It seems to me that they can be stretched just shy of infinitely, because sources aren’t reliable and people aren’t paying attention. That is, when a source reports on what’s happening with as little bias and editorializing as humanly possible, it is labeled as “left bias” while the conservative news sources don’t bother talking about the problems with ICE at all. As long as that’s the case, they can basically get away with anything because their human rights abuses won’t get enough coverage or will be dismissed by enough of the population that it won’t actually have an impact.

To be honest… If tomorrow WINE was 100% perfect, we’d probably see laptops start moving the direction of phones and it would be terrible for consumers. You’d get your AceOS on your Acer laptop and DellSys on your Dell and so on and they’d all have little marketplaces where you could install LibreOffice next to an ad for some other office suite that costs $100 for some reason and that’s all people would know.

Yes, techy people would have more options but for the average consumer, they have no idea what an OS is. Many don’t know what Windows is. They don’t care or want to care. If presented with the average Linux install screen, supposing they could make it that far by figuring out how to make a bootable flash drive, they’d freak out at all the options and information presented. They’re at the mercy of the manufacturer, and the manufacturer will want to squeeze out every last dollar, and being given control over the OS would be terrible.

AI could probably find the occasional actual bug. If you use AI to file 500 bug reports in the time it may take a researcher to find and report 1, and only 2 pay out, you’ve still gotten ahead.

But in the process, you’ve wasted tons of time for the developers who have to actually sort through, read the reports, and verify the validity of the issue. I think that’s part of the problem. Even if it sometimes finds a legitimate issue, these people are trying to make it someone else’s problem to do the real work.

In case you’re curious why they might hate the post office so much, I suspect it’s because as a government entity it has two important attributes:

• A requirement for universal access
• At least some constitutional protections for privacy.

When you ship UPS or FedEx, you’re giving a package to a private entity. They are only bound by the contract they make with you. If they decide to start opening every package, that’s their right. The USPS has specific laws around when it can and cannot search packages, and generally requires a warrant.

I use a little mini PC with a DAS connected via USB. So you don’t need to go full server to expand the storage.

Yeah but have you seen the state of things? One man’s absurdist joke is apparently another man’s deeply held belief right now.

It sounds like Hollywood tech lingo. Like when you’re watching a movie or a TV show and the designated techy character starts just saying computer words that make no actual sense in the real world, but I guess in CSI: Idiottown the hard drives have severe overheating issues.

When I was little, long before I had a reason to want it to be true, I had this theory that the Secret Service, which is obviously not a secret, was called that because they had a secret mandate: If the President ever gets really out of pocket and goes for dictator powers, it’s their job to execute him as a traitor.

Anyway, I doubt it’s true, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

I agree but I feel like you’ll almost never get honest feedback, and companies never seem to do anything with the feedback they get. I mean if you’re firing someone, you’ll probably get a list of grievances that are exaggerated because they’re upset. If someone is quitting, they might hold back to not burn the bridge so to speak. The only time I had an exit interview was also the worst job I ever had, and I doubt they did anything as a result of me telling them, “Hey, when you tell someone they can’t take their legally mandated break, and then write them up for not taking that break, it’s kind of a demoralizing dick move.”

That’s the neat part: Convicted felons ARE excluded from most public service jobs like being a teacher or a mayor. It was widely believed that this included the presidency until the Supreme Court decided it somehow didn’t.

You’d be dismayed to find out how often I’ve seen people do that.

It’s more odd to me that the ones who believe in original sin and forgiveness for everything are the ones anti-abortion and pro-execution.

I don’t know the full history of corporate shenanigans, but it’s my understanding that the beginning of it all was to help form businesses that no individual could afford to start. No single person should reasonably have the funds to build a factory with all of the expensive equipment and parts needed to make cell phones. So you get people together who think cell phones are a good idea, they all pitch in, and now you can afford to build it and they get to share in the profits when it succeeds.

I like the employee-owned idea, but it seems like it would be hard to get off the ground in industries that require huge upfront investments. Imagine you want to build a grocery store, but the land and the building and the initial stock all takes money so you have to ask the cashier for $10,000 up front before you can actually build the thing and later start paying them. I legitimately don’t know, are there proposed ways to build these businesses but make them employee-owned?

I always got hung up on that too. It seems to me that the ideal state would be you invest in a company, they make a profit, you get a share of that profit. You can reinvest that in other places, helping more people start their businesses, helping more people find employment and get things done. It’s like economic democracy in action, where people get to decide what businesses are needed through investment. No person on Earth should have the funds to just build a chip fabrication plant, as an example, so crowd sourcing the funding like this makes perfect sense to me.

Where it falls down is in short term greed. I don’t think that the system was intended or can reasonably sustain all the high-speed trading trying to maximize returns not by helping the company succeed but by leeching off of the investment of others. What should have been a way for people to help build things has become a way for a whole industry to extract more money out of the world.

I think about this sometimes but the challenges for direct democracy are very hard to overcome. To vote right now, you go to a place and someone verifies your identity and then you vote on a machine that should theoretically have not just your vote but some form of backup to ensure your vote is counted.

Obviously this would get really obnoxious if you were voting constantly. So something like change.org maybe where people can propose things and others can vote on them. But now how do we handle identity verification, and ensuring only one vote per person? On something connected to the Internet, how do we verify security? This needs to be even more secure than a bank, as every hacker and government in the world will want to sway the results.

We could maybe distribute something like a USB key to cryptographically ensure everyone’s identity, but then you will need to handle people losing theirs, or theft, and it wouldn’t work great with cell phones. There’s other identity solutions like scanning documents or facial ID but they have their own security issues and also are a nightmare for privacy.

I dunno. There’s probably a solution out there that might work, but it would take a lot of work to make it trustworthy and that work would largely be overseen by people the system is meant to replace so they aren’t exactly incentivized to get it right.

I hate when people downplay the economy or employment as trivial or at least not very important. It is important, and for many it is rational to consider it the most important. At an individual level in America, employment means food, shelter, healthcare. It even means companionship… People who can’t afford to date, have a harder time finding love.

At a high level, even if we implemented universal healthcare and fixed our other problems, the health of the economy would STILL dictate our access to food, shelter, and healthcare. A government with no funds cannot sustain programs.

So your argument is “it doesn’t literally say that to the letter, so you’re wrong?” At best it suggests that this relatively wide swath of the population shouldn’t vote. What’s your interpretation?

From the article…

These are the men swimming in the electoral pool. It’s not too late for it to be drained.

The article is cautious at first, pointing at facts and figures. At times, it almost seems to care. But when it comes to the final arguments, it is just: We gotta get rid of these men. Not even a viable solution, much less a sensible one.

It’s everywhere. It’s not hard to find, but it’s not always overt. Usually, it is dismissive: “Well that’s not what we’re talking about right now.” “Well feminism would fix those problems too.” Or the person gets lumped in with Nazis, or misogynists, or whatever when what they’ve said doesn’t really support that.

I’m going to say something that I fear will not go over well, but I think it would be said. The left has some culpability here. Not in who they chose, but in how they approach the problem.

One of the things that draws me to the left is that people are all supposed to be people. No one is beyond redemption, and much of the worst aspects of people are due to changeable circumstances and not some genetic defect.

Criminals probably do crime because of their circumstances so if we can improve those circumstances we can help rehabilitate them. Addicts who are treated with dignity and compassion are more likely to be able to get their lives together. We shouldn’t paint over people with broad brush strokes, like assuming all Muslims are terrorists just because a few have done terrible things while claiming it is in the name of Islam.

But the left has a blind spot for men. The problem is solely with them, and they are garbage beyond redemption. They clearly are acting only out of hate, and not a result of their circumstances, so people seem to think. “It’s not my job to educate you” became a trope in a society where educating others is literally the only way to make change.

I submit that these people can be changed and can be rehabilitated if they are shown a better way. If their problems are listened to, rather than dismissed. If their circumstances are improved, rather than belittled. There are valid concerns, valid reasons for them to be upset, but they are handwaved away: “Well feminism cares about that too (even if you don’t see it)” or “The privileged feel like equality is oppression.”

Anyway, I don’t expect anyone will learn anything from this result. The left will say, “Man, misogyny just won’t let a woman be President” while ignoring how few people actually even voted. The left will say, “Men are to blame” without ever questioning beyond “I guess they’re just spiteful.” And if we get another election, we’ll have a Democratic candidate who moves right on everything except these problems.

This. It’s not an election, it’s what’s next. Is every American election just going to be “Outright Fascism vs. Traditional Conservatism?” Is it always going to be this unrelenting and horrible from now on? Trump losing would be a good thing, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

The way I see it, the problems are that we’ve lost trust in the concept of society. We don’t trust expertise. That’s not even a right vs left thing. I know it’s unpopular to “both sides” these things, but in truth it’s not even a matter of sides: Everyone of all political stripes just disregards what they don’t want to hear.

At the same time, truth is getting harder to discern anyway. Botnets distributing and promoting misinformation, deepfakes making lies look real, and hordes of the financially incentivized pushing whatever their audience wants to hear over what is real.

Anyway, I try to be optimistic but I just don’t see how things will actually get better.