Politics

The Biden of Bad News

An old man wrote a letter to the nation. An HR company learns the difference between humans and resources. A promising HIV drug trial completes. Texas is gonna get a bit more Musky.

Endeavorance

Jul 22, 2024 — 5 min read

Scheduling Note

I will be traveling in the coming weeks, so the next Stuff Keeps Happening will be Monday, August 12th. See you then!

Schrödinger's Biden Nevermind, He's Out

This section was going to be all about how complex the Biden campaign situation was, and speculating on if he would drop out or not based on the growing number of political insiders who were privately calling for him to drop.

I then decided to be a Responsible Boy and recorded today's episode yesterday to give me enough time to focus on editing and whatnot, only to find that the moment I finished recording, Joseph R. Biden dropped out. Just to spite me.

He has dropped out of the race for the Democrat primary candidacy, and has already endorsed Kamala Harris to take over. It is most likely that Harris will get the nomination at the convention in about a month. As a reminder, the Dems haven't actually chosen their nominee yet. It's just been "presumptive nominee."

There's probably gonna be a couple of people who try to go against Kamala, I've seen murmurings of Joe Manchin switching back to the Democratic party to primary Kamala, but I don't think that'll do a whole lot.

This'll ultimately be a huge win for the Democrats, as their own polling was showing senate and congressional candidates in swing states beating republicans by double digits, while Joey was losing to Trump by the same amount. That's dangerous because they need a presidential candidate who will get people into the voting booth to actually vote for those other candidates. Biden wasn't bringing in non-base voters, which is likely one of the driving forces behind this call. Independents by and large don't want to vote for Trump, but weren't interested in voting Biden. That's likely to change now.

Anyway, this is your reminder to never try to be responsible, lest Joe Biden ruin your plans.

AI Isn't People

I need you to understand that AI is in fact not people. This is a lesson that HR tooling company Lattice failed to learn before it was too late.

See, they decided to try and prove that they're an AI-forward company by rolling out support for listing AIs as a part of your org chart, calling them "Digital Workers."

DIGITAL. WORKERS. In a time where workers are consistently dehumanized, this HR company was like "hey lets list a literal computer as a member of this team of otherwise fleshy humans with like, lives and families."

Understandably, their customers weren't super into it, with one of them posting:

A screenshot of a LinkedIn post quoting the Lattice announcement and asking "why??" — "I have questions. My biggest one: why??"

I share the same question, but unfortunately the answer is "because executives wanted the company to pivot to AI because buzzwords are more important than actual productivity."

…they have since walked this announcement back, because obviously.

Breakthrough HIV Drug Trial Looks Pretty Dope

A double-blind drug trial of about 5,000 women across South Africa and Uganda for a pre-exposure HIV drug was found to have quite literally 100% efficacy.

The drug, called Lenacapavir, is a twice-annual injection to help prevent the contraction of HIV. Other such drugs exist, but mostly are available as daily pills, rather than an injection every 6 months.

The control group, using existing PrEP drugs, still had a very low rate of HIV contraction, in the low single digit percentages. But in the group using the injection drug, there were exactly 0 cases.

The next step is further trials to verify the information, followed by a submission of a proposal for the drug to various government regulation agencies in the hopes of distribution starting in the near-ish future. The big question now is "what'll it cost?" which remains the most obnoxious question in medical science.

While this medication doesn't totally change the landscape of HIV drugs, it will indeed make a meaningful impact on the lives of people who otherwise would have difficulty keeping up with daily pills. HIV infection rates have been dropping over time, but more protection is always a good thing in this case.

Texas Getting More Musky

So first, California passed a law which prevents school districts from enacting rules which force teachers to out queer students to their parents against their will. This is apparently a step too far for Elon Musk, who says that this law is now the reason he wants to move SpaceX and Twitter HQ from California to Texas.

Let's ignore the obvious pearl clutching he's doing though; we know that he's just using this as an excuse to hate on trans folks while making noise about moving to Texas anyway, which is a thing he's not been quiet about regardless. Texas would tax him less and ask fewer questions, so he wants that. Just a nice lil' bonus for him to also dunk on THE TRANS AGENDA.

And if he didn't make it clear enough that he's a piece of shit, he has now gone full, unapologetic MAGA, throwing his full endorsement behind Trump, and adding MAGA-specific features on Twitter, such as specific emblems for MAGA-related hashtags, and an animation of US flags raining down the screen if you search "Trump 2024" or "MAGA" on Twitter.

It's just gross, its transparent, and it shouldn't be at all surprising. We are so far beyond "stay on Twitter to fight back!" — I promise you, you can find porn elsewhere on the internet. Get off Twitter.