Just because you refuse to learn anything from this doesn’t mean there is nothing to be learned. I, for one, have got one important actionable insight from these replies: they prioritize having a strong president more than having a president that aligns with their values.

Trump radiates strength. You may say it’s fake strength, that it’s just the aggressiveness of his narcissism, but it doesn’t matter - he is perceived as strong, and that’s his main weapon, his number one selling point. Look at his his announcements and listen to what his supporters say - the main focus is on depicting him as strong and his opponents as weak. Policies are an afterthought.

Republican voters wanting a strong Republican president is a no-brainer, but the thing that really surprised me is Democrat leaning voters (Democrat enough to vote for AOC, at least) preferring a strong Republican president because he’s strong. I find it counterintuitive - if you’re going to have to live under the opponent party’s rule, shouldn’t you prefer a weak president that would be less forceful when implementing these policies that you disagree with?

This insight does shine a new light on some well known points. For example - Biden and Harris received lots of fire for supporting Israel. This always seemed weird to me - wouldn’t Trump, if elected, support Israel so much harder? But this new insight make it all make (twisted) sense. If - or, actually, now we can say “when” - Trump as a president will support Israel it will be an act of strength because it aligns with the Republican values he represents. When Biden did it, it was against Democratic values and therefore perceived as weakness - as surrendering to pressure.

Or, more importantly - I keep seeing (mainly here on Lemmy) claims that the Democratic party lost these elections because they did not go left enough. With this new insight, I think the problem is not that they didn’t go left enough, but that they didn’t go hard enough. It doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum you are aiming to be - you should be as forceful and as assertive as possible when going there. This is something Obama had in spades. This is what the Democrats need if they want to win the next elections.

Understanding why something is broken is a crucial prerequisite for fixing it. If you don’t care why it didn’t work, then you don’t care about making it work - you only care about being angry.

Small comfort: they still can’t physically force you like they can with biometrics.

Since I doubt he is a certified member of the National Socialist Party, I’d argue the more accurate term would be “neo-Nazi”.

He’s the punishment America deserves, but not the one it needs right now.

You wouldn’t download a book?

The unwashed masses dare to think that we are the elites? Clearly a result of their inadequate education…

Which is weird, because SovCits are a cargo cult who try to mimic the legal miracles top lawyers sometimes manage to pull off. Musk should be different - he does have access to these top lawyers who do have deep understanding of the law.

Unless Twittex’ lawyers got the same treatment the engineers got?

They are not made of straw, either.

Thing about the electoral collage is that it doesn’t matter what the large majority wants.

This does not make an awful lot of sense. The reasons scammers have to filter for the dumbest victims don’t apply to politicians:

1. Scammers don’t want to waste resources chasing bad leads. Sending the same email (or emails generated from the same template) to huge amounts of people is rather cheap, but when someone takes the bait at some point you’ll need to assign an actual person to deal with it (I’m not 100% sure this reason still applies today, since you can use AI, but it may not take you all the way and it’s still more expensive than generating an email from a template) and you’d rather not waste that effort if the chances to complete the grift are low.

   Politicians don’t have that problem, because at not point do they need to go one-on-one with individual voters (the bottom feeder activists may do it, but that’s a separate attack vector than party leadership going on media). Having the smart voters not buy into these announcements save them neither time nor money.

2. If someone is going to figure out the scam, the scammer would prefer they do it as soon as possible. Of course, long after the scammer is gone is even better, and not at all is best, but if they can’t get away with it - sooner is better than later. If you figure it out as soon as you get the email, you’ll just ignore it - and maybe delete it and/or block the address. Most people won’t even try to report it, and even if they do there is usually not much that can be done. But if you figure out the scam after you’ve started to send them money - you are going to want your money back. You’ll have more information can potentially be used to track them (like the details of the account you transferred the money to). And you’ll be better motivated to involve the authorities. It’s safer to filter out the people who are smart enough to do that and make them leave before they have skin in the game.

   If you figure out your politician lied to you - what are you going to do? You can’t rescind your vote. You can not vote for them in the next elections - but how is that worse than not voting for them to begin with? Worst you can do is vote for their opponent - but I fail to see why a disillusioned voter is more inclined toward that than a non-voter or someone who voted to a different party. “Yes, they’ve ruined the country, and if I was their supporter I’d punish them by voting to the other party - but since I didn’t vote for them it’s not really my problem so I’ll just not vote”.

3. Scammers only really need a small fraction of their potential targets to take the bait, because they’ll be stealing lots of money from each such target. Having too many victims can actually be risky because it raises the chance someone will do something about them. Maybe even someone competent.

   They can afford to filter.

   Politicians can’t.

   Politicians compete against other politicians, and they need a plurality to win. They don’t get to be picky. Even in the USA, the number of people with more than one brain cell is enough to tip an election’s result. You can’t just say “I don’t care about the people I can’t easily fool” because these people will for your opponent. The 16% who fall for scams won’t get you your victory.

Yes, but a much more defensible one. To refute a lie of omission you need to present the omitted information and show how it is relevant. To refute a lie of actual falsehood you just have to present the truth and point out the contradiction.

I’m not saying he’s not a liar, I’m just annoyed by his stupidity.

It’d be more of a spin, or a lie of omission, at most. Either way it’d be less stupid.

Weird thing is, he didn’t have to lie. He said that the price went from $1.5 a dozen to $4 a dozen, but it’s not like his argument would have been that much weaker had he used the real price $3…

XML is good for markup. The problem is that people too often confuse “markup” and “serialization”.

“Your brakes operation will resume after this 10s ad”

You are assuming here that I know what I want. What if there is no obviously correct answer, and even in the Everett branch that generates the optimal content for the file I’ll still think it can be improved and tell it to destroy the universe?

What if there is no correct answer?

I just use this:

#!/bin/bash

keep_generating=1
while [[ $keep_generating == 1 ]]; do
    dd if=/dev/random of=$1 bs=1 count=$2 status=none
    echo Contents of $1 are:
    cat $1
    echo
    read -p "Try generating again? " -s -n1 answer
    while true; do
        case $answer in
            [Yy] )
                echo
                break
                ;;
            [Nn] )
                keep_generating=0
                break
                ;;
            *)
        esac
        read -s -n1 answer
    done
done