This week continues the trend of (frankly) boring skies. It’s times like these that I’m glad that astrology is a SCIENCE! because if it was a matter of having sensitivity to astral emanations or some such thing, I’d be worried about losing my mojo. But no, there’s a chart, and there’s a protractor. Science. On Friday, a conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter retrograde portends problems at home. There is a brief period of time as Pisces gets its time in the sun (or vice versa) but that comes to a screeching halt as… MERCURY RETROGRADE on Saturday. Which will affect everyone, so whatever nonsense happened the day before won’t go away on its own, you’ll need to deal with it.
Pisces: Strength reversed – your abilities fail you, or your opponents are excessively powerful.
Aries: 10 of Swords reversed – Temporary success, pyrrhic victory, excessive price paid.
Taurus: 2 of Coins – Having fun, paying back social obligations, asynchronous communication
Gemini: 8 of Coins – Effort paying off.
Cancer: The Hierophant – Marriage, alliance, captivity, servitude, mercy and goodness, inspiration.
Leo: 8 of Wands – Speed, good news, new attraction.
Virgo: Ace of Coins – The good aspects of money.
Libra: 5 of Coins – Material trouble, true love or friendship.
Scorpio: 10 of Cups – Contentment, repose of the entire heart, perfection of human love and friendship.
Sagittarius: 9 of Coins reversed – Roguery, deception, voided project, bad faith.
Capricorn: Ace of Wands reversed – Fall, decadence, ruin, perdition, problems of a masculine nature.
Aquarius: The Hanged Man reversed – Selfishness, the crowd, body politic, decisions forced.
I could certainly use some of that right about now! 😟
Sagittarius: 9 of Coins reversed – Roguery, deception, voided project, bad faith.
Hurry hurry hurry, step right up. Get yours before they’re gone. This offer may never be repeated.
I’m beginning to think that some of the astrology stuff isn’t true.
10 of Swords reversed – Temporary success, pyrrhic victory, excessive price paid.
Blech, I guess this isn’t the week to convince the wife to buy the new RV.
Ace of Wands reversed – Fall, decadence, ruin, perdition, problems of a masculine nature.
Especially if she sees this forecast.
Blech, I guess this isn’t the week to convince the wife to buy the new RV.
At least you’ll have a place to sleep when she kicks you out.
I’ve witnessed this situation when I had to go fix a customers “temporary housing” after he got caught schtupping an employee.
Speed, good news, new attraction.
Not sufficiently shitty.
From the morning thread, Cyto.
I can’t think of something I care about less than bedside manner with regards to doctors. Or even nurses. It’s well and good to have compassion and humanity in that role I guess if it helps the patient in some way even if just makes dying a bit easier for them though I’d wager those rated higher in bedside manner aspects of the job are probably even more arrogant and narcissistic than their gruff counterparts. But people would seemingly rather be treated by someone who will talk to them like they are a child than someone who will actually help fix or solve a problem.
The guy that sewed my quadriceps tendon back together was a complete fucking asshole.
But he did great work. That’s all that matters.
Yep.
Surgeons are notoriously arrogant. Goes with the territory. Probably takes a dose of narcissism to have that level of confidence.
I’ve had both types of surgeons.
Best outcome so far was from the hand guy, Col Cutting who was totally chill. Arrogant guy FD me up and I’m betting in time will cost me my right foot.
I have also had both, the humble, patient one was the best doctor I have ever had (and I have had a lot by this point) while the arrogant SOB was probably a decent enough surgeon, but the after care he proscribed left me pretty fuct.
Yup.
But moms want a nice pediatrician.
And hospitals compete on patient ratings, so the measure patient feels.
I had a long discussion about this with the administrators at the hospital I was in when I had an infection during chemo.
They had tons of patient satisfaction surveys.
The nurses and techs always mentioned to give them a good rating.
And it worked. They were obsessive about being friendly and attentive.
I told the administrators “you get what you measure”. (Old IT guy saying)
Meanwhile, I was asked about my medications some 5 times in one evening. They had a system and a process for checking and tracking it.
And every single time there was something wrong in the list.
Why?
Nobody was singularly responsible for the accuracy. And nobody was getting hired, fired, promoted or raises for it. So even though it was critical – it was not being done competently because they were not measuring that.
But the marketing folk figured out what makes a hospital highly rated and regarded in the community and went with that.
Hospitals give your money to some cause, bumps them up on the ratings scale.
The new Talibani morality police
A group of House Democrats sent a letter to tech billionaire Elon Musk on Thursday criticizing him for releasing a “reprehensible” tool with his artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, which has created sexualized deepfakes of real people without their permission or knowledge.
Three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee included a list of questions for Musk and his AI startup, xAI, about the undressing tool.
“We are deeply concerned about xAI’s refusal to put a stop to the creation of nonconsensual sexualized images, particularly of children,” the lawmakers wrote.
Selling the tools to undermine civil society is a heinous crime.
For their next trick, the Dems will pass a bill repealing human nature.
Because no one on the left took a picture of Sara Palin and photo chopped bewbs onto it.
Gun makers should discourage ammo sales. Ammo sales only lead to more accidental kids’ deaths
And water companies. You know how many kids drown in pools each year?
If you can make a balloon of Donald Trump in a diaper, you can use AI to make fictional sex scenes involving any other real human.
What happens when Aladdin rubs the lamp and asks for a beautiful teenage virgin to cater to his domestic needs? Does the jinn chop his head off?
He keeps rubbing the “lamp”.
Relevant
“asynchronous communication” is the story of my life.
“ Cancer: The Hierophant – Marriage, alliance, captivity, servitude, mercy and goodness, inspiration.”
Sounds about right, as I’m getting my taxes done in an hour.
Not the screwing I normally look forward to each week. 😩
You’re lucky it only takes an hour to get your taxes done.
It should be that easy for everyone but then millions of accountants would have to get productive jobs.
@NA – I hope it was these giant snowbanks blocking our usual pit that led to today’s match going away and not anything worse
Apparently NBC can’t say that the Winter Olympics were ever at Squaw Valley. Now it’s “just outside of Lake Tahoe”.
How insensitive.
It’s illiterate stone age whore valley.
So JP Morgan sent letters to trump and Trump orgs closing accounts in 2021 but only admits it now? Did Trump not have the letters then along with closed accounts? Double secret account closures that he wasn’t even aware of for 5 years? Gee, I wonder why my check got returned?
If the news had come from Trump the media would just say “Trump claimed without evidence that JP Morgan closed his accounts.” Now that there’s evidence they’ll just ignore it.
The real question is: did they do it on their own initiative, or did someone for the Biden admin whisper in their ear.
The good aspects of money. ?
Don’t tease me.
It’s tax time and it’s going to hurt.
Granted I did move my ammo can that has cash and silver in it and was please fly surprised by how heavy it was. Wish I hadent stopped buying when it hit $30
It’s likely to be at $30 again at some point in the future.
I’m sure it will be.
I’ll buy more then.
I don’t plan on ever selling it.
My kids can fight over it when I die.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/puerto-vallarta-advisory-9.7101787
Reading on Reddit that airports in both Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara are closed with passengers stranded.
I was stunned that this story was in the sidebar.
Note that the woman isn’t named.
You could not pay me enough money to be a landlord. I wouldn’t wish that hell on anybody.
Only the tenant board can issue evictions but
Of course not. I’m surprised they don’t have a regulation that past orders can’t be used against potential renters.
I have a rental (which I am going to sell soon) but there is a reason you have property managers handle this shit.
They know the ins-and-outs, and keep shit handled.
Why did my rent go up 101
Buddy had a rental with a long time renter. Charged under market rate (but above his cost) and was glad to have them, although they were sometimes too low maintenance and wouldn’t let him know when something minor needed to fixed/replaced. Sold when the renters had a kid and moved to larger house rather than roll the dice on another one.
You generally don’t keep rental units longer than 8-10 years. At that point, you have made your money on appreciation, but the costs (maintenance, new regs, etc.) aren’t starting to eat you up.
But I keep hearing that tourist Mexico is perfectly safe. 🙄
I’ve been to PV a bunch of times and never felt unsafe in the tourist areas. Unlike Nola.
I’ve heard that for decades.
I was there in December and felt perfectly safe. This stuff isn’t aimed at tourists, though it would suck to be there now. Cancun in the other hand sucks all the time.
Costco is on fire
https://x.com/reportediariopv/status/2025633983342817722
Strictly speaking cars in parking lot and scorch marks up the exterior walls but building itself hasn’t gone up. Narcos are stopping taxis, buses, and private vehicles to set on fire all over to create roadblocks and chaos.
https://x.com/wsermaatra22/status/2025653409890639915
That was me Gustave.
Costco should have know there would be repercussions for no longer carrying 2.5 lb bags of Starbucks Italian Roast.
‘Costco is on fire’
Here I thought they just posted forth quarter profits and beat estimates. No, it’s literally on fire.
Between Walmart and the cruise ship dock near Marina Vallarta
https://x.com/machadodarlon/status/2025652854204027322
“Leo: 8 of Wands – Speed, good news, new attraction.”
No, meh, no (the last is fine as I am perfectly satisfied with my wife).
Don’t know whether I had food poisoning last night or my pancreas is reminding me “go easy on the types of intake!” but I was sick to my stomach and guts last night and now though feeling OK am rather ploddy.
But have you given a thought to adding to your wife collection?
But have you given a thought to adding to your wife collection?
Answered “no” to the “any suicidal thoughts” question during annual wellness exam?
I have an army buddy who is a few cards short of a full deck.
He’s been married three times and they all were nuts.
Guy loves the drama.
My wife and I had a conversation last night about him and I told her that it was a shame he didn’t have all of them at the same time. He could have had an amazing reality tv show.
I am very lucky with the one I had and I tell her at every opportunity.
Whether she was lucky . . .
Going through a box of papers (like the Dude) last night. Found my divorce papers and danced a little jig. She passed away nearly 30 years ago, I danced a big jig that day.
One takes a test and has to pass to be able to drive but they let any young fool get married. There oughta be a law!
My wife’s birthday was yesterday.
I forgot.
She usually forgets our anniversary, I usually forget her birthday.
It’s all cool.
“You got lucky babe,
When I found you”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mtLpZWNyM0I
@Slumbrew, have installed Tampermonkey and latest Monocle on Brave/MacOS. After some messing around with ‘enablie developer mode’ in Brave, ‘allow user scripts’ in Tampermonkey and restarting Brave, Monocle started working, although I’m not entirely sure what did it.
I now see new posts highlighted, and I can hide old posts. Which is all I ever wanted, so thank you very much.
Unrelated, brisket in is the smoker, about three hours left.
Molto bene.
I’ll poke at Brave when I have some time and add any special setup info to the readme
I am using Brave and can’t get monocle to work. I will try what you tried. Thanks for the info.
Update, all posts are now marked as new. Although DEG notes below that he “sees blue again”, so maybe something has changed on the
wordturdpress side.New comments are blue. Old comments are white.
Yay!
Thanks to whoever fixed that.
And after my post, all has returned to as expected. So, yay, indeed.
I’m seing new posts high lited and it’s scrolling to my last post.
No monocle installed (I don’t know how to do that even with printed instructions)
It’s still not opening windows in new tabs.
Science
New research confirms that reducing immigration is not good for the economy or U.S. workers. In recent weeks, several studies have concluded that the United States would prosper by welcoming more immigrants rather than reducing their entry and engaging in mass deportation. The latest economic data show that U.S.-born workers did not benefit from a decline in foreign-born workers in 2025.
The unemployment rate for U.S.-born workers increased from 4.3% in January 2025 to 4.7% in January 2026, while the number of foreign-born workers dropped by 122,000, according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis. “This decline, though smaller than reported in earlier months, represents a reduction of more than 1.4 million foreign-born workers compared to the labor force growth expected in government estimates,” concludes the NFAP report.
Speaking of bullshit studies. Potential short term adverse effects prove the inadvisability of change.
Burning the furniture will, in fact, keep you warm in the short term. And that’s all that matters.
Um… which ones? It kind of matters.
Contrary to what Trump administration officials predicted, U.S.-born workers did not prosper from fewer foreign-born workers in the labor force. U.S. workers also did not reenter the labor market as the number of foreign-born workers fell. The labor force participation rate for U.S.-born individuals aged 16 and older declined from 61.4% in January 2025 to 61.2% in January 2026.
Labor force growth is vital to the U.S. economy. Economic growth relies on labor force growth and productivity growth, and immigrants are essential to both. “The Trump administration’s policies on illegal and legal immigration would reduce the projected number of workers in the United States by 6.8 million by 2028 and by 15.7 million by 2035 and lower the annual rate of economic growth by almost one-third, harming U.S. living standards,” according to a 2025 NFAP analysis.
What if we shift government employees into productive work, like picking up trash on the side of the roads?
I love this sort of “We tried it but saw no instantaneous benefit so we decided we should give up” analysis.
“The latest economic data show that U.S.-born workers did not benefit from a decline in foreign-born workers in 2025.”
All because one number went down and so did another, and over just one time period. We better rewrite the laws of supply and demand.
“lower the annual rate of economic growth by almost one-third,”
While this can be a bad thing, if you control for the number of people in the country this may actually mean standard of living going up. Especially if say, housing and rents go down. Sure, billionaires will make less money with fewer serfs to employ, but that’s not the same as actually lowering the standard of living in the US.
Lastly, there are a host of non economic life quality issues that matter, more than money alone.
David C. Grabowski (Harvard Medical School), Jonathan Gruber (MIT) and Brian McGarry (University of Rochester) found that admitting more immigrants would help save the lives of Americans, particularly seniors. “Admitting 1,000 new immigrants would lead to 142 new foreign healthcare workers, without evidence of crowd out of native health care workers,” according to the research. “We also find striking effects on mortality: a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the U.S. would result in 5,000 fewer deaths nationwide. We identify reduced use of nursing homes as a key mechanism driving this result.””
According to our model, this is indisputably true.
Jonathan Gruber
I wouldn’t trust a word from that shitbird.
As a reminder https://manhattan.institute/article/aca-architect-the-stupidity-of-the-american-voter-led-us-to-hide-aca-costs
Forget about that.
Christ, what an asshole.
Or “forgot”, even.
But yeah, we would be stupid to send even one of them home. Open the gates wide, Donald. Or else grandma gets it.
Why not just admit the 142 healthcare works and exclude the other 858?
What are you, racist?
https://youtu.be/wncTgMi3pWc
“Healthcare workers strike!, wages frozen as more foreign healthcare workers willing to work for minimum wage pour into the US. Foreign health care in serious decline!
How about, and now just listen to me, we train more Americans as doctors, and more Americans as nurses, and let other countries keep their own doctors and nurses for their own healthcare needs.
I know, crazy talk.
“a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the U.S. would result in 5,000”
How many deaths a year and how many immigrants?
Has to be a few-several million each. Well, if it saves just one life I guess we should turn the whole country into the third world.
Also, don’t we have enough policies that favor the elderly already?
Maybe leaving a country left for the next generation would be a good idea at this point.
Also, fuck Trump’s giveaway to oldies with the extra deduction stuff. Literally the people who need tax relief the least in the country and have already benefitted (to the extent that this benefits people) from all the overspending of the last 6 decades.
Shhhhhh! Now you’ve done it, cat’s outta the geezer bag.
And it is all a lie. The death rate is still 100%. No exceptions, no appeals.
I have a rental (which I am going to sell soon)
I hope you will be partnering with an appropriate civil society advocacy group to ensure a deserving purchaser gets it at a fair price.
I see blue again.
Taurus: 2 of Coins – Having fun, paying back social obligations, asynchronous communication
—-
Ooh, timely! Chilling w puppy and going out to hang w Bro and The Boys this eve, w no work til 130 on Tuesday. (Other than my constant queries for other Work (and those ins and outs).
Be well, all. Kill Reality and do Big Things.
Monocle is working again. Huzzah.
I can jump to comments on the cinemascope screen.
“Blessed are TPTB, for they make old Glibs happy”
WEBSITE UPDATE: Not only are unread-by-you comments now showing up with a light blue background again, but the new website design is back up and seems to be working. Fingers crossed.
This is all WebDom’s work.
We give our thanks to the goddess of the web.
Thanks WebDom!
🥳
And it’s even scrolling to my most recent comment on refresh!
🎉
I’ll submit to the humiliation and spanking I deserve if it stays this way.
Huzzah!
This is all WebDom’s work.
Hail WebDom!
Yes!
Hail WebDom!
PBUHer
And it is all a lie. The death rate is still 100%. No exceptions, no appeals.
But if we can just eke out a few more days or weeks no expense is too great.
I know you’re joking, but so many people really have this outlook.
https://x.com/nycemergencymgt/status/2025652791574667274
I don’t remember travel bans (vs advisories) before covid except perhaps for martial law during riots. Now it’s
sheltercower in place for everything.And you would think that commies would be used to snow.
I remember Massachusetts closing its roads during really big snow storms. For the same storm, NH roads were still open. I remember mocking MA for that and some folks I knew back then screaming and yelling about “YOU DON’T REMEMBER THE BLIZZARD OF ’78! IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP THE ROADS OPEN!”
I remember during a couple of big blizzards in PA in the 90s, the roads were closed. For those, I remember lots of people ignoring the closure once the plows came through.
They did this all the time in Buffalo. They can’t actually enforce it, was my understanding.
Corvallis goes on complete lockdown, and everyone puts on masks, when there is an inch of snow now.
Mammydammy caught a bunch of shit about the last snow storm. He wants people to know he’s Doing Something this time.
“… this is something, therefore… “