President is two jobs. One is policy driven. One is being a leader. All president's have to do both, but arguably the latter is more important as president's can leave policy to aides and congress (and formerly the federal agencies, but that's gone now). The president is a communicator. Yes most voters like Biden policies, but they don't know they are Biden policies because Biden does not communicate that. In fact, in many congressional districts the Dem candidates are outperforming Biden while running on the same policies. You can't blame voters already burdened with living in this capitalist hell hole for not devoting hours into researching candidate policies.

In presidential politics, at the end of the day the buck stops with the candidate. Campaign aids and paid advertising and surrogates on TV can only do so much. You need the candidate to deliver, to speak directly to the voters, to make the case for why voters should choose them and their policies over the alternative. Biden is incapable of that.

It's Bidens fault.

Biden should have booked a tough sit down interview for the weekend after the debate to show he has the mental chops and ability to communicate the stakes of this campaign. Instead it's been five days now since the debate and Biden hasn't spoken publicly without a teleprompter. Hell dem governors and members of congress, including party leaders, have not spoken to Biden since the debate. Biden is doing basically nothing to calm people down. Hiding him and only rolling him out with a teleprompter in tow just plays into the republican conspiracy that Biden has had a significant decline. To the point that it's starting to not seem like a conspiracy. If Biden wants to stay in the race, he needs to fix this, like yesterday. Is the reason he hasn't done so yet because he can't do it? If so, wtf is he still in the race??

This movement wouldn't have any traction if Biden put on even a middling debate performance. We all saw Biden start to answer a question about abortion, then get confused and switch midway into talking about some woman killed by an immigrant. You don't need a grand conspiracy, it's a simple case of grandpa being too full of pride to give up his car keys. Except in this case the car is American democracy.

Biden was a great president. He should have asked in his accomplishments and set up a new generation of dem leaders. Instead, he let his pride get in the way, ignored his own decline, tried to hide it by refusing interviews and non-scripted public events, even the softball traditional pre superbowl interview, and then had that disaster of a debate. Yes, I'll still vote for the corpse of Biden if it means stopping Trump. But will swing voters? What about Trump to Biden voters in purple districts? What about young people and anyone already pissed about the genocide in Gaza? Is the "corpse is better than Trump" argument going to motivate infrequent voters to turn out? Better fucking hope so, cause Biden has us in this fucked position, is refusing to back down, so I guess we'll find out.

Banning abortion used to be illegal too...

The whole point of this is to get to the Supreme Court and chip away at legal precedent. That's why they are framing "the Bible" (as if there was a singular book) as a "historical document" that serves as a foundation for the US legal system. It's a way of saying, "hey we're not teaching religion, we're teaching history". The Supreme Court has rejected that argument for decades, it was the basis for cases involving displaying the ten commandments in classrooms. But now we have a new ultra conservative supreme court that doesn't give a shit about precedent. So the bet is, SCOTUS will reverse precedent and buy this argument.

It looks like now that Roe is gone, the new Christian nationalist legal project is dismantling the seperation of church and state. So buckle up, even when dems are in power they are too chicken shit to do anything about this stuff.

I look forward to reading everyone's calm and measured reactions

We continue to recommend Wyze lighting, since we consider them lower-risk, lower-impact devices—a security breach of a light bulb, for instance, wouldn’t give someone a view of your living room.

Call me paranoid, but I don't want a company I don't trust plugged into my network at all.

This feels like it's meant to be a joke, but it's not.

Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says the provision of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza endangers Israeli soldiers and must stop after more than 100 Palestinians were reported killed while trying to get aid in Gaza City.

“Today it was proven that the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza is not only madness while our hostages are held in the Strip … but also endangers IDF soldiers,” Ben-Gvir said, calling the deliveries “oxygen to Hamas”.

The incident is “another clear reason why we must stop transferring this aid”, he wrote on X.

Ben-Gvir also said Israel must “provide complete support to our heroic fighters operating in Gaza, who acted excellently against a Gazan mob that tried to harm them”.

How do execs not understand the Streisand Effect yet? If DeNiro had just made the speech and criticized Trump and the industry, I never would have read past the headline. Good for him for speaking out, but I'm good and over "celebrity bashes Trump" stories. Ah but Apple censors Trump criticism, well now you've got my click and my eyeballs. So dumb. Also evil. But mostly just dumb.

Just want to add that this wasn't just McDonald's spinning it for their own purposes, it was part of a larger effort of tort reform - spreading the conception that people are suing for everything, even hot coffee hur dur, so that the public would support things like caps on pain and suffering damages and punitive damages. Corporations wanted more leeway to maximize profits(the reason McDonald's coffee was so hot was because they could get more coffee out of the beans that way), even if it hurt people, and the public jumped right on board. This was part of the same strategy as denigrating plaintiffs attorneys as "ambulance chasers" and the like. It got to the point that even when people were harmed, they still wouldn't sue because they didn't want to be lumped in with "those entitled people suing over everything". It became a point of pride to get fucked over by corporations and to do nothing about it. Really disgusting how easily the public was manipulated by all that.

"There is international pressure and it's growing, but particularly when the international pressure rises, we must close ranks, we need to stand together against the attempts to stop the war," he said.

Sorry, why is Isreal not an isolated state at this point? If they won't respond to international pressure, and indeed are intent on doubling down because of that international pressure, why even include them in international bodies?

It's not even that.

California: "Please tell us if you allow nazis or not. We just want you to be transparent."

Elon: "California is trying to pressure me into banning nazis! If I disclose I'm cool with nazis, people will be mad and they'll want me to stop. Also, a lot of hate watch groups say I'm letting nazis run free on X, and I'm suing them for defamation for saying that, but if I have to publicly disclose my pro-nazi content moderation policies I'm going to lose those lawsuits and likely have to pay attorneys fees! Not cool California, not cool at all."

Ah there was a time when Prime Day was kind of fun, a Christmas in July kind of feeling. But now Amazon is just so loaded with knock off junk that doesn't work, spam postings, review manipulation, etc I absolutely dread shopping on Amazon for anything other than something I need right away, can't get in a local store, and don't care if it breaks in 2 months. I've never given less of a shit about Prime Day than I do today, and that's even without factoring in the price manipulation noted by OP.

For context, this all started Thursday when the ADL xeeted that is had a "frank and productive" conversation with X's CEO. She replied with some warm and fuzzy PR bullshit about working together to improve the platform blah blah blah. But the right wing nutjobs weren't happy with the implication that X was in anyway cooperating with the ADL and there was immediate backlash. "Ban the ADL" became a trending hashtag, because, according to the racist majority on X, the ADL is the actual hate group and they pressure advertisers who in turn pressure platforms to "ban free speech." Musk, always quick to undermine the sad sack holding the title "CEO" jumped on that bandwagon and been xeeting about it all weekend, threatening to ban them, generally talking trash, and now threatening to sue.

I find it depressing that I'm aware of all this.

I'm old enough that for me the NYT lost a lot of credibility with their cheerleading of the Iraq war and WMDs and serving as a tool for Cheney to get revenge on a whistleblower and all that shit. The same organization that is now writing haikus to avoid saying Isreal massacred starving civilians in their headline, "As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll".

The simple fact is a second Trump term is good for the NYT. Trump does crazy shit, people are outraged, they buy newspaper subscriptions to read about it. The NYT monetizes doom scrollers, and Trump is a endless supply of doom.

So is it money, or is the NYT always just been a mouthpiece of neocons? Or both.

For those fortunate enough to be out of the loop, one of the qanon catch phrases is "Where we go one we go all" which is some bastardized version of the three musketeers "all for one, one for all." It's often abbreviated as WWGOWGA, which you'll see on bumper stickers to helpfully let you know the driver has completely lost touch of reality so you should give them plenty of space. I've never seen it shortened to WGA, but that is plausible.

Theodore Medad Pomeroy was elected as speaker on the last day of the 40th Congress on March 3, 1869. It was a gesture of respect and honor ahead of his retirement. He served one day as speaker, basically an honorary role, speaker for the day and then congres adjourned for the year. He was the shortest serving house speaker in US history. The second shortest serving house speaker is Kevin McCarthy.

If my dog was bringing his ball or stick back to me out of some evolutionary instinct to be helpful, you'd think he'd actually drop it and give it to me. If I'm some primitive person and missed my shot with a spear, my dog would bring the spear back, but I'm not getting another shot at that mammoth until I win a game of tug first.

Mr. "assassination coordinates" said he was going to live stream driving to Zucks house to fight him, which would effectively doxx Zuck. Expecting logical consistency is silly.

Watch Gaetz run for governor (and then president?). Run, Gaetz, run. Most old school Regan Republicans would never go for this stuff. Limiting their own terms? Banning donations from lobbyists? Limiting SCOTUS terms and risk losing the theocratic supermajority? Gudouttahere.

Gaetz knows this. He also knows the establishment right wing media (Fox) is trying to make him the villain, "It's not that Republicans can't govern, it's just that this one guy is an asshole."

When Gaetz does shit like this, it makes him sound almost reasonable, right? Republican voters say, ok I think all that stuff would be good, so why won't the rest of the party go along with it? Hmm, maybe Gaetz is right about House Republicans being part of the swamp. Maybe Gaetz is a true fighter for America and not the asshole that blonde lady on Fox said he was.

That's the game. Gaetz is building some serious media coverage and name ID. I have to admit, the shit heal is making the most out of his time in the spotlight.

“At one point, we didn’t even know who the mayor was,” Ballard recalls. “If you knew somebody and you was white, and your grandfather was in office when he died or got sick, he passed it on down to the grandson or son, and it’s been that way throughout the history of Newbern.”

Yeah that's a monarchy. And those folks probably call themselves "patriots". And they probably claim systematic racism doesn't exist either while being the dictionary definition of it.

The first impeachment hearing is scheduled for Thursday, two days before the government shuts down. This is how House Republicans are spending their time, holding some dumbass hearings about how it still counts as a bribe even if no bribe is actually paid so long as we hate the guy. Meanwhile millions of people will lose paychecks, government assistance like fresh food for pregnant mothers and housing assistance, and the overall economy takes a kick in the teeth because of the shutdown. But don't worry America, Republicans are hot on the trail of public enemy number one Hunter Biden so it's definitely all worth it. And to think there are millions of Americans who will look at this cluster fuck and think "yup, I'm going to vote to put Republicans back in charge of Congress since they did such a good job last time".

During an earnings call on Tuesday, UPS CEO Carol Tomé said that by the end of its five-year contract with the Teamsters union, the average full-time UPS driver would make about $170,000 in annual pay and benefits, such as healthcare and pension benefits.

The headline is sensationalized for sure. But the article itself actually makes the point that the tech workers are misunderstanding that the $170k figure includes both salary and benefits.

"This is disappointing, how is possible that a driver makes much more than average Engineer in R&D?" a worker at the autonomous trucking company TuSimple wrote on Blind, an anonymous jop-posting site that verifies users' employment using their company email. "To get a base salary of $170k you know you need to work hard as an Engineer, this sucks."

It is important to note that the $170,000 figure represents the entire value of the UPS package, including benefits and does not represent the base salary. Currently, UPS drivers make an average of around $95,000 per year with an additional $50,000 in benefits, according to the company. The average median salary for an engineer in the US is $103,845 with a base pay of about $91,958, according to Glassdoor. And TuSimple research engineers can make between $161,000 to $250,000 in compensation, Glassdoor data shows.

On the whole though this is a useless article covering drama on Blind, wrapped up with a ragebait headline.

I listened to the whole thing on the Decoder podcast feed. The verge is promoting it as "wild" and "contentious", and the latter is a little true, but overall id describe it as a cringefest. It was hard to get through, and I got the same sick pit in my stomach I did watching Scott's Tots. Not that I'm particularly sympathetic to Yaccarino, she took this job so that says volumes about her judgement. But she was just so incredibly unprepared to address the most obvious questions, it seemed like she had drank the coolaid (flavor aid) and was expecting to the interviewer and audience to be so amazed with how awesome X is, and how amazing Elon is, and she was totally surprised when she got obvious questions like, how is X's user engagement since third parties are reporting it's down, why did x fire all the election integrity people, how much is X going to charge users and isn't having a free option valuable to keep advertisers on the platform, and what's the deal with suing the ADL?

At best she avoided every question with vague drawn out platitudes (elon is a genius, the employees at Twitter are brilliant, X is a transformative platform). At worst, she completely stepped in shit.

The two moments that stand out: first was when the interviewer asked about musk's statements/tweets about charging all users a fee. Yaccarino took a big pause, asked the interviewer to repeat the question, then asked the interviewer "did he say he was thinking about doing that, or that it's actually the plan?" The interviewer confirmed the latter and asked Yaccarino if Musk talked with her about that. Yaccarino says "we talk about everything." Like, big ooof. Girl, your only lieing to yourself.

The second was when she was asked about Musk being the head of product, and whether that meant she's not a real CEO. She defended musk being in charge of product because "who wouldn't want to be working with the genius musk?" The audience audibly laughs and a bunch raise their hands. Yaccarino tries to brush the audience reaction off like they were just joking or just didn't know Musk well enough. Lady, common, people hate musk, they know he's shit to work for, what reaction were you expecting? Are you in that much of a musk cocoon?

The last thing I'll say is that the former Twitter head of trust and safety, who left Twitter in protest a few weeks after musk took over and then musk called him a pedophile and he ended up having to flee his home because of the death threats, was added on as a speaker at the "last minute", and X defenders are claiming Yaccarino was "sandbagged" with him speaking a few hours before her. The reporting so far is that that's bullshit, she knew a few days in advance and was even offered the opportunity to speak before him. And he's been publicly saying the same shit for months now, there weren't any bombshells she couldn't have prepared for. Tried and true strategy, if you bomb an interview just blame the "lamestream gotcha press."

Overall, Yaccarino ate shit for 45 minutes. It's an interesting case study in bad PR. Id recommend listening, but if your a person with any amount of empathy, make sure your emotionally ready to handle a whole lot of second hand embarrassment.

Edited to add Casey Newtons succinct summary: Yaccarino fended off most of Julia’s excellent questions with GPT-2-level responses, punctuating her answers with dutiful praise for Elon Musk and the “velocity of change” he brings to the company. I’m grateful Yaccarino took a turn in the hot seat, but in the end she had little to offer — just some numbers that will never be audited, and explanations that don’t add up.

Saved me a click, thanks!

Putting aside the merits of trying to trademark gpt, which like the examiner says is commonly used term for a specific type of AI (there are other open source "gpt" models that have nothing to do with OpenAI), I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate how incredibly bad OpenAI is at naming things. Google has Bard and now Gemini.Microsoft has copilot. Anthropic has Claude (which does sound like the name of an idiot, so not a great example). Voice assistants were Google Assistant, Alexa, seri, and Bixby.

Then openai is like ChatGPT. Rolls right off the tounge, so easy to remember, definitely feels like a personable assistant. And then they follow that up with custom "GPTs", which is not only an unfriendly name, but also confusing. If I try to use ChatGPT to help me make a GPT it gets confused and we end up in a "who's on first" style standoff. I've reported to just forcing ChatGPT to do a websearch for "custom GPT" so I don't have to explain the concept to it each time.

This has been Newsome's shtick for a minute. During his reelection campaign, he spent campaign funds advertising on Fox in Florida. He's been going to red states to give speeches. He gave an interview to Sean Hannity just a month or so ago. He's brandishing his reputation as a democratic fighter not afraid to go into hostile territory and news environments to stand up for liberal values.

DeSanits in particular has been a foil for Newsome since at least the coronavirus days when Florida was open and getting crushed under the delta wave. He regularly attacks DeSantis on abortion, book bans, teaching that slavery wasn't so bad, on and on. When DeSantis sent migrants on a plane to California, Newsome instantly reacted suggesting that DeSantis could be charged with kidnapping (this made his staff none to happy btw, Newsome can be like Trump in that he tweets out policy forcing his staff to react without notice).

Newsome is term limited, so he's done in 2026(?). He's been on the campaign trail trying to become Bidens number one bestest surrogate. He's building his brand for a presidential run in 2028. Also he just loves the spotlight. I doubt there is much logic to that beyond that.

And it doesn't matter what happens at the debate, so there's no real downside. Viral clips will be shared of good zingers each contestant got in, each side will talk about how their guy crushed the other guy. None of this will change anyone's mind. It's all just a show, and Newsome loves to be on stage.

To be clear how off the deepend they went, they released a poll after the election "proving" that Kari Lake won the AZ Governor's race by 8 points. The article implies the final stray was when they released a poll showing that 1 out of 12 Americans have been paid to vote in a certain way (or at least received an offer).

There's tons of legislation, proposed and enacted, aimed at lowering rent prices, primarily aimed at increasing supply. Things like prohibiting zoning restrictions that limit single family housing, providing incentives for infill developments and affordable housing bonuses, and allowing rent control ordinances.

The article doesn't say "there is only one bill related to housing this legislative session and it's for pets". Just because a bigger problem exists doesn't mean you have to ignore every other problem until the big one is fixed.

Landlords prohibiting pets is a housing issue because it effectively limits the housing that is available to people. I know when I was looking for an apartment because I had two cats that eliminated probably 50% of housing options I had. I don't know what this does to the market overall, but I'd bet it does something.

Per ownership is also an objectively positive thing, both for animals in shelters that need homes and for the mental health of people. Landlord restrictions functionally turn pet ownership into a privilege only available to the landed gentry. It's shitty.

So anyway, this bill addresses a problem and does some good. Just because it won't singlehandedly solve all the country's housing affordability problems in one swoop doesn't mean you have to dismiss it.

Before everyone gets ahead of themselves like in the last thread on this, this is not a Musk company. This is a separate startup based on the same (dumb) idea, that was later bought by Richard Branson's Virgin. It's IP is going to the Dubai company that is it's biggest investor, so I'm sure they'll actually build one with slave labor and all that.

This whole thing is unbelievably stupid. Past shutdowns were also stupid, but the Republicans shutting down the government had something they wanted (entitlement cuts, funding for the border wall, whatever). Here there is no unified demand, it's just a dozen or so Republicans who were elected to burn it all down keeping their campaign promises. So why not just ignore them? Because McCarthy will lose his speakership if he so much as thinks about a bipartisan compromise.

There's no game plan here, no options, no strategy. For the dozen holdouts, the plan is the government shuts down until Biden and Senate Dems cave and agree to slash government spending by 10%, fund the border wall, and give the middle finger to Ukraine. That's not happening, ever. And they know that, these aren't serious demands, this is just an attempt to burn it all down but disguised as a principled position on government spending. McCarthys dumb plan was to pass a super partisan continuing resolution to keep the government funded for a month, which the Senate strip it of all the conservative junk and send it back to the house, and then ??? What conservatives would accept that??? We'd be right back in the same situation we're in now. But the holdouts won't even agree to that dumb strategy.

There's a longshot where all Dems and a handful of Republicans could sign a motion to vacate forcing a clean CR onto the floor, but 1) procedurally that takes a full month to do, and 2) you need Republicans willing to sign on bucking both McCarthy and the base. Even if this scenario saves the day, the government will still shut down for a month or more, and again it's only a continuing resolution so we're back in this same clusterfuck in another 30 days after it passes.

The only realistic way out of this is McCarthy does the right thing, works with Democrats to find a bipartisan solution, and stops listening to the derangement caucus in his party. He'll probably lose the speakership, he'll probably lose it no matter what happens anyway so maybe just do the right thing?

As I'm sitting here today, it feels like we're in for a looong shutdown, not because Republicans are dug into a demand, but because they have no demands at all. You elect people to burn it all down, and that's exactly what they are going to do.

Some are, sure. But others have to do with the weight. The most interesting rationals for returning it are because it's shit as a productivity tool. So if you can't really use it for work, there aren't many games on it, then why are you keeping it? At that point it's just a TV that only you can watch (since it doesn't support multiple user profiles).

We had I think six eggs harvested and fertilized, of those I think two made it to blastocyst, meaning the cells doubled as they should by day five. The four that didn't double correctly were discarded. Did we commit 4 murders? Or does it not count if the embryo doesn't make it to blastocyst? We did genetic testing on the two that were fertilized, one is normal and the other came back with all manner of horrible deformities. We implanted the healthy one, and discarded the genetically abnormal one. I assume that was another murder. Should we have just stored it indefinitely? We would never use it, can't destroy it, so what do? What happens after we die?

I know the answer is probably it wasn't god's will for us to have kids, all IVF is evil, blah blah blah. It really freaks me out sometimes how much of the country is living in the 1600s.

If it makes you feel any better, as a fan of Knowledge Fight, I followed the Alex Jones Sandy Hook defamation trial in Texas pretty closely. Alex did his best to turn the trial into a circus, throwing out deep state conspiracies, complaining about the process and his first amendment rights on the stand, and otherwise showboating. The judge was on top of it and shut it all down, and a lot of that came back to bite him in the ass. It didn't help that Alex kept doing his show while the trial was ongoing and freshly defaimed the plaintiffs and alluded to the jury as being brainwashed liberals.

I'd imagine the same thing happens here. Whether trying to make a circus out of the proceedings helps Trump in the presidential race, I don't know. But it's not going to do him any favors with the judge and jury.

He raised over 7 million dollars from that mugshot in the 48 hours after it was released. Laugh all you want, but his cult was buying up "boohoo I'm so persecuted" merch by rascal load.

Crikey!

The army's chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, says Israeli troops found the hostages Friday and erroneously identified them as a threat. He said it was not clear if they had escaped their captors or been abandoned.

So, this wasn't an oopsie with crossfire. This was, IDF found three people and killed them. I think the implication is these three were alone and very likely unarmed. It's hard to imagine how they could have been perceived as a "threat" by troops. If the hostages has noticed the IDF troops at all, they were probably coming toward them with hands up to be rescued. And the IDF fired on them.

This just goes to show how indescriminate the IDF is. "Perceived as a threat" just means "perceived to be Palestine." There are no rules of engagement, just this time it bit the IDF in the ass.

The author of the article determined that these ads are coming from the trashy ad networks that brought you such classic clickbait ads as "Doctors hate this one weird trick" and "[Current President] has slashed auto insurance rates in [your state], here's how" that you see at the bottom of low quality news articles. So, it's not just that X has spam ads, but they aren't even directly selling them, which the article summarizes is a sign of desperation to get any ads, no matter how shit in quality, no matter how low paying to X they are, on the platform. At least the low tier news sites have the decency to identify them as ads and label the ad networks that is putting them up.

On the one hand, bombing a hospital is pretty brazen even for Israel, especially as your most important ally is en route for a visit, and the explanation of a Hamas rocket going astray does seem plausible. On the other hand, I'm not inclined to trust the word of a country that has proudly cut off food and water for 2.2 million people for over a week now. You don't get the benefit of the doubt when your actively committing war crimes. Also it may not have been intentional, a IDF pilot could have just missed a target or gone rogue. I'm sure no UN inspectors will ever be let in to examine the scene to make a determination, so we'll probably never know the truth. It probably doesn't matter much, the dead are dead either way, the grieving families will grieve either way, and all sides of the conflict will believe what they want to further their political ends, including Hezbollah using potentially using this as a justification for a broader conflict. It's just tragedy on top of tragedy.

Very interesting observation. Alternative theory: cat vs dog prevalence corresponds with users who live in rentals vs owned homes (homeowners or people living with their parents, etc). Cats are often the only animals allowed in rentals. It's often not until you buy your own home are you "allowed" to have dogs.

But I think this still follows from what you suggest. People living in rentals are often younger (and more attentive to tech and culture generally, so more likely to be early adopters) and/or often live in big cities which obviously have higher percentages of tech workers than rural areas. When you say reddit went mainstream, that could mean more older people joined (more likely to be homeowners) as well as their kids (living at home with the family dog).

In my very scientific survey of me, I rented for a long time and had cats, and loved cat posts. One day I got old and bought a house and a year later got a dog. Now I like dog posts more.

I'll go now, I've given this far too much thought.

When does place end?