shikitohno

I don't get how Republicans have any credibility amongst the electorate at this point. They demand blind obedience, or else cry foul, and somehow, a significant part of the population still supports this bullshit. Their eyes must be painted on, or else they're willfully ignorant.

Setting up a couple of spreadsheets at my job has basically been the entire grounds for me receiving bonuses last year, and it looks to be the same this year too. I don't even know that much, I just Google "excel xlookup" or whatever half the time, but people think it's black magic.

My main one last year turned a 30 minute daily task into something it do once a week in about 10 minutes on a busy week, and just print off the daily sheet each night to post. This year, I just added drop-down menus and some conditional checks to someone else's sheet.

I'm just amazed nobody else did this before, because I was sick of doing the old way everyday after my first week.

Things have gotten bitter, but you can't have bipartisan politics when the majority of Republicans don't engage with it in good faith. As recent years have shown, it's a concept Democrats insist on sticking to for optics that prevents them from delivering on major platform issues, which the GOP only pays lip service to in years where they don't have the votes to ram through their policies, regardless of what the opposition thinks of them. As long as the GOP continues with this attitude that lets them pack the Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary, while passing broadly unpopular laws and blocking policies that have majority support, insisting on bipartisanship is a losing play for Democrats. Leaving aside whether or not they would prefer to perpetually campaign on issues like reproductive right versus definitively solving the matter once and for all, it just feeds into the narrative that the Democrats are a bunch of incompetents who can't deliver on their promises, and even flub the ones they do make progress on by compromising their stances in the name of bipartisanship, sometimes before the Republicans even raise an initial objection.

Coupled with their abject failure at communicating their actual successes to the public at large, they're kind of self-sabotaging here. All they're accomplishing is further demoralizing their voters to maintain an image of respecting procedural norms in the face of an opposition who explicitly seeks to undermine and subvert those same norms. Who exactly is this supposed to excite?

Why on earth would I want to shop somewhere that I can guarantee will ship with FedEx? I'll actively avoid places that only offer FedEx shipping as it is.

He would leave NATO and risk the Pax Americana that has stabilized the world for almost 100 years now.

Stabilizing the world is just flat out wrong. At best, the US has stabilized itself and a select few allies. Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan most recently, along with a whole bunch of countries in Central and South America over the last 100 years would probably feel quite strongly that the US has been a disruptive force for them.

Could just be that you can only run so many campaigns in a row with "If you don't vote for us, it's going to be the end of the world as we know it. And at least I'm not as bad as the other guy." With the exception of Obama's first run against McCain, that's been the pitch for every single election I've ever been able to vote in, as well as a few before it. It gets old real quick, makes them come off as insincere, and doesn't motivate anyone when we're still largely dealing with the same BS issues that we were 20 years ago.

Trying to browbeat people into voting with the same old song and dance has diminishing returns, especially when your candidate is increasingly out of step with many of the voters they should be courting on major issues.

who is maybe the perfect reflection of what everyday conservatives have become, ignorant, stupid, and incredibly well off while whining about how they’re not well off enough.

I wouldn't say they're that representative of a lot of everyday conservatives. A lot of them are doing pretty poorly, but they're ignorant and get pissed off at the idea that anyone else might benefit from a program they personally don't qualify for or disagree with. My father is absolutely convinced that if the Democrats had the political will and ability to implement a wealth tax, that he would somehow be absolutely murdered by taxes on his $10 or $11 an hour he's making at a Winn Dixie in Florida. He's also the sort convinced that welfare queens living it up with brand new cars and designer clothes are not just a real thing, but a common thing that happens that Democrats just don't want people to know about. He'd probably also chalk up his retirement sucking due to what limited social safety net we have in the US, rather than him draining his retirement accounts while he was unemployed before hitting retirement age so he could play golf and go hang at the bar with his buddies even though he was broke. Medicare is his right, though, he worked for that and earned it, but screw these poors under 65 trying to get healthcare with Medicaid. About the only thing he's missing for your average, everyday conservative is an unhealthy dose of religion.

I mean, people generally do want to work, actors included. They just don't want to be mercilessly exploited while they're at it.

Maybe users wouldn't have felt the need for adblockers if ad agencies hadn't made them increasingly obnoxious, intrusive and pernicious. They just couldn't leave a fraction of a penny on the table and made sites more and more unusable without adblockers, so screw 'em. They can reap what they've sown.

I don't want to go back to a world without the internet or cell phones, but I would like expectations to change. Just because you can theoretically reach me at any time doesn't mean I'm obligated to respond to you or acknowledge you at any time. Whether it's work or personal acquaintances, I can't stand it when it's treated like a horribly rude thing to not immediately acknowledge and respond to any communication, no matter how trivial. A lot of times, I'm busy working on my own thing and don't want to kick off twenty minutes of back and forth texting over some trivial thing that's going to distract me from what I'm doing.

Yeah, for definitions of "hard left" that don't include a penchant for rugged individualism, a nearly pathological hatred of taxes and libertarianism, a lot of reddit is just liberal on social issues, at best. There is still a strong libertarian current of thought that is quite opposed to anything that could remotely be accused of being socialist and leans hard into tech utopianism saving us from the predictable outcomes of our current course of actions. There are also sizeable populist and conservative communities there. Sure, you have politically oriented subs that explicitly adopt leftist positions, but you could point to plenty on the right as well.

I guess just how for certain conservatives in the US, anyone to the left of Reagan is probably the love child of Stalin and Satan himself, it seems like calling any place that doesn't actively purge and issue an apology repudiating any leftist view that slips through is liable to be declared a haven of leftists.

This is great and all, but it doesn't mean too much if Biden doesn't actually care to correct course. There have been plenty of protests already showing the current policy is increasingly opposed by significant sections of the population, yet they're only making the most token efforts at any sort of real change in their stance towards Israel. If tens of thousands of people turning out for protests on the matter don't get it through the heads of Biden and other Democrats that this stance is untenable, I don't see why we should expect he'll suddenly start listening for a few staffers sending a stern letter.

In all likelihood, they'll hold the line on this, then when Democrats lose the next elections, they'll blame it on racists, antisemites, more leftist candidates spoiling their chances, or literally anything but doing some reflection and realizing some of their long-held positions are now deeply unpopular with a significant portion of their voter base.

Spanish gave us the word machismo, and it also conveniently has its opposite, hembrismo. So, yeah, I'd go with that, myself.

They are the biggest group, but it's a pretty diverse group with a wide range of beliefs. It covers the whole gamut from Evangelicals who declare anything that has ever made someone smile to be of the devil and the King James Bible to be the literal word of god to the hippy dippy churches that are cool with gay marriage and will say the whole bible is just metaphorical, so come play guitar with them at coffee hour before the church goes on a nature hike to do yoga and meditate on top of a local mountain. If you consider the denominations individually, Roman Catholicism is a larger denomination than the biggest Protestant denomination, at least according to Wikipedia.

Also worth considering how many people in all camps don't really practice their professed faith and just keep saying they identify as follower of whatever creed anyway.

Mental health care is also often just excluded from coverage. My current job is the first time in my life I've had insurance that would cover therapy rather than be like "Look, we gave you one 60 minute session with our free crisis line, what more do you want? If you really need it, it's only $450 a session if it's that important."

Sure, you can get a warm body in a seat, but that's not the same thing as being as effective at the job as the person they're replacing. Lots of companies are now reaping the harvest of treating their employees as disposable, interchangeable cogs. That mentality destroys moral amongst workers, and new employees can see that glazed over, dead-eyed look when they come onboard. Even for what's considered low-skill work, there is some value in institutional knowledge and general proficiency at a job that companies just completely disregard.

They're currently engaged in a race to the bottom of the barrel, asking themselves why employee engagement is down while they adjust their stance to really put some weight into the next kick in the ribs they give us peasants.

That avoiding systemd is even a choise is nuts

I really want to know what the crossover is on people who know what systemd is, much less have any actual reason to decide they wish to actively avoid it, and those who would find this the best way of determining their next distro. That has to be a vanishingly small group of people.

So does Qbittorrent, if you're unaware.

Do they not have phones or emails? Why do they specifically need to contact you via Facebook? The whole setup sounds rather intrusive and unnecessary, just tell them to call or email you.

A good chunk of restaurants will also suddenly close or have massive price hikes when they can't count on taking advantage of undocumented people and paying them sub-minimum wage off the books.

Could be for the sort of awful filters so frequently employed by schools that just block content based on matching a list of banned words exactly, like I used to have in high school years ago. We couldn't visit a page on breast cancer without an admin override while learning about cancer in the school library as part of an assignment, all because their awful content filter flagged the page as porn for having the word breast in the page.

Some people are just stupider than you would like to believe possible while still not forgetting to breathe. My father is one of the idiots that moans about "For English, press 1" or feeling slighted that people around him have private conversations in Spanish when he doesn't speak it. Out of all the states, where does this idiot move to for retirement? Florida, famously known for its lack of any Spanish-speaking population, of course.

Yeah, there are a lot of people in groups that one might think "Hey, you know the Republicans don't like you and want to make your life miserable, right?" but are socially conservative and are not willing to let that stuff go. There are lots of predominantly Black or Hispanic churches from the "Fun is a sin," denominations like the evangelicals, Pentecostals and Jehovah Witnesses whose members will not make any compromise on issues like abortion or gay rights. Even amongst the more secular people living in these communities can still be influenced by the folks that live around them. You also get a lot of people, especially older people, who are still on board with the law and order, tough on crime shtick, believing this is the sure way to get nice, safe communities to live in.

Religious, older and concerned with security doesn't sound all that different to the stereotypical white conservatives that serve as the base for the Republicans in rural areas. They just need a bit more of a nudge to get there because they have to overcome some resistance to voting for a party that explicitly targets things that are important to them in other areas.

If you assume they're all 13" wide laptops and stacked them on their side to get maximum height per unit, you'd still fall 305,752 km short of the average lunar distance. You normally only see this level of hyperbole in the estimated street value cops give for drugs they seize, pretty impressive.

I wouldn't reduce it to a binary. I think there's a pretty good chunk of the population who are anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, but aren't reachable as swing voters. They're to the left of the current Democratic Party and might vote begrudgingly for Biden, but wouldn't vote for Trump under any circumstances.

My hard drive on my laptop died in college and I needed to get a paper written in a few days. I didn't money to get a new Windows license and Fedora was free and had a live disc I could burn to install off of in the school's computer lab without getting in trouble. I distro hopped a bit since then, but never went back to Windows. Things worked and it wasn't as hard as people made it sound.

No evangelizing, I just use my computer.

You'll wind up dealing with a bleaker outlook on democracy one way or another. Just see how long the Democrats can cry wolf with "Oh no, the other guy is going to destroy our democracy, and I swear to god, guys, just vote for us one more time and we're totally going to fix it this time." You can only pull this bit so many times before people stop taking you seriously. At a certain point, you have to ask how stupid the DNC can be? This was a losing tactic with Hillary Clinton, it's not looking so great for Biden, but just keep rolling it out every few years, it's bound to start working sooner or later, right? Definitely sounds like a winning move to me. Heck, it's real convincing when that's what Biden ran on last time, and he's not exactly crushing it with his strategy of "I'll just go talk to these Republicans like I did 40 years ago, I'm sure we can reach an understanding like we used to, back when I still wholeheartedly helped pass laws that would lock up minorities."

I'm sure being able to say "I told you so" will make you feel much better if things don't pan out and it turns out you can't just nag and guilt trip people into voting for a candidate that holds views they can't stomach voting for.

You're probably selling yourself short on the tech front and over-estimating the difficulty of installing something new. If you wanted to install something like Linux Mint or Fedora, the most complicated step would likely involve making a bootable thumbdrive to load it from. You could check that all your hardware works as intended (ie, can you connect to wifi, does sound play properly, can you watch a video on youtube, etc) without actually modifying your base OS, and if it does, the installations mostly hold your hand and you can get a perfectly sane setup just sticking to the defaults for most things and clicking next. There are plenty of options out there where you don't need to be a command-line wizard to have a perfectly usable system.

If you can read instructions, it's not that hard to set these things up. It's just a matter of what you value more. You can spend less than a day setting up the needed *arr software and Plex/Emby/Jellyfin/whatever and have things as you want it, or you can periodically spend time looking for new streaming sites when the one you settled in on finally gets shut down, and meanwhile, you're at the mercy of the site for what's uploaded and in what quality.

If you have it locally hosted, you also don't lose your ability to watch any of the movies you wanted to every time the internet goes out, unlike streaming sites.

My sense of taste kind of came back, but severely muted for some things. Coffee never quite got back to the same level of flavor, for example. I've also noticed my ability to taste salt is pretty shot. I can, but I have to add stupid amounts of the stuff. For an example, I had to do a clear liquid diet about a week ago prior to a medical procedure, and drinking some broth with 748mg of sodium per serving just tasted like drinking greasy water to me.

In terms of long term effects, it's a bit harder to say. I got covid for the first time in August 2020 (yay for being an essential peasant!), and I was out of work until May 2021. I had to do months of PT because of what my primary doctor called a post-viral fatigue syndrome. At its worst, if I tried to walk more than a block away from my apartment and back, I would wake up the next day feeling sore from my neck down to my toes. I remember a day where I slept for 12 hours, woke up and made and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and just doing that left me so tired I went back to sleep for another 6 hours or so.

Other stuff is less clear. It certainly started manifesting and presenting symptoms after I had COVID, but correlation and causation being what it is, it's hard to definitively say what might have just been low-level and not bothering me that much before and what could have been kicked off by COVID. I developed photophobia, Hashimoto's thyroiditis and some nerve damage after being ill for the first time, which are all fun.

I guess the photophobia is the easiest to manage, I just need to wear heavily tinted glasses at all times, as I get these awful migraines if I don't. Uncovered light bulbs, TVs, monitors, whatever can set them off. The thyroid condition I get to take a synthetic hormone basically for the rest of my life and get blood work done 4 times a year to see how it's working. The nerve damage I get to take another medication pretty much for forever as well, thanks to US insurance. Instead of a daily pill, my neurologist could give me an occipital nerve block every 3-4 months, but insurance doesn't want to pay for them unless it's done at a pain management clinic. For reasons I can't work out, every pain management clinic I looked at with my referral seemed to be out of network for everyone, so it'd run me like $700 for the initial visit and $400 every 3-4 months after that. I guess they know they've got you if the pain is bad enough? Anyway, my prescription has been working so far and it's the only thing I don't even need to pay for before hitting my deductible, so I have that going for me.

How has moving more to the right been working for them? They need to realize already that they're out of touch with much of their voter base. Maybe they don't run more progressive candidates in purple states as a strategic call, but they could try something new in more liberal cities, at least, and start moving the conversation. I can't be the only one where my primary options straight up suck. Oh, yeah, change things from within, where I have Corporate Democrats #1 and #2, running along with the Working Families Party candidate whose only concession is something weak like "Maybe we should increase EBT eligibility, but means test the hell out of it so it's a full time job to manage your application."

The current Democratic party basically claims to represent everyone to the left of Mussolini at this point, and that's too big a group to be a functional political unit. Unfortunately, we're basically screwed on a third party being viable, as it would depend on the two current parties taking action to change voting procedures in a way that could only hurt them. Democrats and Republicans are both content to sit on their hands right now, as they know that no matter how unpopular they may be, how badly they might lose elections, it's only a matter of time before the other guys piss people off enough and the pendulum swings back to them.

I would just say that not everything needs to be a BIFL product, but there can be a tendency to push towards recommending only buying the best of everything. Like, I cook a lot at home, so it made sense to buy a $200 chef's knife that I'll get tons of use from and decent sharpening stones to maintain the edge. I listen to a ton of music, so I've dropped probably around $1500 into a pretty good pair of headphones, a DAC and an amp. On the other hand, I solder like once every couple of years, so getting my cheapo $40 Amazon special made more sense than dropping $500 on a much better soldering iron that offers features I simply don't need and won't benefit from. Sometimes good enough is exactly that, but it can be a nuance lost in these discussions.

Heck, even though I use them several hours a day, my hearing just isn't that good for me to justify spending a substantial amount upgrading my current audio gear. Even if there is an improvement to be had, I'm not sure it would be something I could even notice, so I'm not tempted to go down the rabbit-hole of upgrading my DAC, amp or headphones, as it would be chasing diminishing returns that I'm not even sure would be perceptible for me at a simple biological level.

If you could offer enough money, you could probably get him to show up to hear cases dressed liked Judge Dredd.

I'm rather curious how you relativise a lot of the US' recent history. Sure, Iraq and Afghanistan weren't pillars of stability, but I think the balance comes down pretty hard against the US with Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations as well. Our continued support of Israel and Saudi Arabia isn't looking so hot either.

Then we've got military intervention in the Dominican Republic and support of Trujillo until he stopped being useful, installing the Pinochet regime after helping topple the government of Salvador Allende, support for the military dictatorship in Brazil, as well as backing dictatorships in Argentina.

Our colonization of the Philippines was pretty awful, as is our continued treatment of Puerto Rico as essentially a vacation spot and Caribbean ghetto.

You get the idea. Seriously, I'm hard pressed to think of an instance in the last century where the US has intervened on the international stage and actually has a credible claim to having done good with the exception of World War II.

The government has created and fought for stability for a small subset of monied interests and has largely left the rest of us to jump for whatever table scraps they deign to let fall to us plebs. As @Nokinori mentions, even domestically, things are increasingly coming undone at the seams and looking ready to get worse.

I haven't really tested the limits on it, but so far at least one therapy session a week. Haven't needed any inpatient care or anything beyond this, thus far, so I can't comment on that.

It moves the discussion further to the right and legitimizes Republican talking points for the majority of people who will only hear a brief soundbite about this, rather than diving deep into the matter.

Besides, the GOP isn't about to run out of bogeymen to trot out just because they could get what they want on the border. They can take it as a compromise and try to push things further down the line. Or they can decide this is good enough for now, and start railing against something else. Union membership rising being a Chinese plot to infiltrate the US and install a Communist dictatorship, so we better write some new laws to enable even more union busting. Free school lunches for kids from poor families turning them gay AND communist by getting them hooked on the government teat early. Woke public libraries turning kids trans by letting them check out books that don't universally demonize it, so better put some sort of draconian funding limits on them. They'll find something else, don't worry.

The way you're framing it and Congressional Democrats approach these things only work if the Republicans aren't completely shameless, above doing things that should completely destroy any remaining vestiges for their voters, but this has been disproven time and time again by the actions of the GOP. If they think they'll have half a chance, they'll wring out even more concessions on this front from the Democrats by pretending to offer something they immediately renege on, just to leave the Democrats going "Aw, shucks, fooled me again. I thought you said you weren't going to do this again."

Damn, I was coming here to say this. All I can add is that maybe sleep on your stomach with one of these, otherwise it could wake her up vibrating the mattress, since she sounds like a light sleeper.

I've had bad experiences with all of them, it's just the most consistent with FedEx. Out of the major services, I prefer USPS and DHL, by far, but even they still fumble things from time to time. FedEx has just been a consistent pain to deal with, across 3 addresses at this point. Plus, I happen to get off work and get home right around when FedEx comes through my neighborhood, so I've had the pleasure of seeing the lady that handles this area literally hurl every package small enough for her to be physically capable of doing so the 8 feet from the sidewalk to peoples' front porches. I buy a lot of small, delicate things. Do other couriers toss stuff around? Probably at some point. But I know it's a 100% guarantee it'll happen with this lady, so I'll take the "probably, at some point," over a sure thing.

If they don't deliver something to me and determine I need to go pick it up, their delivery hubs are also the least convenient to reach. One is across my county, the other halfway across the neighboring county, Both are at least 90 minute trips each way on public transportation, with a healthy walk between the last stop and their location. At least UPS drops things off a 15 minute walk away, and the post office is probably a 10 minute walk.

Then they have a shocked Pikachu face when the people they left to stagnate and rot, turn out to be the shitty products of their environment aka the neoliberal hellscape of modern day America.

I mean, the Democrats didn't really leave these people to rot, they've largely been prevented from doing anything to help them since rural areas vote so overwhelmingly Republican. What do you really expect the Democrats to have done when it's the other party these folks keep electing to represent them? They effectively say they want the policies that have left them so exposed and disadvantage, then they have a shocked Pikachu face that "those darn liberals haven't done anything to help us." Heck, even in broad terms, their voting habits have screwed all of us by preventing broadly popular things like universal health care or drug reform from going forward because of the disproportionate power the self-destructive votes they cast wield at the national level. My sympathy for them is extremely limited, and my patience at their insistence in making everyone else suffer for their god-awful politics has long since run out.

Ah, yes, the prospect of another war with US troops going to a country most Americans couldn't find without google maps is sure to go over well with people.