Who do these pants -wetting idiots think they’re scaring?

The boomers who grew up during the Cold War and who continue to have better voter turnout rates than Millennials, even as the latter generation sneaks up on their 40s.

Like…I don’t agree with their policies, but their tactics are objectively effective.

This isn’t an endorsement of conservative fear mongering but rather calling out my fellow Millennials, who’ve recently surpassed boomers as the most populous generation in the US.

Show up and vote, god dammit.

Which is why there should be legal mechanisms to place legal responsibility for decisions like this personally on those in leadership positions when they’re being made, even if those people no longer hold those positions.

You bet your ass the chucklefucks who came up with this little stunt would’ve thought twice about it if they knew that there was a decent chance they’d go to prison for it.

Also gotta make this shit sting the shareholders too: make the company pay the victims not only the estimated value of their data but also a portion of all profits made while a policy like this is in effect. Since there’s no easy way to tell how much money was made off their data, unless the company has the numbers, let’s say half.

Suddenly the quarterly report’s got a nice repayment shaped dent in its side and all the sudden the shareholders care about following the law and respecting the rights of customers.

The bounty is posted by Iran… wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we dropped him off at Tehran?

Chocolate with raisins is super common though…

Not that we need to open this can of worms here, but it’s a pet peeve of mine that “vanilla” has become a term used to mean plain, boring, sheltered, standard, mediocre, underwhelming, basic, and uninteresting.

Vanilla is an amazing flavor that comes from orchids that must be hand pollinated to cultivate at scale, and has a long and interesting history. It’s the second most valuable spice after saffron.

Just feels wrong to use that as a synonym for bland and blah.

Maybe not the best parallel but a good point nonetheless.

A more apt comparison might be:

“What’s the best all-beef hot dog I can buy at my local supermarket?”

“Ugh! OMG! Don’t do that to yourself! Why would you even want to bother with eating beef if that’s the shit you’re going to put in your body?! Just get some Japanese A5 Wagyu ribeye and thank me later!”

The artist has perfectly captured the feline character when being scolded here: annoyed, defeated…but utterly incapable of shame or remorse.

Fucking cormorants…they kill lots of fish that they can’t even eat, plus a ton of fish that they do eat…and they’re federally protected.

I don’t care about that so much as the hyper specificity of not only “you have to be on the political left here” but “being to the left isn’t enough, you need to be this far left, and hold these specific views on politics, technology, etc.”.

And the community that is here is, amazingly, somehow even worse than Reddit, on average, when it comes to being a hive mind that is wildly intolerant of any disagreement.

legions of career bureaucrats who run federal departments get replaced with Trump loyalists.

For many of those bureaucracies, this is absolutely foreseen and intentional.

See…while bureaucracies often get a bad rap for being slow and inefficient, there’s often simply no (superior) alternative. It’s like how everyone bitches that it takes so long to get from point A to point B on the interstate, but taking an alternate route that avoids it takes even longer.

And while they may be frustrating, they’re usually run by capable people in the federal government. The lazy federal workers that the civil service is known for do exist, but they don’t typically rise to the level of making their bureaucracy work or not work, they’re low to mid level functionaries who’ve found a niche where their team will carry them and pick up their slack without creating a department-sized blip on the radar of any high level official.

These P2025 people…and MAGA Republicans in general…are trying to set up a win-win for themselves with this tactic: either they replace bureaucrats with loyalists and turn it into a reward system they can use to shore up support…or they remove enough pieces of the Jenga tower that it collapses under its own weight, proving their accusations that these agencies are dysfunctional, and using it as a flashpoint to push to eliminate these agencies and privatize the functions they performed…both allowing them to turn that service into a profit source for friends while also freeing up those tax dollars for their own purposes. And in the process, the American taxpayer gets sold down river to an organization looking to charge as much as the market will bear for the services that were once funded through taxes. The people will still pay the taxes, of course… they’ll just get less in return for them and have to pay more of their wages to get the same or worse services.

And the side that actually, verifiably tried to use fake electors to subvert the will of the people (even against the stacked deck of the electoral system that benefits their side)…is also the side that loves to spread constant (and constantly disproven) lies about their opponents’ voter fraud.

Like…even if I agreed with their platform on the issues, the GOP would still not get my vote based on the way they try to get that vote…in order to gain power…to realize their goal…of getting to a point where my vote loses its power.

Right?!

Like…even if you had no idea what either party stood for, or what positions they took on the various specific issues that concern the population in the present, all you really need to know is how a democracy works in theory, how presidential elections work in the US in practice (and by extension, how these two things differ, thanks to the Electoral College)…and where each party stands on voting rights, voting access, districting (and gerrymandering)…and as a dark horse…public education.

One side wants as many people as possible to get out and vote (and while they obviously hope they’ll vote Democrat, most of their messaging, to their credit, is focused not on ‘go vote for us’, but instead ‘the most important thing is that you get out there and vote’), wants to make sure that everybody who wants to vote is able to do so, has no roadblocks, hoops to jump through, bureaucratic red tape, etc., wants every voter across the country to have a voice equal to every other voter, and wants everyone to have a good (and improving) baseline of education, as a foundation upon which to make an informed decision about their voting.

The other side wants to suppress the vote, wants to disallow voting by default unless the individual takes steps to prove themselves, wants to introduce obstacles to voting access, wants to maintain and perpetuate a system where some voters have disproportionately more impact than others on the overall results (a system which, by the way, has much of its origins in the political maneuverings of slaveholders)…and most telling (and disturbing) of all, in the long term, actively, directly, and overtly makes efforts to reduce and degrade the quality of public education, literally seeking to reduce access to quality education for anyone not fortunate enough to be born into a family with the means to provide for a private education.

Seen to its logical conclusion, one side is literally seeking to revert decades if not centuries of progress on education and return to a situation where an education (and the opportunity it provides) is a privilege reserved for the children of affluence, where wealth, opportunity, class mobility, and professional occupations are reserved and exclusive to the wealthy, and in effect secured to them and their future generations indefinitely. And the best part (for them) is that once this happens, the future generations of uneducated lower and middle classes won’t have the education to understand what’s being done to them, or how it might be different.

It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.

When I first heard about what was going on, I assumed that “CrowdStrike” was not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack where they used systems they’d previously hacked and had them all do the same thing at once to another target.

I’m just imagining a port the size of a VCR

USB is people!

The amount of times I’ve struggled when setting up monitors over the past 5 years with HDMI and DP…only to have them eventually work in a way I had it previously when it wouldn’t…is too damn high.

I feel like AIM was the de facto god-emperor of IM platforms and the rest were just also-rans.

Maybe that was just my experience tho, but I feel like ICQ and IRC were older but more clunky, MSN and Yahoo were newer or contemporary but less dependable and had less buy in from the community.

Lemmy doesn’t want to hear it, but you’re correct.

Democrats want Biden to drop out because they don’t believe he can beat Trump.

To this point: for those who think that, do they think anyone else realistically could, at this point, other than Biden?

While I’m not thrilled with his chances, I will say that if he wasn’t to be the nominee, that decision needed to happen in 2021. At this point, I do believe that statistically, he’s got better odds than anyone else, so regardless of his debate or mental state, he’s our guy.