Vikram Bath

@vikrambath.bsky.social

2455 Followers 647 Following

Former business school professor, current software engineer. Writes at ordinary-times.com

WIRED identified a dozen accounts, varying in reach and influence-some had tens of thousands of followers-but they all share a similar theme: the fantasy of white male domination. They promote the aesthetic of being a white god or alpha, post about "the natural order" and the "biological truth" white supremacy, while encouraging followers to claim their "birthright" as the ruling species.
In Southeast Europe, the modern lion (Panthera leo) inhabited part of the Balkan Peninsula as well as adjacent areas, ranging northwestwards to Hungary and eastwards Ukraine during the Neolithic period.[28][29][6] It survived in Bulgaria until the 4th or 3rd century BC.[30][31] Around 1000 BC, it became extinct in the Peloponnese.[2][7] It disappeared from Macedonia around the first century AD, from Western Thrace not before the 2nd century AD and from Thessaly possibly in the 4th century CE; Themistius regretted that no more lions could be furnished for beast-shows.
She said yes
The Man Who Runs the IRS Spied on Colleagues When He Worked at JPMorgan Frank Bisignano directed staff to use software to snoop in email of rivals and surveil work of employees; Bisignano, who also is the chief of Social Security, denied he ever spied on co-workers
Watters: Women on base, you better be careful. Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be wild animals and you better watch out.
True story: I went running a few weeks ago on the bike path here deep in thought and all of the sudden came across a raccoon that was growling at me. I didn’t know what to do. Kick it? Anyway, I just veered off from him and MF STARTED CHASING ME. I sped up, and he gave up on me, I guess
Ant on keyboard. I stole this from search
Me: If you were an anti-vaxxer, would you say that your side should be more polite about the views that might lead someone to believe the vaccine is safe and effective? Are there moderate anti-vaxxers who say stuff like "we need to tone down the rhetoric; this isn't how we persuade!" Tod: I dunno. Is there a polite QAnon theorist who would just like everyone to treat everyone with respect & hear one another out?
NY governor Hochul: If data centers are really "LIQUID GOLD," then New Yorkers deserve more than scraps. We hit pause because the communities powering Al should share in its success. Maybe that's a novel concept in Washington. We call it doing our job.
Ben Shapiro: Candace Owens is an IQ test. If you watch Candace and come away thinking that you are smarter, better informed, or more moral...you are retarded. If you echo or excuse her evil and vicious stupidity...you are worse than retarded. Don't be retarded.
Who watches this shit? Reply: You just did
I might ask you: What are your hopes and dreams for your kids under the "why," before we get to the details of the skills? I have a lot of hopes and dreams for my kids. I would like them to live happy, fulfilling lives. I think I'm not naive. Certainly in my lifetime, the implicit purpose of education - the way we say to ourselves: Did this kid's education work out? - is, Do they get a good job?
Coates is very clear about his role: He is in opposition not against human beings, but against hateful and abusive lies and ideas that strip people of our shared humanity. Earlier he says "my role as a writer is to state things as clearly as I possibly can, to make them in such a way that they haunt, to state truths and to reinforce the animating notion of my politics - which is that all humanity is equal and is worthy of that."
Forbidden donut lamp at IKEA
applied to a job that showed the ATS score as part of the interface, I now know I am unemployable because I: -- used middle initial in resume but not app -- wrote out the word percent rather than % -- didn't mention equity in my resume even though it's in the JD (as a benefit)
How Nicotine Impacts Your Brain & Enhances Focus | Dr. Andrew Huberman
Mark Dohner, a musician and YouTuber, first tried nicotine pouches a few years ago, after hearing Mr. Huberman call it a cognitive enhancer and seeing posts from other influencers claiming small doses could be good for his brain. He bought a can of pouches at a gas station, hoping he would feel "locked in."
Jillian Michaels: The Comprehensive Health Benefits Of Nicotine:
Apple's 'Thermonuclear' Response to the OpenAI Threat Apple's suit against OpenAl under Tim Cook echoes a familiar playbook, betting that litigation can delay a rival from upending the iPhone era.
Om is charming and disarming, forceful and accommodat- ing. He has an easy smile, a quiet, melodic voice, and a hand- some face. Once he opens his mouth, it’s obvious how much he reads and how thirsty he is to learn. It’s rare to meet someone who is ready to debate you on almost any topic, but who’s also genuinely curious about your life and your opinion. It all makes the burly journalist one of the most huggable people on Earth.
Dave Ramsey on a single mom whose late boss left her a life changing inheritance. Caller: “My boss passed away and left me $1.25 million. I was his personal assistant for eight years. I’m a single mom with four kids, and now I don’t have a job.” Dave: “Someone just handed you $1.25 million to manage that’s your new job. Don’t rush. Build your own advisory team. Find a trusted investment advisor, a CPA, a real estate professional, and an insurance expert.”
I woke up this morning to the tragic news that Senator Lyndsey Graham of SC has passed away. Lyndsey was a dear friend and the hardest working man in the US Senate. He was also one of President Trumps most loyal supporters.
My son got mad at me bc I set the speed limit on the car to 80 mph. I drive w the same limit on the car. It's not just for my son. And l have never needed to go over 80 and we used to live in a place that had a speed limit of 60-70. Now we live in Delaware and 195 is 55 mph..
Nov 1900 An official of the American Ice Company was quoted in Wall Street circles yesterday as saying: “Our company last week secured control of the ice interests in Boston, and this gives control of 90 per cent. of the ice business on the Atlantic seaboard.” “In this city we expect to have in operation by the opening of the Summer season fifteen additional plants for the production of manufactured ice, and this branch of the business we purpose soon to increase in all cities.”
As a new Cold War takes shape between the U.S. and China, progressives fear the result will be a dramatically warming planet. Over 40 progressive groups sent a letter to President Joe Biden and lawmakers on Wednesday urging them to prioritize cooperation with China on climate change and curb its confrontational approach over issues like Beijing's crackdown on Hong Kong and forced detention of Uyghur Muslims.
Liberty Hangout and Sunrise Movement are the same thing just like Gwenneth Paltrow’s and Alex Jones’s sex powders turned out to be the same thing
Elon Musk: He takes scamming to a whole new level (On Sam Altman)
Vance: A lot of the people who are going and getting 4-year degrees, they're not like engineers and doctors. They have fake jobs
To summarize today’s desktop app changes: The existing ChatGPT app is now ChatGPT Classic. Codex is now the new ChatGPT desktop app. It still looks like Codex and includes the Codex icon as an option, but it’s now called ChatGPT. ChatGPT for desktop includes ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Codex, which share plug-ins. ChatGPT Codex mode shows more technical details that ChatGPT Work abstracts away from the user. It’s possible to have ChatGPT Classic, ChatGPT, and Codex installed, but the way forward seems to be just running the new ChatGPT desktop app. Codex users can still use the Codex app icon, but the app will be called ChatGPT.
This is remarkable because I don't have any access to sensitive intel and it was obvious to me (and many others--I am not special here) that they were going to do it in april of 2021 QT of Dutch not believing Russia would invade Ukraine
Ryan Grim: Politico knew at the time of publication precisely what Jenny Racicot texted to Graham Platner but deliberately omitted it from their article. Racicot, according to the lead Politico reporter on the story, told Platner she "needed her glute massaged." He told her he was coming right over; she responded by telling him not to do so, but he came over quickly. Whether this detail is important to you or not, it is a shocking breach of journalistic ethics by Politico and CNN not to include it in their coverage.
Katie Miller, wife of Trump's deputy chief of staff, was dining with the president in January, hours before special forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, and noticed Trump was in a ruminative mood. "I wish I had more time," Trump said. "If I had more time, I would do Greenland." "You do have time," she reassured him. On Jan. 3, with Maduro now in U.S. custody, she thumbed out a provocative single word tweet: "SOON," she posted on X, with an American flag covering Greenland.
Some other races on the ballot are given recommendations. A recommendation is NOT an endorsement. In these cases, a candidate might not call themselves or be a socialist, but we believe that their platform can materially benefit the working class in Maine (especially in comparison to other candidates in their race). A ballot question might be a more incremental (or even unrelated) step towards a socialist vision for Maine, but a step nonetheless.
Zaid Jilani: Ro Khanna and Bernie are doing a great job defending Platner. Where is AOC?
I have spoken with Graham Platner about the best path forward for Maine. In light of these very serious allegations, I have recommended that he step aside.
Job Opportunity! Graham Platner for U.S. Senate is immediately hiring a Research Director to develop a comprehensive research and vetting strategy and build comprehensive defense strategies and rapid-response toolkits. Salary range of $7k-$11k/ month. 吗
Erling Haaland calmly walking while others are moving. Then steps to a trot and does the header for a split second
On Oct. 16, 2025, deleted Reddit posts authored by Platner surfaced, including comments on a post about underwear designed to prevent sexual assault in which he wrote: “Holy fuck, how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to? Men and women, you make a choice to consume enough of a substance to lose your self control. So if you don’t want to be in a comprising [sic] situation, act like an adult for fucks sake.”
While Contederate generals fought for the "wrong cause" and Union generals for the "right cause," he notes, the Confederates were "strategically brilliant" and "tragic in their heroism." And, really, both sides helped build the nation: "Whether our great-great-great-grandfathers fought for Grant's or Lee's army, we learned that their actions that day had made it possible for us to be part of a United States of America."
Matt Dunlap, the Democratic nominee for the House in the swing district where Graham Platner lives, has called on him to leave the race. “The allegations reported today are serious, and they deserve to be treated with the gravity they warrant,” Dunlap, a progressive who has campaigned alongside Platner, said in a statement. “As such, I am calling on Graham Platner to withdraw from the race for Senate so we can all come together behind a nominee who can successfully carry the torch in November.”
Graham Platner has not made a decision on whether to drop out, according to a person familiar with the campaign’s internal discussions, who added there was no guarantee he would drop out even as Democrats abandoned his campaign on Monday. “If he was to step down it would only be with a guarantee of being replaced by a candidate who he believes is true to the values and vision and policy agenda of the campaign that Maine voted for,” said the person, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the discussions publicly.
Tell you what--if you knew the whole truth about everyone in the Senate and House of Reps, those chambers would be dead empty. Jesus said, "Let him without sin cast the first stone."
Table setting with labels
race. “These allegations are very serious and Graham vigorously denies them. They are also coached and coordinated by out of state establishment operatives. For a year, opponents of this campaign have thrown everything they can at Graham –– calling him a Nazi, a war criminal, and a communist. None of it has been true and this is no different. It is not a coincidence that this story comes a week before the ballot deadline, just as the previous false allegations came a week before the primary. Graham began this campaign to fight for a Maine where everyone is treated with dignity and where Mainers are put first, and no amount of desperate smears will stop this movement from seeing that vision through.”
parents to sign their children up for Trump Accounts immediately, claiming that if they do, their kids will "become, actually, very rich." "If parents have not done so already, and they are doing so in record numbers, they should go right away to trumpaccounts.gov and sign their child up for a free investment savings account" "A child that has no money can have hundreds of thousands of dollars at a very, very young age. Accounts could grow to be worth numbers that nobody ever thought even possible."
Sky News captured his words, as he explained: ""Yes, I asked for a review by FIFA. I spoke to a man [Infantino] who is highly respected. I'm the one who got them to do it, not Biden. Biden was asleep."
The internet gave every single person on Earth access to all of MIT's lectures for free and I think most of us would agree that it hasn't made us that much smarter. I don't think the main problems and solutions here are technological.
If you step away from the glory of economic statistics, so much of American life has gone wrong. An influx of prescription opioids became a flood of synthetic opioids, which has led to tens of thousands of deaths each year and a declining life expectancy among a substantial portion of our society. We have made great progress on reducing infant mortality, but we send our children into a world—even in the physical security of their own homes-that bombards them with images and influences that have left them isolated, depressed, and increasingly at risk of self-harm. We are more disconnected, lonely, and isolated, even in the midst of historic levels of material comfort. All this economic abundance coexists with intense spiritual misery. We orient people toward a life of consumption. We tell them to find meaning in the home they buy, the money they earn, the prestige of their job. We bombard them with all manner of creature comforts, and add their consumption—price club mega-size junk—to our national GDP. We use that GDP as a yardstick for our broader society, which is why it's possible for false prophet economists to argue the American Dream is healthy even as suicide and addiction rates soar and the laughter of children fades from our streets. A famous investor once told me, "In business or government, you often get what you measure."
We care about GDP in the Trump administration, but we also care about wages, and how many people are dying of drug overdoses, and whether our country can get the things it needs in times of international emergency. If that means the GDP is a fraction of a percent lower, then so be it. This is hard for our technocrats because they struggle to put a value on anything that can't be specifically measured. And that meant for a long time we were ruled by numbers on a spreadsheet and the people who built those spreadsheets. Of course, we came to this state with the best of intentions. The concept of GDP, for instance, was popularized by economist John Maynard Keynes, as he was trying to quantify aggregate industrial capacity in World War II Britain. Measuring the poverty level—and aiming benefits at those beneath it-helped us prevent a lot of destitution. But we now live in a society almost blinded to considerations outside of the economic. This way of thinking is inherently opposed to the Christian way, which demands more focus on people. Take, for instance, the time we spend with our children. Long before I ever held political office, it occurred to me that economic statistics often see kids as burdens despite the fact that they're the best part of my life. Domestic labor-that done by moms and dads—if unpaid, is uncounted in measures like GDP. When I leave work to spend time with my children, when I cook them dinner or argue with them about eating their carrots, I am engaged in economically unproductive work. No money changes hands, so it doesn't show up in our national figures. By contrast, if I left for dinner at 6 p.m. and returned to work until midnight while paying a total stranger to look after my kid, my contribution to GDP would be much higher.
Oren Cass wrote a book a few years back, The Once and Future Worker, that made significant waves in economic policy circles, in part by attacking some of the critical assumptions of economists. In that book, Oren argues that "economic piety" has taken over American public life. In particular, he argues that an obsession with maximizing consumption has focused our policy, and indeed our entire culture, on a potentially harmful metric. Oren's argument proceeds like this: One of the critical ways we measure well-being—perhaps the critical way—is by evaluating how much people consume. To say that someone lives in poverty or doesn't is fundamentally a measure of consumption: We quantify, in dollars, how much they're able to buy. And if their income is below a certain level, we say they're in poverty. Oren traces how policymakers in the decades after World War II turned economic growth into a kind of obsession. We argued about how much to redistribute to poor people and how much to tax rich people, but our country broadly agreed that growth mattered most. We even developed a metaphor—the economic pie-that captured both the importance of growth and the related question of how big a piece to give to each person. Oren cleverly calls this view economic piety:
One of the things I've picked up during my two jobs in government is that the economics profession dominates many of the background debates in our politics. This is because politics fundamentally tries to answer two questions. The first is a question of values: What are we trying to accomplish here? The second is a question of practicality: How do we accomplish this thing? Say you want to reduce carbon emissions for environmental reasons. Should you tax carbon? Or subsidize non-carbon-based forms of energy, like nuclear power? Should you apply an import tax on foreign goods that depend heavily on carbon emissions, or should you ban those products altogether? What are the unintended consequences of these policies? Enter the economics profession to provide answers to practical questions. But as the decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum. We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values. Take one of the major issues of the 2024 campaign and a significant focus of our time in the White House: Should our trade policy be oriented around protecting domestic industries and jobs or around ensuring a short-term supply of cheap consumer goods? This is a tough thing to quantify, but the rise of economic thinking and rhetoric in our public life is striking. Economist and New York Times columnist Justin Wolfers analyzed how mentions of the economics profession evolved over time in our country's paper of record. He found that economists have gone from getting the occasional mention to being the most discussed of all social scientists. There are also about twice as many mentions of economists as there are of the next-most-discussed academics (historians) in the Congressional Record.
One of the things I've picked up during my two jobs in government is that the economics profession dominates many of the background debates in our politics. This is because politics fundamentally tries to answer two questions. The first is a question of values: What are we trying to accomplish here? The second is a question of practicality: How do we accomplish this thing? Say you want to reduce carbon emissions for environmental reasons. Should you tax carbon? Or subsidize non-carbon-based forms of energy, like nuclear power? Should you apply an import tax on foreign goods that depend heavily on carbon emissions, or should you ban those products altogether? What are the unintended consequences of these policies? Enter the economics profession to provide answers to practical questions. But as the decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum. We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values. Take one of the major issues of the 2024 campaign and a significant focus of our time in the White House: Should our trade policy be oriented around protecting domestic industries and jobs or around ensuring a short-term supply of cheap consumer goods? This is a tough thing to quantify, but the rise of economic thinking and rhetoric in our public life is striking. Economist and New York Times columnist Justin Wolfers analyzed how mentions of the economics profession evolved over time in our country's paper of record. He found that economists have gone from getting the occasional mention to being the most discussed of all social scientists. There are also about twice as many mentions of economists as there are of the next-most-discussed academics (historians) in the Congressional Record.
Now, I'm not saying Japan doesn't have problems. Its own leaders worry a great deal about the demographic crisis in the country—the fact that so few children are born in the island nation that the population is declining. But in their focus on the quantitative metrics of society, the economists had missed something important about Japan. If you're focused on GDP, a $6 pint of Japanese strawberries is no different from a $6 pint of American strawberries. If you're focused on dollars and cents, each contributes equally to the economic indicators. But if everyone in Japan eats better strawberries than everyone in America, the economic indicators have failed to measure something meaningful. When I got back home, a friend asked me if I learned anything on my trip to Japan. "Yes," I replied snidely. "Maybe economics is just fake."
On June 24, Trump landed in The Hague, Rutte’s hometown, where the NATO secretary-general handed him a huge foreign-policy win. The alliance, Trump said, was no longer a rip-off for the U.S. One after the next, the West’s most powerful politicians took turns praising Trump in a closed-door session for strengthening the alliance he had threatened to leave. But Carney was more restrained—Trump would see through the praise, his aides reasoned, and think less of them for it. 
How I prompt Opus: Please implement a SwiftUl Mac application that has feature-parity with the existing web app. Here's the full user context... Test [xyz]. Continue until all test conditions pass. Docs: [links] Engineering notes: [lots of details] Edge cases, constraints, architecture, patterns... etc. etc. etc. How I prompt Fable: patterns... etc. etc. etc. How I prompt Fable should we do a deeper dive or d'you wanna just CTO this s*** and make me happy?
THE GREAT American STATE FAIR EVENT POSTPONED