As someone who live in Texas for thirty years, I am genuinely shocked that the Texas GOP has managed to find someone who is too corrupt even, for them. I wouldn't have said that was possible.

This is what happens when everyone has easy access to children.

Whether or not Putin actually had him assassinated, years of unfair imprisonment and abuse certainly contributed heavily to his death. Putin is responsible, in one sense or another.

In almost every case, the best defense against this is to be a genuinely good person. Treat everyone with kindness and you will get surprising amount of support.

The air traffic control system has never entirely recovered from what Reagan did to it in 1981. He fired a lot of them to bust their union, at the cost of public safety. In the short term, there weren't enough controllers to cover the losses. That lasted for around a decade. Since then, the problem has been that the pay is no longer good enough to attract the number of people needed. Air traffic control is one of the most stressful jobs in existence and, without a union, the pay has lagged. We can thank Reagan, and all of the tight-budget conservatives who followed him, for our current problems with air safety.

I have friends who've run an AirBnB for nearly a decade. They they rent out a room to cover their property taxes. Our city imposed all of those rules mentioned, plus a few others, like regular inspections, several years ago. There were some initial problems as the city administration worked out how to implement the new rules, but overall it had very little effect on them and did not change the volume of their business.

The AirBnB hosts who are likely to have real problems under the new rules probably should. AirBnB runs the full range from responsible people trying to provide an honest service to opportunists looking for ways to take advantage of loopholes and gaps in the rules for profit. This will be inconvenient for the former and may put the later out of business. And I am okay with that.

Some areas like taxis and hotels may be over-regulated, but there are still good reasons for them to be regulated. Any business model that relies on avoidance of existing regulation deserves the inevitable changes it will cause.

We need a similar bill that would send anyone convicted of unlawful activity in the US Capital since January 5th of 2021 to Siberia.

There are two kinds of groups that push changes to society based on morality. Those who want to provide more freedom and rights to people who are at an unfair disadvantage under the system and those who want to impose restrictions and penalties on people who do things they don't like. The latter groups are almost never sincere. The actions they oppose are just an excuse for making people they don't like suffer. As a result, they are often caught do the exact things they say they oppose, because they don't really care about the actions themselves.

This seems like a great idea to me. Touch screens are a terrible way to operate controls while driving. Some car companies have begun backing off from the trend and are moving back to buttons for some functions.

AliExpress screwed me recently. A vendor sent me the wrong items. I mean, they weren't even the same kind of items. I disputed it with the vendor and they said they'd sent the right things, so there.

I opened a case with AliExpress. They asked me for a whole lot of information, some of which didn't make any sense, along with some pictures. I sent them everything. They sided with the vendor.

Fortunately, I had paid with PayPal. PayPal looked over the information from both sides and promptly refunded my money.

I don't expect to be doing business with AliExpress again any time soon.

The best therapist I've known had a neat little cross-stitich on her lobby wall that said:

"Normal is just a setting on your washing machine."

Every mode of human thought and behavior is represented by a spectrum. There is never a clear boundary between normality and mental illness.

I don't think the conservatives are sufficiently unified to form a single opposition army. The problem with basing your appeals on hating "outsiders" is that you end up with a lot of internal hatred too. There's also a strong undercurrent of "no one can tell me what to do" that makes central control unlikely.

What seems more likely are terrorist incidents, carried out be individuals and small groups, without any overall communication or strategy. We're already seeing some of that. The lack of coordination won't prevent it from happeing, but will prevent it from achieving anything.

I don't think there are very many people within the MAGA movement who honestly want to resort to violence, whatever they tell themselves. The ones who are actually willing are the ones who wanted to hurt someone anyway. Politics provides them with an excuse, not a motivation.

I think we're going to have a nasty time for a while, but I don't think a right-wing takeover by violence has any chance of happening. I'm much more worried about a political takeover that then turns into an authoritarian coup. The left-wing has a much better chance of organizing as a whole, but I don't think there are that many people ready to fight from that side either, but that could change as conditions get worse.

You're not extending your chi through your finger when you push. The instructions take that for granted, but they really should be more specific.

We had a dog who was brilliant in almost every area. For example, he liked to watch television. Late at night he would go downstairs and turn on the TV. We only discovered it by accident, because he would also turn if off if he heard us coming. One night I walked in on him with his nose on the off button and the picture (on our old-style TV) still fading.

Once he knew that we knew, he stopped trying to hide it. He would turn it on and off when he wanted. Then he figured out, I assume from watching us, how to use the remote. Finally, he learned how to change channels using the remote. His favorite show turned out to be "The Pet Department" on Animal Planet. I kid you not.

Translation: Elon Musk desperately searches for buzzwords that will boost the stock of his failing company.

I am terribly surprised that ultra-rich sociopaths have no empathy toward mankind.

The real issue here is not that these people support a terrible vision of the future; it's that we are allowing these sociopaths to run our world now.

When Trump was impeached (both times) the GOP clearly established that for them guilt or innocence has nothing to do with the process. They made it clear that only political affiliation mattered. The next logical step is to begin impeaching people just for doing something they don't like. Or even for just being on the other side of the aisle.

What i think a lot of people haven't entirely gotten their heads around yet is that the GOP isn't just pushing limits. They have completely rejected the concept of the rule of law. Exploiting the system in every possible way is not a side effect; it's the whole point.

The purpose of a law is irrelevant. They will twist it to serve them if they can and they will ignore it if they can't.

I am yet another fledditor. I think I looked at nearly all the alternatives and I liked the Fediverse the best.

I do miss the sheer volume of participation on reddit, but I that has been steadily improving. And the quality and tone of the conversations is generally much better.

Any forums with large numbers of participants is going to have certain problems. The difference is that reddit turned most of those problems into institutions while Lemmy provides better ways to deal with them and easier ways to avoid them.

Having worked in high tech for almost four decades, I have come to appreciate the advantages of not having everything controlled by a central authority. Sooner or later the leadership, however benevolent, will change into something repressive and exploitive. Once that happens, it will remain that way forever, because there is no financial or political incentive to move in that direction. Replacement has been the only thing that works, at least so far. The Fediverse provides an alternative to that cycle that seems viable.

I understand the cynicism, but it's worth looking at the details. This is not the most powerful phone on the market, but it looks very good. The price is reasonable. It is easier and less expensive to repair than anything else on the market and it comes with a much longer warranty. They appear to be serious about both minimizing their environmental impact and being fair to the workers all the way down their supply chain. Those are all significant achievements.

I don't need a new phone right now, but I'm still tempted, just to encourage the effort. We tend to complain about all corporations being basically evil. We should do everything we can to support the ones that really aren't.

It would be nice if there were separate Tech Industry and Technology News communities.

Yes, but you need "multipoint" headphones that are designed to do that. Low end headphones tend not to have that feature. Medium to high end often do, but make sure before you buy.

When companies began to drop the audio jack I was annoyed, but I figured I could just buy a converter. Which would be great if there were a universal standard for connecting audio through a USB C. There isn't. There aren't even just two competing approaches. There are all kinds of different setups that sometimes vary even within a single brand.

I found multiple adapter that said it supported my phone brand. It didn't work. I looked deeper and found some advice on adapters that would work with more recent phone. I bought one based on that and it worked, sort of. The audio quality was not great and it would occasionally just cut out for a second. My third try got me an adapter that work reliably, but the audio quality is still mediocre. My best headphones are all analog, but I have to use Bluetooth with my phone because it provides better audio.

The physical issues, particularly the connectors, guarantees that USB C will never work as well. The lack of standards for implementing it make finding compatible hardware a nightmare. And if you manage to get everything else figured out you end up with the kind of sound you can hear from an audio jack using a $5 set of earbuds. It provides no benefits to the user, only to the manufacturer.

This is just an attempt to keep their bots motivated.

How could even Microsoft release a product named WinCE? I've marveled at it for decades.

What can we do to push traffic to shoptrumpsneakers.com?

Income inequality has made traditional measures of the economy meaningless for the majority of us. Even the overall measures of price increases and inflation no longer apply across the board because categories that are less important can cancel out areas that are critical, such as housing and food costs.

Just when I thought I couldn't like Ryan Reynolds any better.

They are aggressively going after anyone who points out that almost everything they say is a lie. That's what "woke" really means. They're terrified of anyone who is awake and paying attention.

Consider me as a data point. My salary is in the low six figures. I have a reasonable mortgage and car loan. I also live paycheck to paycheck and have trouble paying my bills every month. I am currently in default on several thousand dollars of medical debt, that I am trying to pay off gradually, but I'm not always keeping ahead of my new medical debt.

Part of my income goes to helping out some relatives and friends who are in much worse shape, but even without that, I would have trouble breaking even.

I am just barely short of being in the top 10% of US incomes. The income inequality in this country has left the vast majority of the population struggling. Many can no longer afford enough food or housing.

Me too and me neither. I'm over sixty, I've lived in various parts of the country, and I've never head anyone say that.

I want to know what that's about too!

It's hard to believe, but there has always been as much as 20% of the population who are willing to believe anything that makes them feel special. These are the people who think they would be successful and happy if they weren't being kept down by aliens, ghosts, or secret international conspiracies. What Trump has done is to give them an enemy they can see. That has brought them all together and brought in another segment who are slightly less crazy, but are united by their hatred of "others".

If most people in this country voted, they would be scary, but not large enough to be a political force. As it is, they are still a minority, but not by a safe margin. Any time they can convince a small group of independents to vote them they are capable of winning elections. Even without that, their "win by any means" non-ethic means they can game the system and outright cheat while feeling good about themselves. That has allowed them to win more elections.

We should be able to win back the independents, and I think we largely have. I don't know that there's much we can do about the rest of them. Now that they have been weaponized and unified, they will continue to be a threat until the current generation of them die off. We need to contest every election and fight for our democracy. There are enough of us to do that successfully, if we make the sustained effort to do it.

It depends on what you were subscribed to. Most of mine are dead too, but they were smaller and more eclectic subreddits.

Stories about police abusing their authority and breaking the law have become like stories about mass shootings. They happen constantly, everyone wrings their hands, but no one is willing to actually do anything about the problem.

I understand what they're saying, but it's a bad way of saying it. "Inevitable" implies there is nothing anyone could do about it. This is the direct result of choices made by a fanatical group of House members who would rather posture on social issues than actually govern. And they are the result of bad choices their electorate made in voting for them.

A small portion of our population is choosing to hurt large numbers of people (including themselves) to push extreme positions on social issues that the majority does not support.

Recession, as we define it, is only really meaningful to those of at least moderate wealth. That line used to be low enough that it included the majority of the population. Extreme wealth inequality has changed that. The majority are now below that line. Recession has become a concern for the rich. The rest of us suffer from wage stagnation and inflation to support ever increasing corporate profits, but that problem doesn't have a simple name and is rarely part of the economic debate. "The Economy" is doing fine, but most of us who have to participate in it are not.

I used to wonder why conservatives always seem to be hypocrites. I finally came to the conclusion that it isn't anything inherent about legitimate conservative philosophy. The problem is with any extremist movement that decides their cause justifies ignoring the opinions of others, the rules of society, and of the law. When winning by any means is acceptable you have moved out of the realm of politics and and into insurrection and revolution.

I wish I could just get Prime shipping and drop the video service. I may still drop the whole thing.

No, it isn't just you. "Cancel Culture" is another of those pejoritive terms the right is so fond of. Making decisions about where to spend your money based on the behavior of the companies is a one of the few ways we have to influence corporations (and politicians).

The extreme right seems to have given up o boycotts and moved on to direct physical attacks as their preferred methods of influence.

A potentially awesome service...from a company that offers no contact numbers or email addresses.

PBS was just one of many sources, but it probably helped. A lot of their programs for children include that message. It was particularly central to Mister Rodger's Neighborhood. Fred Rodger's was a national treasure.