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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Jesus, technical people are some of the worst communicators I’ve ever worked with.

    It’s not necessarily their fault though. Y’know who goes into technical jobs? People who often prefer to work with machines, physical stuff, laws of nature, that’s who. And often because it’s MUCH easier than working with people, at least for them.

    On top of that, soft skills are HARD. Communication is HARD. It comes easier for some, but it’s a skill like any other. It’s the technical socialites, the diplomatic devs who become the best managers and leaders, due to the rarity of their hybrid skillsets.

    I’m in the middle. Just technical enough to mostly understand the devs and understand the implications of plans, and just enough soft skills to turn that into decent documentation, emails, and working with clients.

    SUCKS that I’ve gotten a taste of project management and hated the absolute fuck out of it. I probably would’ve been decent at it otherwise.


  • It does make a little sense, when you consider that one of the goals is to demotivate fascists from voting at all.

    Straight facts don’t dissuade fascists. They have every argument and deflection in their back pocket ready to go. Trump is a rapist/racist/traitor? Fake news, fake news, fake news.

    But… Trump is weird? That hits them right in the ego. They’re not a principled policy-based voting base, it’s a cult of personality. Even if they want to say he’s NOT weird, it’s not a fact, it’s an opinion. So all it takes is showing a bunch of really strange gaffes, irrelevant rants, and incoherent ramblings, and you just might get would-be Trump voters to feel too embarrassed to vote for him.

    It’s a long shot, but based on what I’ve been seeing, it appears to be effective so far. We’ll have to wait and see.


  • I was a child with an NES and virtually every Nintendo machine thereafter. Parents said my first language was Nintendo.

    I still played outside all the time. I regularly rode my bike all over town. I didn’t have to be threatened to play outside. I dunno, people and situations are different, I guess.

    That said, it’s certainly harder for kids now. I have a hard time imagining letting my kid ride a bike all over town, mostly because of traffic and stupid drivers. The free public places I used to hang out with my friends are largely gone now. Plus, like you say, the games are now designed to be addicting specifically in the ways that regularly extract more money from players. It’s just kinda bad if you’re not versed enough in the gaming ecosystem to know what’s a worthwhile experience and what’s a cash grab.





  • The only outcome that might suck even more is if Biden did step down, Kamala steps up, and she still loses. Cuz then it’s like… oh so we’re just gonna be misogynistic as a voter base now, great, thanks fellow Americans. Like, we were ready to vote for a shambling shell of an old man but not a lady with Hillary Clinton energy, okay. 🤦


  • Well, in the current economy, the statistical indicators that economists rely on are booming. GDP, etc. What folks on the left like us are saying is that those indicators are easily measurable but do not paint an accurate picture of what most Americans are experiencing. It doesn’t feel like a boom out here because, well, it ain’t.

    It’s not like we’re sipping champagne, kicking it at the beach, and complaining that the guy next door has a nicer beach. We work just as hard as other generations and get a lot less to show for it.

    Acknowledging that is important, but corporate politicians in either party seem like they just don’t want to anything about it.

    Still voting for Biden, but yeah, not enthusiastically.



  • 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.


  • On the one hand, if the people are armed, the government should theoretically fear the people and want to keep them happy.

    But even with millions of armed citizens, nobody is even close to putting up a fight against the US. And they know that. And they keep shitting on you because they know you ain’t doing shit about it.

    And then you look at the countries that are more democratically reflective of the will of the people… and they have strong gun regulations. It’s almost like maybe governments that at least work even a little don’t need the fear of popular revolution to keep them in check.


  • 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.




  • If I had to guess, he’d try to find a business selling enterprise supported distributions of Linux, buy them, then try to expand/convert them to develop “consumer Linux”. He’d advertise it as getting out from under the thumb of evil corps (ie his competitors), then as soon as it gains even a modicum of traction start implementing privacy violating shit, ads, whatever, to enshittify it as quickly as possible for a quick buck.