Similarly, don’t expect much help with history questions in pub quiz from someone with a history degree.

“You have a whole ass degree, why can’t you tell me when Garfield was president!!?!?!??”

“It’s not like that … my thesis was on medieval crop rotation “

USA is also a democracy

Is it though?

I don’t have 1st hand experience but I’ve seen in the news that UK businesses have been hit economically because imports and exports between the UK and the EU have more taxes and regulations. I’ve also seen news stories of British retirees in Spain shocked and appalled that they now need visas and may or may not qualify.

There is always a new poll with the “lowest numbers ever!!!” yet Trump seems to consistently have a ~40% approval rate. It’s beyond frustrating.

This one only focuses on economic sentiment and is sad (people are really struggling) but also encouraging because the struggle is hitting some of Trump’s hard 40% floor of support with the clue stick. Inflation has been hammering folks for years now but the gas prices may be what finally wakes the Tump supporters up 🤞🏾.

So much of this country has shitty public transportation (or none at all) and so many people live in suburbs or exurbs where there are no sidewalks and nothing is a reasonable walking distance, especially in the freezing winters or 100+ degree summers. Additionally, the people living in cities where you can get by without a car are less likely to be Trump supporters. It may be hopium but the gas prices are such an obvious own goal, I really think the clueless are starting to wake up.

Tax the extremely wealthy until they can’t afford to buy politicians. Don’t know how we get there when the wealthy already own all the politicians. But if people with too much money can’t be trusted to play well with others, taking away their money seems like the obvious solution.

Could they start with Elon Musk, Melania Trump and Peter Theil?

He kinda started strong with trying to undo the toxic Ballmer era culture and scrambling to try to catch up on cloud infra. But even back then, the push for crazy excessive telemetry and moving pretty much all of QA into data science was the beginning of the end. And like all tech execs, AI has them losing their GD minds.

Is this including the ones actively promoted by the POTUS?

If the licensing agreement receives court approval, The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a comedy site satirizing its conspiratorial origins, and comedian Tim Heidecker has been hired as creative director.

This brings me so much joy.

To be clear, I’m not trying to “put this on the working poor”. I 100% get why most people aren’t in a position to act. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. This is not a safe place to risk your job, doing so is often risking your life (or your kids lives).

The GOP, the political donor class and their supporters are absolutely awful and deserve the blame. However, we can’t pretend that we are 100% helpless to stop them. When we think about Nazi Germany, do we think “well, the average German didn’t really have control over the situation?”

Yes, and no. Yes the GOP is pushing for all of this madness and obstructing any efforts to reign it in. But as much as it pains me to admit, most people in the US bear some culpability. In theory, if everyone old enough and well enough to do so unsupervised, traveled to their state capital or major city and basically flooded the streets with protesters, effectively halting all traffic and commerce, and refused to move until Trump was gone and the war was stopped, this shit would probably stop. Similarly, if everyone refused to work or spend any money, aside from the absolute bare minimum, this shit would stop. Of course there are a million reasons why this won’t happen. It weighs heavily on me that I’m still paying taxes and generally behaving despite the clear need for drastic action.

But individuals do have power to make Twitter less important. Well, maybe not Twitter, just because it’s 95% bots, but social media companies are usually only valuable if they have users. There are people who depend on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram for their business but 99% of users absolutely do not need to use those services. The analogy with recycling and climate fall flat because it takes many orders of magnitude more effort to avoid most/all plastics/packaging/fossil fuels than it does to just avoid IG/FB/X. The biggest barriers to getting rid of these shit companies is 1) too many people don’t realize how awful they are 2) too many people just don’t give a shit and 3) too many people are addicted to the dopamine hits from these trash sites.

Seriously, just don’t use them. When you’re presented with something that tries to force you to use them, say “sorry, I don’t use Meta products, do you have another way for me to get [the pop-up dates, the invite, etc]”

Too bad the genius, job creators couldn’t have possibly foreseen this outcome before giving financial and algorithmic support to a malicious, compromised, demented, fool. But I guess they can always retreat to their doomsday bunkers while the rest of us deal with the (hopefully not literal) fallout.

People still use fucking Twitter. I hope people will choose alternatives but I’m not holding my breath.

The mayor and the governor say things that sound like they are outrages by ICE but I guess they can’t or won’t get the police to side with the law abiding residents who pay their checks.

More than one thing can be true. The DNC could have prevented our current mess by actually running primaries, not abandoning their base, not trying to court republicans and the millions of other things they do to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Progressive voters could have prevented this current mess by actually fucking voting for the tepid weak sauce DNC candidates once it was clear that we’re only getting that or literal Nazis in that election cycle. There’s plenty of blame to go around and a tragic shortage of mirrors.

I’ve seen some mention of prepubescent kids in the file dump. IDK if any of it has been substantiated but people willing to abduct 13 year olds are probably OK with abducting 10 year olds if that’s what they or their friends are into.

Of course, minors can’t consent but there are a lot of accusations of brutal violence, coercion and murder, in addition to the sexual assault. There is a lot of truly repulsive and vile shit in the files and we ought to have a justice system that brings it all to light and punishes anyone who committed crimes. In light of all of that, handwringing over whether it’s misleading to call a 13 year old rape victim a child is some weak sauce. Try hitting on a 13 year old in front of their parents and see how the “if there’s grass on the field” defense plays out.

It’s not incorrect language, but it is a deliberate choice to use language that minimizes the offense. They could describe the victims as children , teens, minors, girls, etc. They are deliberately saying “underage woman” instead of “15 (or 13) year old girl” because their editors will pull it for being too inflammatory, sensational or unprofessional (as if that is a regular concern in the modern press).

A similar thing happens when the police kill someone. All of a sudden all of the rules about using active voice for good writing go out the window and it’s “man dies in police involved shooting” rather than “Police shot man.” People who study journalism and writing in school and are full time career writers and journalists absolutely think about word choice so I have a hard time believing that this is accidental.

I’m very lucky to have my own house. The number of spam calls I get from randos trying to buy houses is staggering. Some are obviously from call centers. I don’t understand how it makes financial sense to pay people to cold call every fucking homeowner in the US constantly in the hopes that they catch someone looking to sell quickly (and cheaply?). WTF is their endgame?

I kinda want to get everyone on board with refusing to sell single family houses to anyone who isn’t going to live there as their primary residence. Back in the not so old days, people would refuse to sell to “undesirables” because they didn’t want to tank property values, which would also carry significant reputational harm. We need to use that energy for good.

In theory, developers who would replace single family houses with multiple houses, townhomes or condos would be OK. We do need more housing in general. Although, IDK if real estate developers are a trustworthy bunch.