With a little more than 3 weeks until MLS is back, rosters are almost set. Portland leads the league returning 96% of minutes played for 2025 from 2024. The Revs at 37% are fewest returning minutes from the previous season since I started tracking these prior to the 2019 season.
— Eliot McKinley (@eliotmckinley.com) 2025-01-28T17:39:52.255Z
Interesting to see the amount of returning minutes by team. Portland and Sounders near the top makes sense.
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A fantastic explainer about Deepseek R1
I started playing around with it. I have a version on my home PC and I was toying with it last night to see how it would work. It feels like the best self-hosted option I currently have for my hardware.
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Two amazing quotes from tonight's D&D session:
"You deal with your mother, we'll deal with the dead dragon"
"This is where the Vietnam hippy in the van took us."
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"It’s official: Research has found that libraries make everything better."
Far from an earthshaking study in its breadth and depth, but it's good to see and hopefully it will drive some greater awareness and investment.
Science has backed up what many of us have long been saying: the library rocks. A study from the New York Public Library surveyed 1,974 users on how the library makes them feel and how it affects their lives, and the results are overwhelmingly positive.
The researchers' analysis (which used positive psychology's PERMA model, if that means anything to you) discovered that libraries are good for people, their well-being, and their communities. Not only that, but the positive societal impacts are more pronounced in lower-income communities, even more reason to make sure we're funding and supporting libraries. Don't let the ghosts of Reagan and Thatcher tell you otherwise, government can help people!
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"America is history’s most successful failing state"
Everything is so dark and awful. I overheard someone mention America as a failed state and did some searching, found this article which is normally behind Financial Times' paywall. Here's the archive available contents.
A key sign of a fading power is its currency losing value. Britain, like ancient Rome, could tell you a thing or two about that. By this yardstick America is close to an imperial peak. The euro is too fragmented, and China’s yuan too restricted, to threaten King Dollar’s primacy. Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme. Yet political science tells us that America is more divided than at any point since the eve of its civil war in the 1850s. Could it be defying the laws of historical gravity — a failing state that outshines its rivals?
The answer is yes, for the time being. A nation can be both rich and ungovernable for long periods. The last country anyone would compare to America is Belgium, which has been dubbed the richest “failed state” in the world. Yet US politics looks more like Belgium’s every day.
Unlike the US, Belgium is divided into language blocs, French and Flemish. Such is their mutual mistrust that most decisions are taken locally. Life goes on for months, even years, without a government. What saves Canada from a similar fate is that French-speaking Quebec is too small a part of it.
With one undisputed tongue, America should be free of such paralysis. Yet the cultural divide between blue and red state America is as uncomprehending as any language barrier.
The US separation of powers has gone from being a strength to a weakness. One branch, the US Supreme Court, is now a second legislature, making laws that would be the preserve of elected assemblies elsewhere. Supreme Court justices have life-long tenure and invoke long dead founding fathers to justify their lawmaking. The court is under red America’s control for decades to come. Its conservative majority may be taking revenge for the liberal Supreme Court of the 1960s and 1970s, which pioneered “legislating from the bench”. Either way, American law is no longer above politics. The court is now rated as low in opinion polls as other institutions.
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Automated Archives for January, 28th 2025
This post was automatically generated.
Articles To Read
The following are articles that I saved today. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
Chess For the Day
Record: 0-0-3
Net Elo Change: -16
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- January 28, 2024 (3 posts)
- January 28, 2023 (1 post)
- January 28, 2021 (5 posts)
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