shikitohno

When it comes to the Democrats and* the left* — from the Biden campaign on down to the activists

What's with calling out the left on this, when the closest they get to a leftist organization they take issue with is a climate advocacy group. The left has been pretty clear that Biden is not the man for the moment since the go, and for our troubles, we've been called everything from stupid and naïve, to privileged white people who don't care about insert minority group here (and ignore that not all leftists are rich, white people, there are plenty of POC active in leftist politics, though critics, often privileged white people themselves, do love to erase their existence in the same breath they claim to be looking out for them), to either useful idiots or fully cognizant agitators working on behalf of enemy states. Centrist Democrats and liberals have been the ones trying to tell anyone who will listen that the same old play will not just be good enough, but is actually our only option to win, and they're trying to leave the left to take the fall for their mistake, yet again.

Some of it is political calculation. If the president steps aside, the logical candidate is Vice-President Kamala Harris, but Harris has struggled in office and her poor poll ratings mirror those of Biden. If the Democratic Party tries to sideline Harris and open the door to other candidates through an open convention, they risk alienating her and her supporters and opening up further wounds in the Democratic coalition.

What, risk all four of her supporters? Oh, darn, there go the chances of winning ever again.

Democrats are not going to win with a staid campaign by the usual corporate boot-licking line of candidates they've relied on up until now. The sooner they accept that and get behind a candidate who is pushing for systemic changes on issues that actually resonate with your average Americans and the problems they face in their daily lives, as opposed what matters only to their donors, the better for them this time around. Heck, if they actually follow through and make some of those changes, even better.

There's a lot of racists out there. I feel like if she's at the top of the ticket, she's gonna get dragged down.

This is just preemptive cope to avoid having to reflect on whether the Democratic leadership and its preferred candidates are actually the thing that needs change, and she's not even an actual candidate yet. Kamala's biggest problem is not that she isn't white. Obama was a Black man, but he had heaps of charisma. Kamala has all the charisma of a plate of lutefisk,and people flat out do not like her. She is also irrevocably tied to Biden and his legacy, likely to her detriment amongst the crowds you would most worry about not voting for her because of her not being white.

If you read the article, it's defined purely in terms of income:

The poll, commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition, found that around 65 percent of Americans who are considered “middle class,” earning above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), are in a financial struggle.

In a way, it kind of proves the point that we need to reevaluate what the actual cost of living is in the modern age. For a family of 4 to be considered middle class by this metric, they would have an income of $62,400/year or higher. For a single individual, it's just $30,120/year. I don't know anywhere in the US where making $15 an hour means you're in the middle class, yet the federal government wants to keep acting like it's the 1980s and you can live it up to an extent on such a meager income.

That being said, financial struggle doesn't necessarily mean they're one step away from being destitute. It could just be a struggle to maintain their current standard of life, where is used to be taken as a given that this would improve over time.

Yeah, talking about jobs being created without any context on the types of jobs being created is meaningless. Great, there are now more part-time jobs paying minimum wage with no benefits and erratic schedules near me, just the sort of job creation I was waiting for so I could regress in my career.

In my experience, it's not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.

I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there's any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says "The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it." and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us "I'm too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you're still young." She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I've seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No "Hey, let's just see what it says," just straight to deciding it's impossible, so they don't even bother to check what's going on.

Honestly, cover letters are something that needs to die out for most jobs, they're entirely pointless. 99% of the time, it just seems like they want you to rehash the contents of your resume and grovel a bit for the company. Screw that.

You want someone with 5 years experience in a role, my resume shows I have ten years doing that job, make your call if it's good enough to interview me or not. I'm not writing an essay about how excited I am for the opportunity to count widgets at your company, and how it's always been a dream of mine to work inventory control for a company that changes the world by ensuring stock buybacks can regularly happen by overworking and underpaying their staff.

Biggest waste of time I see recommended for applications. I don't apply to any job that requires them.

I'm sure it won't happen, but there's a part of me that would just love to hear that when the negotiations get to Idaho, Idaho is just like "Nah, hard pass, we don't want you either."

And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.

It's probably more a case of artists acknowledging the fact that streaming services are one of, if not the, primary sources of music discovery and consumption for many these days. Even if they won't make money off it, by not being available on these platforms, they may as well not exist for most people. That's something that only huge, already established names can pull without feeling it.

I hope they come through for him, because the video of a bunch of his fans being arrested and him hauled out would probably be hilarious.

People are wild these days. My wife and sister have both, working in different industries and companies, come home and informed me they were freaked out and a bit repulsed to discover coworkers in the bathroom, audibly having a bowel movement of some sort, with an iPhone on the floor of the stall facetiming their partners. These were both work places that skewed younger, but people have just been going feral. My last job, I walked into the bathroom and heard what I assumed was the Smack, smack, smack of somebody jerking off, only to find out it was a guy near his 60s doing clap push-ups in front of the urinals.

I can't understand why anyone would expect most people to want to have kids. I can hardly afford to take care of myself, things look like they're only likely to get worse, and all indicators are that if I did have kids, they would be facing an even worse future when they hit adulthood. Why would I do that to them?

I think at this point, all of us poors are just crossing our collective fingers and hoping the rent doesn't go up, we don't lose our jobs and we don't have to move for any reason. I'm hoping my landlord turns out to be immortal right now. "Affordable" units in the hood here are going for $3,000+, and you need to make less than the equivalent of minimum wage at a full-time job each to qualify for them. We stumbled our way into a three-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood for $2,200/month, and he hasn't raised the rent at all. The people who lived downstairs before said he charged them the same rent for close to 10 years before they moved out, so hopefully that streak will continue. Just have to worry that he'll die and whoever inherits the house comes in and jacks up the rent once they can, in which case we'd definitely need to move pretty far away to be able to afford something.

GM, who just announced a $6 billion stock buy back once they knew tariffs would keep them safe from having to compete with Chinese EVs, that GM?

This sort of stuff is realistically why I have no sympathy for the major US automotive manufacturers. The only reason I don't just say "Screw them, let Chinese EVs drive them out of business," is because it would put so many people out of work in their plants who have no role in these decisions. Barring some fantasy where the Chinese companies establish US plants and offer equivalent or better union contracts for current employees at GM, Ford and Chrysler, these companies should simply be bound hand and foot in terms and conditions whenever something is done by the government to help them. Like, make those protectionist tariffs conditional on them hitting investment targets in relevant technologies, raising worker pay and benefits, reducing cost to the customer and a ban on stock buybacks for the duration of the tariffs being valid.

I don't know about Turkey, but US politicians mostly care about Israel because AIPAC pumps a ton of money into US politics, both in the form of funneling it to pro-Israel candidates, and ads and campaign funding against those who don't bow down to swear fealty to Israel.

To a lesser extent, you also have a large chunk of fundamentalist Christians in the us who will support Israel no matter what because they believe Israel needs to exist as a nation with its full, Biblical territory, in order for Armageddon and the return of Jesus to occur. Just yet another way conservative Christians are trying to wreck the US for their insane beliefs.

When you think he might finally be correcting course, he just immediately goes and undoes it.

I feel as though I missed the heyday of youtube, and only really started using it within the last few years, so perhaps my perspective is a bit skewed, but I don't really get the point of a lot of content on there. A lot of the content I consume could easily be replicated elsewhere, or in a different format. A good deal of tech content I consume would be improved, in my view, if it were just a website with an associated discussion forum for clarifying or expanding upon any points people don't fully get. Plenty of food channels would be better if they were just a cookbook, because they waste so much time on stuff nobody cares about in order to hit a magic length for the algorithm. Most of the long form stuff I come across could just be podcasts without losing anything of value for me.

I'm entirely willing to say this may well be my "old man yells at clouds" moment, but I just don't get the majority of youtube content. The appeal of things like Lets Plays (outside of seeing exactly how to beat a spot you're stuck on) and Vtubers is completely alien to me. I do enjoy travel content, but I find a lot of the stuff uploaded by independent youtube creators to be pretty exploitative and don't enjoy watching it. I don't think BBC or Arte or the like willl disappear with youtube. I doubt I'll miss it very much when it eventually gets killed and Google launches a worse video site one of these days.

The exam software my uni uses for instance only runs on Windows & MacOS.

I would say this segment of @Iceblade02's post would be the issue, in that people are locked into these systems even if they prefer to use open source software. For example, my university based in the UK requires I submit my assignments in an MS Word format that supports Microsoft's annotations for the tutor to do all marking up and correcting/commenting on the paper there. There are ways to do the same thing with PDFs, but at least on my modules so far, it hasn't been an option at all. That's just for papers and such.

When it comes to exams where you're supposed to be answering the questions and submitting them as you go, there are schools that insist on you installing monitoring software so they can make sure you aren't cheating, which only tends to be available for Windows and Mac. I don't know how common that sort of software is outside the US, but it's certainly a thing.

The color? No, I'm pretty sure it's a Henna-based dye.

Well, if it isn't the chicken of the sea, back again.

True, but you also need to get enough people with the right skills/knowledge who want to live in West Virginia or Oklahoma when those same skills and knowledge likely make them highly employable in markets with more amenities and greater job opportunities without needing to uproot their life and move to a new town/city when the time comes to get a job with a new company.

It also makes it harder for employees to do things that would give them a chance at getting a better job. Can't go to college anywhere that requires attendance as part of the grade if you're on a shift like that. Also can't get another job that might turn into a better opportunity, they won't deal with your constantly changing availability.

I don't think the issue is describing the gap, rather that "unskilled labor" has long been used with the implication that, since it doesn't require extensive training or education to perform at a satisfactory level, the people doing this work are unworthy of receiving decent working conditions or compensation.

There's also a tendency to negate the contribution of so-called unskilled workers to enabling more prestigious professions to exist. That a surgeon could learn how to do the janitor's job to a satisfactory level doesn't change the fact that without agricultural laborers breaking their backs to grow the food they eat, construction workers paving roads or laying out transportation infrastructure they use to get around, or the janitor keeping the hospital from becoming a filthy health hazard, the surgeon could not do their jobs. This atomized view of labor ignores the reality of interdependence between countless jobs to allow society to continue functioning as it does, obfuscating the indispensability of low prestige jobs in order to allow other individuals the time and resources needed to be able to train for and perform higher prestige jobs without having to spend an inordinate amount of their time attending to more fundamental needs like food and shelter.

In no society do you see surgeons, computer programmers, or engineers emerge and begin carrying out their functions without a far greater number of people first doing the heavy lifting of performing these less prestigious jobs. They are fundamental to our society, yet the label unskilled labor is used to minimize this so that people are more liable to tolerate the abuse and degrading conditions those who work these jobs are subjected to.

abandoning Israel would be a disaster for everyone.

How would this be a disaster for anyone but Israel? Worst case scenario, it's a disaster for Zionists, the US military industrial complex profitting off them, and whatever portion of Israel's population opposes Israel's apartheid ethno-state, and I've only got sympathy for the last of them. At worst, it's an inconvenience for the US with Iran. Other than that, let Israel get rocked by sanctions and smacked around by their neighbors they've been antagonizing for decades with US support. Let Israelis go be refugees if necessary and there's an actual threat of loss of life. Otherwise, whoop dee doo, cutting off Israel means they get what they're due for. Israel is not some essential nation that the world would fall apart should it cease to exist in its current form.

And if the demands of the protesters are unrealistic or out of the hands of the institution, then there is no other real recourse but a police response.

Generally speaking, the demands have been neither of these things, though. The media framing them in ridiculous terms like "Israeli-Hamas war protests" certainly doesn't help anyone who is unaware to realize what the demands have been. They aren't demanding the universities end the war somehow, but asking them to stop actively funding, assisting and profiting from the Israeli government and its policies, which is a pretty fair ask to make of most schools. Stop investing in Israeli companies and stop working with Israeli groups that contribute to the military, police and prisons. It's not that hard.

Aside from the completely disproportionate police response, schools like Columbia don't really help themselves with how they want to glorify their history of student activism to draw in new students, but turn their backs on those principles once the students are protesting in favor of causes that the school administration decide are the wrong causes.

I would go as far as to say this is a failure of the schools that the protests lasted as long as they did, not because of any particular fault of the protesters, but because the schools had largely made up their minds from the very start that they wouldn't engage in good faith with the protesters due to financial and political interests. Even for the ones who have stated they'll have talks are viewed as just stalling for time with it in the article.

Pretty sure you need to file them so long as you remain a citizen in any circumstances you would need to file them while in the US, you just don't have to pay US taxes on income you've already paid taxes on in your country of residence, up to something like $100,000/year for a single individual.

I don't know if they resolved it, but I also recall it became more of a pain to open a foreign bank account as a US citizen, because they US government was trying to impose reporting requirements on any bank that had accounts held by US citizens, regardless of where they were.

This presumes one has these options available. Yeah, there are local delis in the neighborhood, but they're slicing Boarshead, not their own cured meats. A bakery that actually bakes their own bread is a 90 minute round trip, while the local farmer's market is over an hour each way, one day a week to get eggs if you happen to be off that day. Also, closing that list out with Coke? I remember when I worked at a grocery store in high school, a 2L bottle was routinely on sale for less than a dollar. The same bottle is over $3 now.

US pulling out of Israel would be the most chaos inducing event in world history.

This is pure hyperbole. The most chaos you could get from this would be from Israel lobbing a nuke before getting taken out, which they already essentially threaten as it stands.

And what US rival is Israel going to find to replace it that has both the desire and means to do so? China and Russia don't stand to benefit from that, even if they wanted to pump billions of dollars into Israel a year. They already have influence in the region with other powers the US is hostile to, like Iran. Israel is increasingly internationally discredited, so it's not as though they're going to get a great diplomatic boost. They already have nuclear weapons of their own and pretty developed intelligence apparatuses. What would be the point of taking on such a massive liability?

And let's not forget that the region is in turmoil to begin with in large part because the US keeps intervening in it, as well as supporting Israel and other shitty governments in the region that are favorable to the US in some way. Israel itself destabilizes the region.

Are the antisemitic protests in the room with us Joe? Can you point to one of them for us?

Just more finger pointing without substance to try to discredit protests. Yesterday's CNN article specifically about antisemitism at Columbia protests didn't provide any more specifics than one Jewish student saying how scared he was because someone confronted him. Doesn't say about what or offer any specifics of the confrontation, just that he was scared.

Blanket accusations of antisemitism continue to undermine efforts to call out legitimate antisemitism, which is still a problem.

I don't care so much when I'm just listening to people talk, but there's something about seeing people use needs washed constructs in otherwise normally composed and edited messages that drives me absolutely mad, for some reason. Stuff like "I need paid more to afford to live there." I first started seeing it on reddit a few years ago, but it seems as though I'm seeing it more and more now, all over the place. It's not something that is used anywhere I've lived, and it's just jarring to see sentences constantly missing a couple of words. I suppose I expect more variance in spoken language, especially in less formal contexts, but seeing it written is something else.

We understand how it works perfectly fine, thanks. The Democrats just can't seem to get that if you constantly run on nothing but "Hey, the other guy is worse," while supporting unconscionable policies, failing to deliver on popular policies and being yet another in a long line of disappointments for significant parts of the population, eventually people will say "You know what? If you want to lose this bad, fine."

The Democrats will never actually change and improve if they keep managing to squeak by with more of the same. Unless they genuinely fear losing an election and take action to address it, we're going to be in the exact same position in another four years, complete with liberals screeching at everyone who doesn't fall in line, "Don't you understand, this is the end of democracy! The other guy will be so bad, and we promise not to suck this time, scout's honor."

Aluminium at least makes sense by analogy to other elements ending in -ium, like helium, sodium, potassium, cadmium, beryllium, etc.

And people are gaslighting themselves happily to suck up to the Dems instead of saying: “We will vote for you, but only, when you end this genocide and bring justice and peace to the people.”

Not just that, but they're twisting themselves into knots to try and convince people that unconditionally supporting Biden is the better option than continuing to pressure him to stop this and calling out his terrible stance here. Sure, everyone can vote as they please come election day, but we're a touch under 6 months out and people are all over this site browbeating anyone who doesn't toe the line and going "Don't you dare criticize our savior, Biden! If you say he needs to stop enabling Israel's genocide, you're just a Russian disinformation agent trying to keep people from voting so that fascists take over and murder all the minorities in the US. They'll probably double murder Palestinians, even!"

Sure, but the barrier to entry is significant enough to still deter most people. Even assuming they aren't bothering with port forwarding and seeding, most people seem like they can't be bothered with any pattern of consumption more complicated than finding content on major streaming platforms, and the music streaming services haven't yet gotten annoying enough for most people. They'll take a peek, go "Do I want FLAC, V0 or 320? WTF is an APE?" and bail again.

We can disagree as to whether it should be that way or not, but I'd wager that the reach of streaming services for a new band far exceeds that of uploading a torrent to a random tracker and hoping it takes off. Unless people already know of you to look for your music, you need to hope a huge number of them are just auto-snatching anything new. On private trackers, sure, you'll get a bunch of people who auto-snatch any FLAC upload from the current year, but you're talking about <50,000 users in those cases, and a good chunk of the auto-snatchers are just people looking to build buffer who won't even listen to most of what they snatch. On the other hand, nobody is auto-snatching all the torrents going up on public trackers, they'd run out of space in no time at all.

I don't know if there's a single reason, but I would suspect a large part of it is that the alternative is giving in and conceding on pretty much everything. Sure, there's a possibility that if they suddenly started voting for Democrats, they might see some more funding sent their way, more programs to help them get by, or possibly even create jobs. It doesn't seem too likely they'll be the same old jobs that used to sustain those rural towns, though. They also won't be able to dominate the discourse of the party with a worldview built around Evangelical Christianity. That's going to mean just flat out giving up on a lot of the culture war battles they're fighting via the GOP at the moment. I don't see them getting the Democrats to walk back support for gay rights, for example. A lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric basically just has to die off, or else urban Democratic voters will not support them.

For me, the real question is why they think they should be able to hold the vast majority of the population to their decidedly minority views? I'm sympathetic to wanting to be able to live the way you and your family have for generations, but there's no bringing that back at this point, so they need to try something new.

Sure would have been nice if Democrats did anything about the filibuster and passing legislation to codify abortion rights when they had majorities at the start of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, rather than just campaigning on the possibility of Republicans ramming through their anti-reproductive healthcare stances when they couldn't, and wringing their hands about bipartisanship when they did have chances, wouldn't it? Same sort of posturing and preening that we get on so many topics this election cycle that, even if Democrats get an overwhelming mandate in, they will proceed to do absolutely nothing to actually implement a permanent solution to so in 2028 they can cry wolf again. Remind me how the story of the little boy crying wolf ended, could you?

Especially if you aren't financially that well off or on a good career track, I think it's really appealing just for the stability it affords. My current landlord has been a pretty good guy for us, but if I owned my apartment rather than renting, I wouldn't have to worry that I'll suddenly need to pay a ton more money if he dies and his kids decide to jack up the rent, or worse, having to uproot my life entirely and move out because of someone else's whims.

My previous insurance just wouldn't cover any long-term prescriptions if I didn't fill it through Caremark on a 90-day supply. It was so annoying to deal with them. My regular pharmacy is two blocks away, if there's an issue with insurance or something, they give me a call and have generally been pro-active. Caremark would just sit on their hands until I realized it was weird I hadn't gotten a shipping notification, only to go "Oh, yeah, when we got this prescription we specifically requested you send through us, we decided there wasn't enough info to determine if you need it, so you need to call your doctor and tell them to call us."

Which Iranian attack is this that's supposed to have started a war to drag in the US? Their most recent attack on Israeli targets was in response to Israel attacking them in a third country, and Israel has been trying to provoke them into a response that would kick off a war the US would get involved with to draw attention from their ongoing genocide in Gaza.

You'll only get more comfortable with Linux once you get on it .

Keep a special lookout for pear- or almond-like scents, which can be evidence of cyanide.

Maybe get a few other people to smell it, for this one, bonus points if they're entirely unrelated to you. Not everyone can smell it, and there may be a genetic component to it.