From Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky.

important stats from that article about why calling local leaders matters:

One phone call = 100-1,000 angry voters.

One personal email = 10-50 voters.

One form letter = maybe 1 voter, if they even count it.

This is the economy of political pressure. Individualized contact influences 94% of congressional offices on undecided issues. Mass email campaigns? 18%. Petitions? Worthless.

But here's the secret that changes everything: State officials are sitting ducks.

State Comptrollers generally receive 5-10 constituent calls per month. State Treasurers? Many have never experienced a coordinated campaign. District Attorneys? Only hear from victims and lawyers, not voters. State Legislators? They average 20-30 contacts per week.

The magic happens at these thresholds:

10 calls in an hour = staff notices.

50 calls in a day = emergency meeting.

100 calls in a day = office shuts down to handle it.

500 calls in a week = policy change consideration.

1,000 calls = historical precedent shows this forces action.

Constituent contact increases legislator support probability by 12-20%. The Net Neutrality campaign's 1.3 million calls changed federal policy. The ACA defense campaign's 6,000 calls prevented repeal. At the state level, you need 100x fewer calls for the same impact.

this fantastic article has sample scripts for what to say about ICE in your state and city, as well as what to ask for to help your city and state fight federal over-reach where you live

we can win this fight, but we need to fight. I know on a personal level how hard it can be to make calls, especially to politicians, but we've reached a point that if we don't, the slippery slope into the chasm of tyranny becomes a cliff

Happy to see this in places where I usually find white nationalist stickers.

Actually, there are two.

no no that’s a bop, i love it

“Woman!” cried I, somewhat tearsome,

“Who are you to stand so fearsome

With your wavy locks of auburn hair and eyes of emerald green?”

Quoth the woman, “I’m Jolene”

Look, it’s a weird hill to die on, especially when I don’t really explain, but children deserve to experience fear, disgust, and discomfort in safe scenarios where they can process those sensations.

Media for children used to be scary and that’s important.

“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” ― C.S. Lewis

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

-- G. K. Chesterton

Sorry, eh

I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.

Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for most of this century, I still hew faithfully to our folkways, which is why I'd like to start this essay by apologizing.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry! I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies.

There is no way to operate one of Nvidia's big AI-optimized GPUs without losing money. The owners of these GPUs who have lost the least money are the ones who rushed into buying GPUs without ensuring they'd have electricity to power them, and have been forced to leave their GPUs to age in warehouses. The minute they plug in those GPUs, they'll start losing money, and the more they use them, the more money they'll lose.

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows.

I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

I don't have any advice for how to do that. I'm sorry!

As Canada contemplates our response to the collapse of the American empire and its alliances with the world, the cornerstone of our current strategy is sacrificing our dollars, water and energy in order to become more dependent on America, in a weird and improbable bet that we will figure out how to make millions of Canadians unemployed. I'm sorry, that just doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

If I can beg your indulgence, I'd like to propose an alternative.

Back in 2012, Canada passed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act. It's a law that bans Canadian companies from modifying America's digital tech exports. We passed it because the US threatened us with tariffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't sell jailbreaking kits for phones and consoles, which would let Canadian sellers offer goods and services to Canadian buyers outside of US app stores, sidestepping the 30% app tax that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony and others impose on our digital economy.

"the average income in <X> is <Y> of <currency>" cool, what's the median

Average isn't useful here. however, after a little bit of research, apparently the median income in the US is $24,327, which means the reality is actually much worse than this meme makes it seem. yay!

According to time magazine, median annual rent is $13,896, which means rent alone is 57% Of the median annual income, awesome!

Do you want a revolution, 'cause that's one of the steps in getting a revolution.