vonbaronhans

@vonbaronhans@midwest.social
0 Post – 97 Comments
Joined 11 months ago

So, speaking from a purely pragmatic perspective, voting for Biden is better than other US electoral choices for the purpose of trying to help Palestinians.

I understand your reticence and moral indignation, I largely feel the same.

But the biggest reason Trump won in 2016 is because voters were not particularly enthused with their choices, and a great many decided not voting at all (or voting for Trump as a protest against the establishment) was preferable to voting for HRC.

I have to imagine that we both believe that Trump is worse than Biden when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Given that we're already in election year, it's down to Biden and Trump. One of them is going to be president come January next year.

Taking all that together, if we want things to get better for Palestine, we should vote for Biden because the alternatives are much worse.

Granted there is a lot you can do outside of elections to help, and I wouldn't recommend ignoring those. But given that voting for the US president takes a few hours out of one day every four years, it's not a good idea to ignore that either.

I hope this helps you understand those of us who don't really like Biden but will vote for him regardless.

Yeah it's not great, but like... coming across as coherent is important no matter the position. Biden kinda failed that basic competency test, probably just due to his age and not like, stupidity or a personal failing of any kind. I'm still voting for Biden, but yeah it's not exactly an enthusiastic vote.

It's entirely possible I'm only familiar with the far right, and not so much the average mainstream conservative. Which is a wild thing to think about my life, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

You have not been listening to conservatives, then. I grew up on a steady diet of Rush Limbaugh and later Fox News. "Activist liberal judges" has been a decades-long refrain on the right.

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He was kind of a wet paper sack sitting the primaries, if he'd come in with this energy he might've gotten somewhere.

Like most really early animated characters, Mickey Mouse was a lot of things over a long period of time. And as far as American animation goes, Mickey Mouse has been a staple for the childhood of literally every generation. Younger millennials and zoomers grew up on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Children in decades prior watched Mickey be a musketeer in one short and starving due to poverty in the next.

So while the rough edges of the character have been sanded down over time, he's still very much a plucky, brave, kind, and helpful protagonist in most of the media he's in.

Which to your average adult viewer means... he's a bland and uninteresting character.

That said, he's still an icon of animation as a whole, and most things with Mickey in them are doing some new and novel something (design, production pipeline, whatever) that pushes the whole industry forward in some way.

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Enshittification, also called chokepoint capitalism, is a term coined by Corey Doctorow (sp?) that lays out a common pattern with platforms in a capitalist system where:

  1. Platform builds a product to entice users to it for little to no cost to the user (Google search, Facebook, Amazon shopping, etc)
  2. Once users are locked in, make the experience worse in ways that increase profits for business partners (Google ads partners, etc)
  3. Once business partners are locked in, screw them over to rake back as many profits for the platform owner.

I think their point is that the pilgrims set the cultural precedents for what would later become America, to which later immigrants would be beholden.

I don't know how true that is, but I think "protestant work ethic" is at least one example of that sort of thing.

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Maybe it's just the circles I run in, but I understand "tankie" to mean leftists who think Soviet/Maoist/vanguard-party styles of Communist revolution/rule were good, actually, to the point of denying any bad things they did/do as "Western propaganda".

Given the red scare in the US, our ability as a whole to use any sort of leftist political labels accurately across the population is basically non-existent, so I do understand the frustration by both tankies and non-tankie leftists about how the term gets used lately, especially in produce circles on social media.

But again maybe that's just me. I don't know if I would consider myself a communist, but I do consider myself as a yet undetermined variety of socialist, if that helps at all.

I did not know this was a trans space, tbh. Thank you for entertaining us cishets!

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Just watched the new episodes that dropped recently. Cried several times. God, I've never had a show with such a deep emotional understanding and enduring compassion for both children and adults.

Bluey is a goddamn treasure.

I wish Democrats were willing to put in the same amount of endless, ceaseless planning and toiling and preparing so when an opportunity arises, you can snatch it up. Republicans did this with the Supreme Court, with religion in schools, etc etc etc. Last time Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency, we got barely anything (to my memory at least).

I wish Democrats had an ounce of Republicans' ability not just to shape narratives, but to conjure them from thin air and still dominate the news cycle.

I wish Democrats were as willing to bend to the extremists in their own party as the Republicans do. That's a real monkey's paw wish right there, but at the moment the extreme right is literal fascists and the extreme left just wants the cool quality of life stuff the Nordic countries already have.

Speaking personally... yeah we ARE divided here in the US. It kind of IS that bad. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in my mind the biggest thing is the legacy of slavery in this country. It's not a scar... it's still bleeding because bigots keep picking the scab. There's been so many knock on effects from it that have gone unexamined and unaddressed because there are enough bigots to be a stupid but effective voting block.

I thought the Dixie Chicks got in hot water for speaking out against GWB? Or is it some other artist/group that I'm thinking of?

I recently asked a "I'll never vote for Biden" person here on Lemmy why, what goal does that accomplish? And boy oh boy, their answers were flacid, goal-post-shifting non-sequiturs. I never replied but someone else took up the torch, and I've never seen a conversation more like 2015 gamergate anti-feminists. Just garbage after distraction after red herring.

For weed I think we'd be fine.

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That's what I was thinking. Wasn't that the point?

Unfortunately student loans are one of the few types of loans you cannot default on or get relief through bankruptcy. From what I understand, anyway.

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It doesn't, but that isn't their point. They're simply pointing out that existing net neutrality laws in the US usually only apply to ISPs and telcos, not internet businesses.

What does a protest non-vote accomplish? There's moral satisfaction, of course, but that doesn't stop the genocide. If the goal of the protest non-vote is to ensure Biden loses to teach the Dems a lesson, and it works, Trump becomes president. That's almost certainly just a continuation of the genocide PLUS all the harm Project 2025 promises to deliver. MAYBE the Dems put up a more progressive candidate next time, but surely we could try to get that power between election cycles?

I guess I just don't think protest non-votes will accomplish any of the goals of that protest, but they will allow Trump to live his best fascist dictator life.

I dunno, is there something I'm missing from your strategic calculus here?

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Yeah, but tax can always be figured into the presented price of things if businesses are required to do so.

That's pretty much the point of this type of legislation. Of course you need legislators who, y'know, vote to legislate in this way.

Once Firefox on mobile got extension support, I switched over immediately to use a decent adblocker. Made sure every app that opens a browser opens in Firefox. Has made my mobile browsing experience so much better, of my goodness.

To be fair, Tesla is the primary culprit of this. Waymo and other AV companies have just been slowly but steadily ramping up their testing and operating in relatively safe ways, and they are by and large doing pretty well from the coverage I've read. It's not happening as quickly as anybody hoped, but we're seeing steady improvements over time.

Tesla is just reckless, though, branding things in ways that make the whole AV endeavor look much worse than it deserves.

Ah, yes, a political party that spends millions and millions of dollars and countless labor hours running campaigns really wants to lose the election.

Biden et al may not do everything we want, but it's ignorant to suggest they aren't at least trying to change some things.

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That's bizarre. I am also on Windows 10 and use Firefox as my primary browser, largely because I can stream DRM'd video sites (Netflix etc) to my friends on discord.

Sounds dumb, but have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling? I might suggest also removing or disabling all extensions to see if that does anything.

I just paid the one time fee for no ads. Works for me.

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Does nobody else notice this is rage bait about videos that were posted 4 or 5 years ago?

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Any system of government will require some way to handle unlawful/harmful conduct, yeah. It's just a matter of making it not complete shit.

No idea if it would work in practice, but I once heard an idea where policing is a (mandatory?) duty for all citizens, but in regular rotation. Meaning, at any given time, some % of the population is now cops, and once your turn is up you're back to a regular person with no enforcement obligations or privileges. No idea if that would work in practice, but it would give people real consequences for being a shit cop. Nobody could just be a terrible cop in perpetuity.

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Uh. Pretty sure that student loan legislation far predates Biden's presidency. Unless you're referring to his time as senator and have a particular bill in mind?

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And it wasn't ever used in lieu of the employee receiving enough of an income at the company they worked at.

Unfortunately that is not true. Restaurants in most states in the US have a law that allows employers to pay tipped employees a much lower wage (about 2 bucks an hour) with the expectation that tips will bring them back up to minimum wage or higher.

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Like it or not, people are interested in celebrities. I wouldn't call that irrelevant in the attention economy.

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I blocked hexbear not because of their political beliefs, but because they would fucking ruin entire content sections by being super annoying.

I'm also glad to see your comment not triggering the same brigading behavior I used to see a lot more often.

While this is true, I'll add that a huge swathe of the same people are huge hypocrites. All it takes is one of their own children to be inconveniently pregnant, and then it's all "rules for thee but not for me".

I don't think it's possible to know the proportion of evangelicals who are hypocrites in this way with confidence, but if you look for examples you'll find plenty. The most recent one I saw was a BYU student who was paid 500 bucks to prank called his mother and say he got a prostitute pregnant (for the filmer's tiktok or whatever), and after a couple exasperated questions, the mother told him to make the fictional prostitute get an abortion.

I've also felt like YouTube Premium was a pretty good deal, given the sheer amount of YouTube content I consume and how much I detest ads.

That said, I also feel like most of what I really value from YouTube is on Nebula, to which I am also subscribed. I constantly wonder if it would be worth it to drop YouTube altogether, to save some money but also a huge amount of time.

The only other thing really keeping me on YouTube Premium is the included YouTube music. Not like Spotify is much cheaper, and I'm not much into manually managing libraries of my own music files like I did in the days of my 2nd Gen iPod (it had a touch wheel!).

Nissan cars bad? Is that a common US complaint? The others I hear all the time (as an American myself).

There have been plenty of phones and tablets with 3D camera systems. It's just not something that most consumers really want or need, so it tends not to become mainstream.

It still comes up every now and then. The iPhone 15 has a computational 3D camera thing it can do, but I've seen virtually no buzz about the feature.

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"what's the Judge Rotenburg Center?" looks it up "Jesus"

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At this point I'm not sure what's newest, since my kid just watches everything streaming.

I do have to say the newer 2D animated shorts, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, are a fantastic return to form.

Would that work in the case of photographers? I would only think to use Maps for business that are likely to have or must have by necessity some building or office.

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Yeah, go for it.

It's unfortunately still far more useful than other search engines, in my experience anyway. I haven't yet tried the paid search engine someone pointed out to me recently, Kagi, I think.

But given the cost of Kagi's tiers based on number of searches, it would have to be MUCH more useful to me than Google to really make it feel worth it.

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