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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: May 3rd, 2024

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  • What little life he has left. I’ll never understand how people get to that age and are still behaving like they’re going to live forever. If someone has a forward-looking sense of duty that motivates them to make a better future for others I understand that, but Trump is clearly just in it for himself so I don’t really understand the motivation if it’s not just straight up denial of his own mortality.

    The end is right around the corner for old Dumpy, you’d think he’d want to spend it sitting on a beach drinking pina coladas that he got other people to pay for.


  • Potentially, yeah, I’m not exactly pinning all my hopes on it or anything, but I feel like even with the people who are fully in the cult, a lot of them are mostly just kind of dim and easily manipulated. They’re ordinary people laboring under a lie, not necessarily the people who actually fabricate the lies themselves intentionally (though some of them certainly might be that type, as you say).

    It creates a short circuit in the system when those ordinary people have the direct access to the truth without Fox or Trump or whoever else being able to act as a middleman and spin it. It’s harder to lie to yourself when you’re the one faced with the decision to tear up the ballots or whatever they would have to do to make things fit their world view.

    I don’t think people are all good, most are a mixed bag at best, but I do have faith in average people to admit the truth to themselves when it’s presented to them in a way that they can accept it. With some those conditions under which they’ll accept it are just especially extreme.


  • We can only hope that literally being the ones to be involved in counting the votes and seeing the results for themselves first hand is enough to get them to accept reality.

    A long shot, but if these people genuinely believe that there was election interference and they aren’t simply looking to knowingly commit fraud, there’s a chance they might acknowledge the facts in the end if the results really are just undeniable.

    Edit: This American Life did an episode back before the 2020 election about an election administrator who basically made it his priority to make the process as transparent as possible so that election deniers could see under every stone and explore every nook of the process.

    And I think it both speaks to the power of transparency as an antidote, but is also a bit sad how this guy bends over backwards to accommodate these people and is still treated with suspicion. Really interesting listen and highlights how fair elections really do rest on the shoulders of these lower level workers.



  • This is illustrative of why I have no faith in Israel to actually behave as a liberal democracy the way its allies pretend it is.

    It’s not just that they temporarily have a far-right administration as part of some cycle between liberalism and conservativism, the population itself is overwhelmingly far right and supports apartheid. The only thing that upsets them about what’s happening in Gaza is that the Israeli government clearly doesn’t care about getting the hostages back. The wholesale slaughter of innocent people does not bother most Israelis in the least, many of them see it as a positive.

    There is no internal opposition to the far right in Israel, and the country should be geopolitically categorized the same as we categorize Russia, China or any other hardcore authoritarian state. It’s not a democracy.


  • https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2018/11/nyc-purged-200000-voters-in-2016-it-wasnt-a-mistake/177964/

    Then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman would eventually reveal that they were among 200,000 New York City voters who had been illegally wiped off the rolls and prevented from voting in the presidential primary. But by January of 2017, when Schneiderman announced that he would intervene in a federal lawsuit against the New York City Board of Elections, along with the U.S. Department of Justice, the news fell on deaf ears.

    […]

    As the candidates entered the New York race, Clinton was leading Sanders by 209 pledged delegates. Although The New York Times, the Daily News and Newsday had endorsed Clinton, the momentum was with Sanders, who had come off seven straight primary wins. By April 2016, Sanders had narrowed Clinton’s initial 60-point lead with voters nationally, to 10 points, and appeared to be gaining on her. However, a Sanders victory in New York had been deemed a long shot, based on Clinton’s formidable support by the local Democratic Party establishment.

    Essentially Sanders was closing the gap with the votes, so the establishment helped kneecap his momentum for Clinton’s benefit.



  • The contexts are really different. Boris played up his “harmless eccentric” facade, but Trump isn’t going to benefit from looking whimsical or whatever, no one would buy that from him. No one sees him as some mad genius.

    Reality is people are pretty tired of weird in their politics, which is why in this context I think it’s potentially a good approach.

    My sense of the general sentiment is that people don’t have time for weirdos at this point, we’ve had 8 years of weird and now we’ve got real problems facing the nation and the world and can’t be mucking around with a bunch of troglodytes like Vance who think only married people who own property should be citizens or whatever bizzarre Gilead type ideas conservatives have for the country.



  • Some talking heads on NPR were discussing the economy and how this was “the first time Millenials were seeing inflation” and how the economy is just waiting for consumers to “adjust”. This in the context of them also basically saying there needs to be more unemployment so wages don’t get higher.

    It’s like victim blaming or something, corporations went on a price gouging spree during the pandemic and now we all have to learn to deal with it so Wallstreet can go back to business as usual, and they’re getting all pissy that people’s response is simply finding ways to spend less, instead of giving up their last nickle.

    Funny how they never talk about corporations needing to tighten their belt or “adjust their expectations” to paying higher wages.





  • RDP is kind of limited because it’s a virtual session. It’s useful if you only need to do stuff while you’re actively connected but you can’t, for example, remote in and start an app or process going and then disconnect and have that app continue. When you d/c your profile is essentially logged out. Your activity also can’t be viewed by a user on the remote system, if you needed to collaborate or assist somehow.

    UltraVNC has worked ok for me for windows systems. It has some of that open-source clunk to the UI, but is pretty straight forward and does what I need.



  • I did this during an international trip last year coming back into the country. The guy mostly seemed confused and kind of suspicious, but it was nbd.

    They will potentially take you out of line to a side room to hand you off to someone else. It seemed to be an area where they deal with any oddball kind of things. There was a lady ahead of me who was more raucus and upset about some issue with her ID. The guy who checked mine mainly seemed kind of bemused, like it was unusual.

    Be prepared for “We have the biometric data from your photo already, why do you care?”

    You’re not obligated to give them a super detailed justification. Just remain polite and unconfrontational, and explain that you prefer not use the system as long as the right remains afforded to you to opt out.

    (Note, this right only extends to US citizens)


  • I can’t say about XP or 7 but they’ve definitely saved my bacon on Win10 before on my home system. And the company I work for has them automatically created and it made dealing with the problem much easier as there was a restore point right before the crowdstrike update. No messing around with the file system drivers needed.

    I’d really recommend at least creating one at a state when your computer is working ok, it doesn’t hurt anything even if it doesn’t work for you for whatever reason. It’s just important to understand that it’s not a cure all, it’s only designed to help with certain issues (primarily botched updates and file system trouble).