I don't watch tv news, so I don't know...is this viewpoint getting airtime? It all seems so obvious, it's been so long, and yet here we are.

Watch this from Brzezinski. If it looks like a different America it's because it was a different America. What a fallpic.twitter.com/cZu7AFVX3q

— Bruno Maçães (@MacaesBruno) May 11, 2024

Mossy writes: Floods in East Africa Damp Mother's Day Cut-Flower Shipments

Overall, the volume at auctions in the days before Mother's Day is down 9% from last year, boosting prices 15%, according to FloraHolland. This is "good news for the growers, because pricing did not match with the inflation in the last years." The devastation in Kenya has so far killed 257 people and displaced thousands more, while sweeping away crops and livestock.

PS: I can read the Bloomberg link by hitting F9 in Firefox.

Heebie's take: Historically, "Mother's Day" is short for "Your Mother's Day" which is the Victorian equivalent to a Yo Mama joke. It was originally an insult, but each new generation has a hard time believing that their old-fashioned parents could have leveraged such scathing blows.

Lurid Keyaki writes: It's probably time to talk about the Trump II escape plan question. That is: people seem considerably more serious about leaving the U.S. if Trump is reelected than they have been during any other election I've seen, to the point of setting concrete plans in motion, getting alternative citizenship documents in hand, and so on. (I know multiple people who have done this, and in fact one younger friend did emigrate in 2016.) It's still unlikely that this would end up being more than a minuscule minority, but to my knowledge even that would be unusual in U.S. history.

Some links:
- Random NYT article about Washingtonians looking for the exits.
- "American Autocracy Threat Tracker" -- I only read the introduction, but it's apparently a Trump nonsense cheat sheet. (Due to my news throttling policy, this is the first I've heard about the Heritage Foundation's 900-page blueprint for Trumpism.)
- From the wikipedia link above, a poll in 2019 found that 40% of women under 30 expressed a desire to leave the U.S. permanently. I'm not sure anything happening now is likely to lower that number.

I'm less interested in hearing about everyone's individual plan (you can still share those) and more curious to purely fantasize about how something like this would play out at scale. We saw a decently large exodus from (urban?) Russia two years ago, and maybe that would be a plausible contrast for a thought experiment where, say, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens emigrated in a single year. Which world cities would suddenly be full of Americans? How would global anti-Americanism (I hear it's a thing sometimes) play out? Would the "Trump emigrés" be despised by their like-minded compatriots who stayed? Would the government make life more difficult for them, or be too busy starting other fires to give a shit?

Europe is likely to be a popular destination for obvious reasons; however, many European countries are also swinging to the right and doubling down on nativism. How would this play out politically? If the U.S. emigrés include a number of LGBTQ people/families, would that drive more sustained opposition from right-wing politicians (like, oh, just to pick a name out of a hat, Giorgia Meloni), making everyone's lives in those countries more difficult? I know that's a little farfetched, because they've already got the dials turned so high, but I do wonder.

It's an interesting thing for me to ponder. Emigration from an increasingly repressive, dysfunctional state seems on the one hand like a failure of solidarity, a further fraying of the social fabric, and a selfish, destructive act. Yet for so many people in so many times and places, it's the right move. I expect most people over 30 in this country to stay put, unless there are pull factors or compelling personal reasons. Under 30, though... I think there may be movement, perhaps even if Biden wins another term.

Heebie's take: But what is the destination if you have no connections? What are the countries that allow any old American to permanently immigrate?

The only scenario that I can imagine moving is if there were such a steady flow of Americans somewhere that there was a destination city with a small network of friends or family to help newcomers get established. If there were cities with Little Americas and established pathways of how people get from the Old Country to the New, I can imagine it.

NickS writes: John Scalzi wrote about his experience with bluesky.

I'm curious how similar that is to what people here who have tried it have found, and also whether his description of how the block feature affects the social expectations rings true.

I want to talk about one other technical aspect of Bluesky which I think is a real differentiator, and also helped me evolve my thinking about how I want to be online generally, which is its really fantastic "block" feature. When you block someone on Bluesky, it doesn't just keep them from seeing you, or you them. It also (as I understand it) nukes every interaction you've had on the site with them out of existence, not just for the two of you but for everyone else. I understand that some people dislike this and feel like it's overpowered and breaks conversational continuity. I tend to think of it differently. I think it both disincentivizes the power of being shitty for clicks and influence in general, and disincentivizes being shitty to people, or (intentionally or otherwise), directing others to dogpile. On social media, that is absolutely a jewel beyond price. You can still be an asshole on Bluesky if you want to! And some people are! But you risk all your "work" in that area being wiped out by someone else in a single click. That's not fun for most trolls.

I found this philosophy of blocking early and often and without taking on anything they did more than "Oh, look, troll," to be liberating. No more wasting brain cycles! Just block with the dispassionate mercy of angels and get on with your life! I had been leaning that way the older I got anyway -- I wasn't any less desiring of poking jerks, I'm just more tired -- but this was a real clean break opportunity for me, and I took it. I also adopted it for Threads and Mastodon and everywhere else I am online. I do so much less taunting of the tauntable now than I did back in the day. Mostly now I just block.

(Am I proud that it took Bluesky's block feature to help me decide change my own behavior, at the oh-so-tender age of 54? No, I am not! But let's take our improvements where we may, shall we.)

Heebie's take: That's interesting. I can see how that drives people to curtail bad behavior before they post.

An odd thing for me is that I have zero drive to produce content on social media. It's odd because I love commenting here, and I keep multiple blogs going, and I can get going on certain private whatsapp/text messaging groups. But social media: it has something to do with the lack of gates and how, unfortunately, I find most well-intentioned people to be annoying*. It's connected to my distaste of small talk. WELL, BYE.

*I'm always vaguely plagued by the notion that maybe it's just Texas, and if I'd settled down in New York or something, my ratio of interesting people to dull people would be better. But maybe this is just the universal monotony of middle age-dom.

NYT article on college admissions (gifted link).

This is the part that shocked me:

Until recently, early decision was a narrow pathway -- an outlier governed, like the rest of this annual academic mating season, by a set of mandatory practices laid out by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which is made up of college admissions officers and high school counselors. ... The Justice Department thought those rules ran afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which bars powerful industries from colluding to restrain competition. At the end of 2019, NACAC agreed to a settlement mandating that the organization "promptly abolish" several of the rules and downgrade the rest to voluntary guidelines.

...At that point, nothing restrained colleges from going all in on early decision, a strategy that allows them to lock in students early without making any particular commitments about financial aid.

So basically, you can only apply early decision if you're wealthy enough to commit without knowing what kind of financial aid package you'll get. However, it's significantly easier to get in during early decision, and the early decision rich kids are taking up more than their share of spots.

Barnard now fills around 60 percent of its incoming class in the early decision round, giving those students a massive admissions advantage. It would have been an obvious option for Rania, but she can't take any chances financially. She applied via the general decision pool, when instead of having a one in three chance, her odds were one in 20.

and

Of the 735 first-year students that Middlebury College enrolled last year, for example, 516 were admitted via binding early decision.

I wish there were more statistics on all the Ivies taken together, on the percent of the incoming class that was admitted via early decision.

Mossy Character sends over Chibok girls feel let down 10 years after Nigeria kidnapping.

Remember the Boko Haram kidnappings of 276 girls a decade ago? This is a follow up of one of the ones that escaped. Apparently 90 are still missing. The Nigerian government promised to take care of the women that made it out.

Life today does not look like what was promised.

Amina now lives in Yola, about five hours away from Chibok by road, and shares a small room with her daughter. They share an outdoor bathroom with a neighbour and she cooks on firewood outside.

Money is tight.

She receives 20,000 naira ($15; £12) a month to cover everyday expenses but nothing for her daughter's education, despite the government's promises. She pays that bill herself with the little money she makes from farming.

"It's hard for me to look after my daughter," she says. "What can I do? I have to do it because I don't have anyone."

Amina is balancing raising her daughter while studying at the American University of Nigeria (AUN), a private and elite institution.

AUN is the only option Amina and the other Chibok girls were given to resume their studies, but many of them have struggled to keep up and some have dropped out.

"We didn't choose AUN because we know the school standards are difficult for us, we girls come from poor backgrounds," she says. "The former minister forced us to come to this school."

The girls said they would have liked more autonomy in choosing where they could study and wonder if some of the government's money spent covering the AUN's high fees could have been better spent directly supporting them.

Amina has attended AUN since 2017, but is not close to graduating. Only one of the former captives has graduated.

I'm trying not to be too western-centric because that dynamic seems SO western to me. What, you're struggling as a single mother with years of severe trauma and you can't make this fancy education work? What's wrong with you? I guess we tried! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Some people!