Cylinsier

Unfortunately a lot of the damage of climate change is done and mitigating the rest of it will require a lot more attention and effort than our governments are giving so far. The fight is still only beginning and we’re starting from a losing position.

All of that said, given the current political climate and the nature of just how difficult it is to pass basically any meaningful climate legislation, this should still be applauded as a great step in the right direction. It disappoints me that this isn’t being reported by bigger, more visible news outlets. Almost as if the narrative that both parties are equally ineffective and neither one passes any noteworthy legislation is better for the business of writing clickbait political analysis to keep readers of all backgrounds bringing in views and also goes a long way in convincing fossil fuel companies to keep buying that juicy ad space.

Well Republicans control the House so…he gets a pat on the back for his successful grift and McCarthy pretends nothing ever happened?

It’s honestly insanely impressive that these things are still working so long after being built and so far from us. One of mankind’s greatest achievements and even after they die they’ll still be out there somewhere floating around. Maybe long after we’re gone and the Earth is swallowed up by the sun. The last piece of proof that we even existed at all.

Headline is very biased, source video is opinion piece from an unreliable right wing source. Here’s a neutral reporting on this story:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gonzalo-lira-red-pill-dating-coach-who-is-accused-of-shilling-for-putin-is-arrested-in-ukraine

There is no reliable evidence that he is being tortured in any capacity. He is charged with violating several wartime laws and it appears he attempted to out the locations of Ukrainian soldiers as well as international journalists to hostile Russian invasion forces, implicitly making it easier to target them.

OP’s account appears to be associated with or wants people to believe it is associated with Project Veritas. Project Veritas has a long, very well established pattern of dishonest reporting including editing videos to make it appear as if people have said or done things they didn’t do as well as lying about the identities of their “agents” and behaving erratically or unethically in an attempt to elicit secretly recorded responses from their targets which can then be edited to appear incriminating of whatever illicit activity they will then be accused of. Project Veritas is not a credible source of fact-based reporting and if OP is not associated with them, it should still be a red flag that they want people to think they are.

The way it’s supposed to work is voters are supposed to notice and not reelect that person. But not enough voters participate in primaries and then when general elections roll around, we’re stuck electing the moderate dinosaur or the fascist. People need to stop asking Congress, a body conposed of grandparents, to outlaw grandparents (and therefore themselves) from running and start just not hiring them anymore. That way when you have an old person who still has their wits and does a good job, you can keep them around instead of it being all or nothing.

By sequencing the genome of this Rip Van Winkle roundworm, scientists revealed it to be a new species of nematode

If this nematode could read I bet it would be offended at being called “new.”

This is all about delegitimizing the impeachment process itself. Trump getting impeached twice was historically relevant because it stood as tangible evidence of him being one of the worst presidents in history and easily the worst of the last 50 years. The Republican narrative remains that those impeachments were politically motivated and not based on any valid legal or ethical concerns. So now they’re going to do what they accused Democrats of doing and deliberately make a mockery of impeachment.

The point of this isn’t to actually punish anyone in the Biden administration. It’s an inconvenience at worst and they know it. The point is to make impeachment a joke. Something one party in Congress does to the other in the White House as a regular and inconsequential thing, just part of the theater of it all. This retroactively defangs Trump’s impeachments in the eyes of people on both sides who aren’t dialed into politics and really only pay attention every 4 years and skim the occasional headline. It also preemptively reduces the gravity of any future impeachments of Republican Presidents because impeachment becomes routine and therefore mundane to the average person.

Basically the Republicans don’t like checks and balances that require them to behave like civilized, functional adults doing their jobs, so they’re just going to smear their shit on those checks and balances until the voters no longer take them seriously and forget they ever had any real meaning. And it will work too.

I think it’s down to a few reasons. One you touched on is exclusives. Most consumers aren’t going to have both consoles like you do, they’re going to pick one or the other and Xbox doesn’t really have many exclusives, even fewer than PS, and theirs are much more likely to end up on PC when they do have them. So for consumers who want the larger variety of games, PS5 currently wins.

Another is performance. While both the PS5 and Series X are comparable, the Series S offering has created a very odd phenomenon of accidental exclusivity for Sony because of performance limitations. It’s a relatively new thing but I suspect it’s going to be more common as the generation goes on. The current example is Baldur’s Gate III. It simply cannot run on the S. As a result the developer has put an Xbox release on hold indefinitely and it may never come out on Xbox because they don’t want to have to deal with the confusion of selling an Xbox game that is not playable on one of the two SKUs. They decided that if the S can’t run it then it just won’t come out for the X either.

Third, and probably more relevant earlier in the generation, Sony had some snappy gimmicks on their side that might have been a difference maker for some consumers on the fence. The advanced haptics of the Dual Sense for example. I think the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly but there was a lot of buzz around it closer to launch to the extent that it’s impact on sales is probably more than nothing at all. I think the PSVR2 was also briefly a console mover as Xbox doesn’t have comparable hardware. I don’t think anyone at this point is rushing out to get a PS5 just for VR now, but there was a brief period of time after the PSVR2 was announced where people were eager to have a PS5 because if they did want VR, Sony’s was the cheapest way into that market at modern performance levels without having to give Facebook your entire identity just to game. Again not significant on its own, but it’s impact is more than nothing at all.

Fourth is just that Sony came into the generation ahead of Microsoft with the PS4. More PS4 owners with big libraries are going to want a new system that can play their old games rather than starting from scratch. So if you have a bunch of PS4 games that you still play, you’re going to choose PS5 and it’s kind of a no brainer.

And lastly I’d say Sony has just done a better job marketing it’s console as a must-have piece of consumer tech. From the jump there were a lot of people who already had gaming PCs questioning why they would ever need an Xbox. And Microsoft did little to address this narrative, it almost felt like they accepted that they were going to cannibalize their own console’s sales right from launch because everything gets ported to PC for them and just decided they didn’t care. There are plenty of reasons to own an Xbox but MS has pushed like none of them in advertising. Sony meanwhile did a great job early on marketing the PS5 as a status symbol and has kept in the public eye much more consistently with game exclusivity, and more recently media tie-ins with the Last of Us tv show. And while the exclusives may be few and far between, they are big draws like Final Fantasy, Horizon, and Spider-Man. When Xbox occasionally gets an exclusive, it’s always in the news for the wrong reasons like Halo almost universally agreed upon to be no longer good or Redfall being an absolutely embarrassing catastrophe of a release.

Come to Florida for college! Rack up insurmountable debt while we program you into a bigoted idiot with no useful skills!

All just theatrics. Red meat for the base who will fall for it because they’re gullible and let their thirst for hate cloud their judgment. This is DOA in the Senate and McCarthy knows it but still has his caucus go through with this waste of time. Tells you exactly everything you need to know about his character and fitness for leadership. Both are, to put it mildly, lacking.

The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.

High speed glass cannons were always a fun build archetype to play around with in these games. I had tended to go the other way as a kid though, building hulking behemoths loaded to the teeth with bullets and bombs. Just don’t ask me to walk anywhere in any kind of efficient manner! Next mission waypoint a hundred steps that way? Meet you in an hour.

The US is far too large and powerful a nation to hide from. The consequences of four more years of Trump climate policy alone will find you anywhere on this planet. You cannot run away from the fallout of a second Trump term just by moving to a different continent. Only choice is to stay and help the fight against it.

People are still going to bitch about this administration not doing enough for student debt relief, and that’s understandable considering how long it’s been a problem and how little effort has gone into fixing it up until now. But just remember which party is trying to do something about it now and which party built the current SCOTUS that has blocked those efforts so far. Democrats’ track record is far from admirable, but the GOP is flat out telling you to your face that you will get nothing you want or need and you will like it when they are in power.

Besides that, consider that Republican policy in general is about obstruction, regressive judicial interpretation, and brazen inaction on social issues. As such it is possible for Republicans to achieve a lot of their agenda by just holding one branch of Congress or having just the Presidency and courts without Congress. Because they achieve most of what they want via state legislatures suing to get their activist judges to rewrite the law through legal precedent. Contrastingly Democratic policy is often about taking action to address things which requires both Houses of Congress and the Presidency to have a chance at success, particularly with the current courts making litigation as remedy a non-starter for them.

Knowing that, look at the makeup of our federal government over the last 30 or so years. You will see that Democrats had about 3 months of true supermajority under Obama (72 working days to be exact) and the rest of that term with a strong majority, and then two years of a split Senate for Biden’s first term with DINO Manchin and turncoat Sinema being part of that Democratic split. So we, the voters, have given Democrats two years out of the last 30 to actually have a chance to install an agenda. Just two. And those two years ended over 12 years ago.

If you want student loan forgiveness along with other things like abortion protections, voting rights protections, climate change action, and so on, you’re not going to get it overnight with Democrats. It’s going to be an uphill battle, it’s going to take participation in primaries to get DINOsaurs replaced with younger progressives who actually have a stake in these things, and it’s probably going to take a few consecutive cycles of sustained federal control. You will not get easy and satisfying victories with just one or two votes. But I can absolutely 100% guarantee you that for every second you let Republicans control even a single branch of government, even just one chamber of Congress, you will get NOTHING on any of those topics and in fact, those situations will be made actively and maliciously worse out of pure spite. And the following Democratic administration will be that much more behind the curve and it will require that much more time and effort just to get back to zero and to even begin addressing those issues in a meaningful way.

My condolences.

Barbados is a beautiful country which is poorer than it should be. I had the opportunity to visit it as part of a cruise many years ago and that experience along with similar ones is why I doubt I will ever go on a cruise again. Not to say I didn’t have a good time, it was a fantastic opportunity to visit a number of small island nations in a single week and since it was a gift, it only cost me a single roundtrip plane ticket. But something was abundantly clear in Barbados, St Lucia, and St Kitts. And that was that if you were not the cruise industry or the handful of local resorts who contracted with them for day excursions, you benefitted absolutely fucking nothing from their presence. The economies of these small nations had absolutely no right to be as poor as they were with that kind of money coming into them. I went on several of my own excursions and got to see the local areas outside of the preplanned trips the cruise had in mind and saw very poor but very happy people living lives in the shadows of these high-pollution ships bringing rich people into places they themselves were never able to afford to go in their own countries.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying I hope this works out for them. Barbados is a free, self-governing nation that has a lot to offer to tourists and a lot of locals who should benefit from that but, in today’s economic realities, you can’t start making money until you have enough money to buy your foot into the door first. The specter of white colonialism still hangs over these small nations.

Maybe a hot take here but if you’re going to engage in a war, whether directly or by supporting an ally with money and supplies, you don’t half-ass it. You don’t give your ally just enough bullets and fuel to get into the thick of it but leave them hanging when they need to keep going. Whether or not you support the US aiding Ukraine, you have to understand that once that support is given the strategically correct thing to do is to see it through. From the position that we are already engaged in supporting Ukraine, the continuation of that support with the goal of winning is itself justification enough to match the ante in response to your opponent raising it.

A number of factors would make that different. For example if we reached a point where our support started to become detrimental to our readiness to defend ourselves (which, despite arguments from the far right to the contrary, we are not remotely close to doing). Or if Ukraine showed a reapted track record of attacking civilians with our munitions. Or if the war was a losing or lost prospect or this was an escalation on Ukraine’s side. But none of those things are the case. Ukraine has not gone out of their way to attack civilians and has in fact fought essentially exclusively a defensive war, they are doing quite well at it and still control their own fates, and Russia escalated to cluster munitions first. This is only a response in kind. With all those factors taken into account, the decision to provide these munitions is justified simply by the fact that they make Ukraine’s odds of winning, and winning sooner, better. If Ukraine starts bombing civilians with them then we can discuss whether or not it was the right thing to do. But their track record so far suggests they have no intention of flipping this to an offensive war. Whatever Russian sites they attack on Russian soil can be assumed to be military targets that pose a direct threat to Ukraine and nothing more until proven otherwise.

No, you will have to create a separate account on Lemmy.world or another instance which still federates with them to do that. It is worth noting that the defederation is indefinite but not permanent so you could also just wait. The defederation was done because Lemmy.world users were creating an overabundance of moderation issues so the intention is to eventually federate with them again when it is possible to address those issues more efficiently.

Except with a lot of features removed.

I think Bsky’s biggest challenge is that you can’t get on the damn platform.