Silly you, thinking that women are “people”. :-P (/s) “Fearing for your life”, according to those who “tell it like it is”, is actually code for gentrified white men, though going to college may remove from you this privileged status.
I don’t follow you. They are BOTH the capitalist party, though not equally so. Also, voting for one side vs. the other does not mean that you agree with EVERYTHING that they do - in fact it is more common these days to vote against the other side and ignore what your own might plan or actually do. Nor is it true that avoiding voting - e.g. for mental or physical health reasons - means that someone does not care at all about what happens as a result of the election. Plus, a rather ENORMOUS fraction of people in the USA could skip a particular vote and it would not make the tiniest iota of difference, due to the electoral college system, though that heavily depends on where you live, and also trends to be more true the larger the region impacted (federal > state > county), whereas local elections could turn on a dime and also make a huge impact regardless of what goes on in upper levels - e.g. federal sends monies to help people but locals turn that aid away b/c “reasons”.
Unpopular opinion alert: I dare to say that many people who should NOT be voting - especially those who do little to no research beforehand - would vastly improve the outcome of elections by NOT voting, and thereby contribute more that way than they do now, by actually voting, where they tend to just magnify the votes of whatever the TV & radio talk show people (or more recently, pastors behind the pulpit) tell them to do. The latter makes the USA even more of a plutocracy than later, when the votes get ignored and the rich get whatever they want regardless of who got elected does.
Counterpoint: the rich want to get richer, and the lapdogs want their bribes, and the lazy folks in the middle can only be motivated by fear (not even greed works anymore, e.g. for retirees who already got theirs), so to break out of this cycle would take… … …
I have no clue.
I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.
One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).
Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.
Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.
The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.
TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?
(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)
Welcome to late-stage capitalism, where companies sell what you do not want to buy. e.g., no wired connection has ever once had this problem, but they had to sell more thingies, so now everything is bluetooth, whether it should be or not, plus it seems like nobody ever bothered to finish implementing bluetooth - e.g., this exact issue you are having, which surely could be fixed except… why bother, when you (& your neighbors) have already bought all the thingies?
There is no possibility of this ever causing negative effects of any kind, certainly it will not ever be misused (like one pilot being pressured into flying 5 planes at once bc… profit).
Sadly, that part comes later as well:-(.
The only bright side is that after the adjustment period, Earth is going to be just fine - no lie! (Humans living on it though… that’s a bit of a different story now…😞)
I love this bit:
There is apparently no suggestion that South America is fictional nor has the existence of New Zealand so far been questioned.
It’s just fuck Australia in particular, everything else is fine. :-P
As Global Warming slowly kills us all, try to enjoy it!:-) 😭
Every single time the FCC tries to do absolutely anything (no matter how modest), the telecom industry works with the GOP to first demonize the proposal (or regulatory nominee as we saw with Gigi Sohn) as extreme, and then set about working to dismantle it. Usually successfully. And often with the help of Democrats.
No biggie! :-)
Okay, a fair point, but… we were talking about abortion:-D. (also, can we stop, or is it a stipulation somewhere in the contract that we must send? perhaps any time they are “attacked” we must automatically send a certain amount? there may be more there than the for-profit news media is willing to tell us, thinking that we are too dumbp to undermastand so they instead just focus on emotional one-liners that generate more clicks…)
I should have admitted in my previous response that I might be biased, trying to find a shred of hope where none exists. But also I aim not to be either an optimist nor a pessimist, but a realist. I do not claim to actually know what that means here though:-).
That said, what I said earlier still seems true to me: if you live in a state that allows - maybe even enshrines? - abortion as a right, then its being banned in other states affects you none to little (unless you actively visit those states, perhaps even traveling through them on the way to other states?), while if you live in a state that bans abortions, you have MANY problems, of which that is merely one of them (a big one to be sure). So it is one issue - perhaps the biggest of our time - and yet all of that said… what are we going to ACTUALLY DO about it? Congress needs to pass a law to make a decision one way or the other. Or else individual states need to do that. So far, Congress is more divided than it has ever been (during the Civil War, the South did not send their representatives anymore, so bills actually got passed!:-P), and we are looking towards another constitutional crisis happening as soon as the very next election, possibly spilling out into actual bloodshed. I don’t, but listen to the rhetoric on the side most likely to fire the first shot, and tell me that has no chance of happening, sometime in the next ten years? So yeah, I believe Biden when he says that it would be a difficult ask to get such a thing through Congress right now… that’s not about what’s right or what’s wrong, it’s about what’s possible at the current time.
Also look at democracy globally - like UK with Boris Johnson, Brazil with Bolsonaro, uh… right now is not a good time for democracy it seems. I am not speaking out against it, just echoing your thoughts that we are already fucked, in so many more ways than one, since it seems that our particular brand of it (meaning: coupled with low levels of edumacashion), seems to be vulnerable to certain outside parties who may have interests in interfering with our electoral processes? :-(
And in the midst of ALL of that, what the Dems offer is… Biden. Yeah, I know, but it’s not about what’s ideal, it’s about what is possible.
That’s probably the gist of it right there in fairness - he could have tried harder. Then again, he knows what’s what, and like (a) the mess he inherited from the previous occupant of the job took an enormous amount of effort to deal with, like basically ALL of the efforts, really, that were to spare (and things like the border crisis, huge spike in homelessness, greedflation, etc. continue onwards even now), and so (b) to have fought the good fight would have come at the cost of enormous political capital that would have prevented other things from happening. Thought experiment: what would Dems be willing to give up, in order to have made a useless (I mean purely in the sense of doomed to failure in the short term, though ultimately such things may need a coordinated effort over many years) attempt to appear to try to codify Roe v. Wade? Would we have been willing to sacrifice funding for Ukraine? Passing a budget for the year at all? College loan remittance? Political capital has limits, so in order to work towards that goal, something else must be sacrificed, that’s just reality.
Also, unpopular opinion alert - or rather, adjacent to one, in the service of a deeper understanding - women are not prevented from having abortions, at least on the federal level. If a state such as Florida or Texas etc. prevents such a thing, then don’t live in those states? There are MANY things going on in those states - book burnings, teacher shortages, also libraries, also doctors/nurses, also basic infrastructure, the list just goes on forever - and Biden is merely one old man, so what is he being asked to do, replace Jesus in those states? There is only so much that he or any one person could do. e.g., when a Supreme Court seat opens up, that’s when he can do a lot to work towards his goal, but I cannot say this loudly enough, even as a President he cannot pass laws. He can be part of a solution but he cannot be the entirety of one. Nor should he be.
There have always been such (it is human nature) - but right now they feel bold enough to speak and act, whereas previously they had been too afraid and embarrassed to do so publicly.
In South Carolina, various KKK-like groups said in advance that they wanted to kill people, wrapped barbed wire around baseball bats (in order to better kill people with), showed up to kill people, then actually killed people, then bragged about having killed people… Oh right, but the other side was not successful in securing a permit for their peaceful protest, so you know, there are “many sides” to every issue I guess.
Misinformation/brainwashing techniques are powerful. Like if you believed that a particular type of human was the root of all evil in this world, then you SHOULD want them dead, under those circumstances… right? You do not bc you know better, not just about that one group but more fundamentally that it is ideas that bring about evil, not people. But the people killing people do not know that, and it is to the advantage of others who seek power, and want to use the army of sheeple to advance their own agenda, for those sheeple to not know that either.
“Successful”? Ah, I see, you think they are making their choices strategically, rather than emotionally. Interesting. :-D
I kid, but there actually is strategy involved there - by saying that their votes cannot be “counted on”, they could be attempting to wrangle additional concessions.
Ofc there is a bunch of nonsense going on as well - e.g. blaming Biden for not managing to codify Roe v. Wade, in this Congress!? They would have a better chance of asking to go to the moon - that is expensive but at least possible in theory!:-P I mention Congress ofc bc that is the government body that passes laws - the Presidency enforces, maybe vetoes, but does not make laws, so having a President receptive to and even someone who heavily pushes for a certain thing is not sufficient. Contrary to popular opinion, the Presidency has many limitations, and you do not simply show up to vote and somehow life gets “all better”, as some seem to think. Young people can be quite inexperienced and naive sometimes.
Then again, it was not young people that gave us Trump, and if they choose not to bail this country out again a second time, especially if they vote their conscience as a result of Israel (right or wrong mind you, in fact especially the latter), I will not be blaming the least experienced among us as the scapegoat to all of life’s problems… It should not be the case that it is up to those least prepared to deal with a situation, to be the deciding factor that “saves” us all - and the fact that we continue to ignore this aspect every time the young people show up to do so, shows how perilous the situation truly is. Maybe next time they won’t? If so, then we never deserved saving in the first place… bc that’s not freedom, to continually lie in the shadow of destruction.
If you mean vote for him vs. not vote for him, then yes.
If you mean vote for him vs. the Republican nominee, then no, as there are other options. For starters the article seemed to suggest that some may just not vote at all. They also might vote for him but do so reluctantly, e.g. without discussing with their friends strongly promoting the voting for Biden as they did in the last election.
But it’s a long way to the actual election, and campaigning has not started in earnest yet.
If you’re an OG iPhone or Mac user, then you might remember paid software updates. Over a decade ago, long before iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, major Apple OS updates used to cost users around $10 for iOS and $20 for macOS. By iOS 4, though, Apple switched to free software updates, allowing users to update their devices for as long as they’re supported without having to pay a fee.
Yeah, but nowadays it’s all “free” - as in you only pay for the hardware to enter their walled garden (but then no matter how much you pay, you can never really leave! at least not via normal, legal means, if you want to ever come back - Welcome to the Hotel California 🎶…!:-P).
Although ironically, the OS software itself is free to end users, as are future upgrades.
Google also sells hardware, e.g. in its Pixel line, and there too the OS software is “free”, as are future upgrades, up to a point.
Both sell listings in their respective stores.
These concepts are getting murkier over time.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.
For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.
And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.
As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.
Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.
And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.
DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.
Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)