic level, which was a two-point increase from 2019.

One-third of seniors met the standard for proficiency in reading and one-fifth in math, give or take a couple of percentage points, bringing me to dust off some cruft and quote George W. Bush:

"Is our children learning?"

An approach (Tom Torr's books):

"What I am now" is inscribed in the neurons and chemistry of the brain, and the state and function of the organs and their behavior. Engaging with this means facing the reality of the body; cognition and the "Self" are considered parts of this body. Cognition cannot drive evolution into conflict and still maintain the equilibrium of "what I am now"; for equilibrium, it is necessary that the movements of cognition be compatible with the findings that the body's possibilities and limitations determine for it. Otherwise, that incompatibility will spread to awareness, approach, perception, the "Self," and consequently, to "what I am now."

Cognition cannot be independent of the body, and for equilibrium, it is forced to submit to its frameworks. If it does not submit, it cannot make the brain's cognitive system accompany it in a way that vitalizes its movement, and the world of cognition, in turn, becomes dual. Only observation, experience, and trial and error—that is, rationality—can guide this duality toward integration.

Perhaps if we consider rationality to be the deference of the "Self" to its own totality and moving in harmony with this totality, then the lack of rationality could be seen as a misuse of the notion of free will, an overstepping of the "Self," and its domination over its own totality; as if instead of the voice of the "Self" being a representative of my totality, it becomes a sound detached from the totality, produced almost solely in the mouth.

In this interpretation, it is not unknown why and how belief plays a cancerous role in creating a gap between "self" and the totality and is castrating. Around this cancerous tissue, which, compared to the functional biases of cerebral cognition, is the equivalent of putting itself to sleep or into hypothermia, the path of observation, experience, and trial and error becomes narrow and rugged. Cognition, and subsequently awareness, evolutionary intelligence, and approach, lose their fluidity, rationality dims, and the brain's perceptual efficiency declines. Of course, the degree of this rationality and its absence is itself part of "what I am now."

The 30-year mortgage rate shot up the day after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates.

Hours after the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday by 25 basis points, mortgage rates ticked up 9 basis points.

...

The Fed announced Wednesday that it would trim its key policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point, bringing it to the range of 4% to 4.25%. Around the time of the announcement, Mortgage News Daily, a website that posts daily updates on rates, crashed - possibly the result of people flocking to the site to see how mortgage rates reacted. The company told MarketWatch it was looking into why the site was down that afternoon.

Mortgage News Daily later reported that the 30-year rate went up by 9 basis points (0.09%) to 6.22% on Wednesday. On Thursday, it reported that the 30-year rate had gone up by 15 more basis points, to 6.37%.

In contrast, a report by Freddie Mac measuring weekly averages for the 30-year rate found that mortgage rates fell to the lowest level in 12 months on Thursday. That's because Freddie Mac's report gathered information prior to and after the Fed's decision was announced. The weekly report doesn't survey lenders, but is based on actual mortgage applications to lenders across the country that are sent to Freddie Mac.

...
Mortgage rates aren't tied to the Fed's interest-rate moves. Instead, they typically fall in advance of a Fed rate cut, as MarketWatch has reported, because bond investors are trying to anticipate where the central bank will go. Mortgage rates are priced off the 10-year Treasury note BX:TMUBMUSD10Y by adding a spread.

Hence, the 10-year Treasury yield is a better gauge of how mortgage rates will move - and the 10-year yield was trending higher Thursday.

Mortgage rates have decoupled from the Fed's benchmark / targets, basically, because fiscal policy and the overall economic outlook are so bad that traditional monetary policy is no longer effective.

This is generally what economists would call 'a bad sign'.

Myself, I would go so far as 'a very bad sign.'

My condolences to anyone who confused their local new/used home salesperson with a qualified economist, if they told you, and you believed, something like 'Fed rate cuts will lower mortgage rates!"

In another topic (#Smithereen 0.11 is out!), grishka@mastodon.social says this:

> I have this convention where I return IDs for remote objects (obviously, how else would you authenticate them if not by fetching from the origin servers) but complete objects that are local, to save resources. IIRC I saw Mastodon do it for replies so just copied this behavior

It was in response to a discussion about conversation contexts — a resolvable collection of items that represents a conversation, thread, reply tree, etc.

Most implementors return a collection of object IDs, some return a collection of activities.

What about a mix of object IDs and full objects? That's interesting — it's the first I've heard of it.

My gut reaction is that it's messy... mixing types: strings for some items in the collection and complete objects for others.

... but I think at the end of the day, there are three things we need to acknowledge:

1. Most implementors end up converting ids to complete objects anyway by fetching from the remote resource (unless it is not needed)
2. Sending additional bytes over the wire is fairly inconsequential (unless I suppose you're sending many Mbits...)
3. Including the entire object saves on additional calls if the receiving party does not already know about the object.
4. You can trust the objects owned by the server you're requesting data from. (this is fe34)

I wonder if an amendment to f228 is needed silverpill@mitra.social to capture this use-case?