Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
banner
richardm.bsky.social
Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
@richardm.bsky.social
1.2K followers 730 following 800 posts
Sunnyvale Councilmember, unofficial account. Houser, liberal, democrat, Democrat, bicycling bisexual, unicameralist fanatic. Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. β€”Terry Pratchet
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
I wrote a thing about what Musk and Trump are doing to the country. Their strategy is to overwhelm us, to panic us, to cause us to give up. If we don't give them that, they're in a world of hurt, because they are breaking their own tools. Read here:
medium.com/@rmehlinger/...
It’s not over yet
We are less than a month into the Trump administration, and let’s be honest: it sucks. It sucks considerably worse than even I was…
medium.com
It being Warhammer, the potential for interesting (and invariably bad) choices to throw at the player are almost limitless. Keep up infrastructure, grow your industrial base, pay the tithe, suppress cults, keep your higher-ups happy--never enough for all of that, something's gotta give.
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
You may have heard my arguments against the Electoral College before. Here’s a new one the Founders never anticipated:

If the President is elected by popular vote, he probably wouldn’t selectively punish entire states for voting against him.
opb.org OPB @opb.org Β· 22d
Oregon is set to lose an additional $400 million in federal grants awarded for climate action and is among more than a dozen Democratic states losing federal funding after the Trump administration terminated nearly $8 billion for those states this week.
Oregon to lose an additional $400 million in federal climate grants
Oregon and 15 other Democratic states are losing nearly $8 billion toward climate projects, after the Trump administration terminated multiple federal grants.
www.opb.org
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
The gaslighting is wild. THEY control the White House, the House, and the Senateβ€”yet always find a way to blame Democrats for their mess.

The so-called β€œ$1.5 trillion wish list” is about protecting health care, food assistance, and housing. (1/2)
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
You can literally just post a picture of a woman and be like WOMEN to rake in over 10k likes on Xitter now. I remember before I left there was a ten minutes hate against some 19 year old sorority girls dancing or some shit and I’m still not sure what everyone was pretending to be mad about.
this woman has been working at Nintendo for almost 20 years and nearly a decade longer than the guy she is replacing

how much more qualified does she have to be lol
One thing's for sure: I won't stop advocating for safe streets for all in Sunnyvale and the region.
I am sad that we seem to have settled on "clanker" for the anti-robot slur when "toaster" is just so much more derogatory.
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
The deep irony is the insistence that everything is class politics, despite the overwhelming evidence against such a thing, is proof that ideas have independent causal force. People read Marx and it broke their brains!
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
This is no great insight, but actually one of the cardinal flaws in the Marxian tradition
We get glimpses of this in Godbreaker as well, where there is an entire political economy of Breaths.
For Stormlight archive, the entire economy runs off of the spheres used to capture Stormlight. The gemhearts that the Alethi are fighting so hard for on the Shattered Plains are valuable for their use in soulcasting, especially food. Soulcasting itself is critical to the entire Rothar economy.
Well, for the Final Empire there's the fact that the entire political structure is a brutal slave eugenic magocracy, with the entire politico-economic system designed around controlling who has access to magic, and the supply of atium explicitly being used by the Lord Ruler to control the nobility.
the Cosmere is the shared universe in which most of his original works are set. I think the original Mistborn trilogy remains the strongest, but all of the books engage quite a bit with how the various magic systems impact the economic and political systems of the planets on which they exist.
The economics of magic is something I think Brandon Sanderson has done very well in his cosmere world-building
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
You need to be as excited for Mamdani as you are for Grijalva and vice versa. Trying to do this weird thing of claiming that an election in Arizona is somehow a rebuke of an election in NYC is insane and doing the work of the Republican Party for them.
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
Grijalva winning just shows what anyone who actually examines the Democratic Party for more than a second already knows; it’s a lib-left coalition that is going to nominate and elect representatives across that political spectrum depending on numerous factors for any given race.
β€œThe Mamdani momentum withered in the deserts of southern Arizona on Tuesday night” is perhaps the dumbest lede of all time. 10/10 for propagandist bullshit, a banger for the ages, no notes.
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
To me the NYT is WMD lies, Clinton email obsession, trans bashing and constant whitewashing of Nazis. The way liberals hold it in esteem is one of the worst parts of liberalism and a testament to media illiteracy nearly as bad as the right’s.
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
The New York Times was more skeptical of the academic qualifications of a black woman who had secured tenure and become the president of Harvard than they were of a white man who washed out of a grad program with a massive scandal and then became a white nationalist troll.
The saga of the NYT's anti-Mamdani story taken from notorious white supremacist Jordan Lasker (they call him an "academic") gets even more amazing: Lasker's only impactful paper, which claimed white people are smarter, is infamous: it misused data so badly it got his tenured co-author fired. 2/
Reposted by Richard Mehlinger πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ©·πŸ’œπŸ’™β†™β†™β†™
4/x And that's the Dream. To be that shining city on the hill. To live by the words of the New Colossus. To be that land at whose gates stands the Mother of Exiles and welcomes in--you get it. I'm crying, whatever.

And now we are reminded, as we were not a year ago, that the opposition hates that.