Yeah, the kind of person who ends up with that job is going to have their life changed way more by being the guy who got to yell at the secretary of “war” than by getting a promotion.
Hopefully in a good way. In a just world that guy never pays for drinks again.
I don’t think that is a gotcha once you consider the full context.
Voting blue is not an assertion that the Democrats are good.
The problem is that our culture is so rotten and voting system so broken that the other viable choice is nazi dictatorship on top of being even MORE capitalist and corrupt and destructive.
In many cases they have blown past “the customer will like it” all the way to “our data suggests that 90% of customers will not leave and profits will slightly increase as a result.”
I mean, at this point enshittification is a widespread business plan.
The biggest difference with updates isn’t even being forced vs “when I say so,” even though it does matter.
The biggest difference for me is the whole “be good at the thing you were made to do” aspect of Linux and FOSS. I never have any hesitation to update my computer, because updates are fast and unobtrusive. At work I will run an update check in a terminal in the middle of a Teams meeting while I also have code building in the background using 100% CPU. No issues.
I absolutely love Linux Mint. But then once I tried regular old Debian with KDE Plasma, I knew that was home.
It sounds that way written down, but I suspect that the predictable easy access to the airport without large but unknown delays waiting for you really helps to ease the friction of each step and the anxiety leading up to them.
To make a stretch of an analogy, it kind of reminds me of my work situation. A few years ago I got a job with a new company that has the perfect location. It’s not just in my town but on my side of town. The drive is short and fun, like 6-7 minutes with most of that on a country road with turns and hills.
There’s no worry about getting back and forth, going home for lunch, running in on a WFH day to test on some hardware, leaving at the wrong time and getting stuck in traffic, etc.
I get the feel that the vibe with this airport on the island is similar.
The most boring yet most common type of conspiracy: Nobody planned this situation, but now that it exists and somebody is making money from it, we are going to drag our feet “fixing” the “problem.”
I guess blue maga thinks the democratic party is more important then the United States of America.
When it comes to the party leadership and many politicians, absolutely.
I think ordinary people who are registered democrats and “vote blue no matter who” types are much more receptive to the idea of a sensible voting system. Ranked choice has the name recognition, but there are better systems like STAR.
Even here on Lemmy, we have plenty of debates/arguments of “vote blue because of harm reduction and (first past the post + game theory)” versus “vote for the candidate that matches your ideals even if they aren’t one of the two that has a chance of winning.” What I do not recall seeing, however, are debates about how first-past-the-post is actually the superior voting system because of reasons XYZ.
Any “arguments” in favor that I can think of are typical conservative bad faith bullshit talking points. The people do not favor it, except probably for a big chunk that gets their information about the world from the talking heads’ conservative bad faith bullshit talking points.
Yeah, it should probably be a progressive rate but with the catch being that the rate never stops increasing!
So maybe we start very small – a 1% tax on wealth over $10 million. And that $10 million is also our magic number below which the wealth tax cannot drag you, which will be important in a second.
Then there are a few tiers above that which don’t need to be fancy. Maybe add 1% to the incremental rate per $100 million.
But then at $1 billion, the incremental rate becomes 100%. So if you end up over the limit you essentially get set back to $1 billion, which is further taxed according to our imaginary progressive rate.
I also wonder if it might be a good idea to provide a strong incentive for the individual to disburse their gains to charitable causes rather than the burden of administration always falling to the government. One interesting thing might be to introduce one or two even higher brackets that go above 100%.
Say that at $2 billion the tax on each additional dollar becomes 150%. That means that if you get lazy or just want to hoard wealth short term, you not only get knocked back down to $1 billion but lower than that.
Honestly though, we don’t need that complexity. 100% wealth tax on anything over a billion and the government does extravagant shit to honor the top payers each year and names buildings after them and whatnot.
I am hoping that the accelerationism this country needed was a cultural one rather than a violent one – that the conservatives showed so much ugly to the world that the American people pushed the Overton window a bit away from conservatism and will continue to reject that whole world of bullshit in the future.
It can’t just be the gas prices, right?
I just hope this decisive result is in part because the republicans and Trump are SO bad that they have driven people to wake the fuck up and choose a more noble worldview.
I just hope it’s something other than fuel prices. I really hope that this result would be vaguely similar if the Iran war never happened. Having hope in people again would feel neat.
I can already hear my internalized Lemmy voice pointing out that we don’t win anything by choosing the friendly capitalists over the asshole capitalists, and that all the theater over corruption and bigotry are to distract from the only real war: the class war.
But I think you countered that best by saying it’s only a start.
Even if we assume that the US government will look like the best Europe has to offer within a few decades, it will take multiple steps to get there.
And you know what is definitely NOT a step in that direction? Giving the entire government to the fascist racist pedo bigot robber-baron party. We did that TWO years ago.
It looks like the transfer rate of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway is back on the menu, boys!
Your accurate yet unavoidably incomplete list made me reflect on how much the term “pro-life” is inaccurate while also being propaganda spin bullshit. It is literally the term for a policy of the death cult wing of american politics. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but god damn.
I am a nature lover and animal lover. I come from a conservative redneck-ish family and one very strong correlation throughout my life has been that the more conservative somebody is, the more likely they are to openly brag about how much they would NOT spend money to help their own pets. Or even about how they would shoot them (usually a dog) if they ever did X.
But that is part of a much larger package deal where those people define themselves by the things they hate and activities they avoid.
Septic Poogaloo
I read that with a positive connotation, at least towards her.
That is, the virtue candidate is the most virtuous one. The best person. The one the world needs. The one you choose when you don’t want to game theory your way into your vote.
But they are not the person the world WANTS, presumably.
The negativity is cast more on the person choosing AOC, the way I initially read it. By choosing the virtue candidate, they are virtue signaling their purity of leftness or whatever. They refuse to compromise and join a coalition behind somebody electable. (again, I’m just discussing the term reflecting more positively on her in my interpretation – I am NOT arguing that she is in fact a virtue cabdidate or unelectable. )
In a country that has been building its infrastructure around personal automobiles for decades, we cannot make that necessary function of daily life be an automatic consent to targeted analysis.
I get that cameras pointed at intersections and highways are here to stay. That means there will be records of what happens in public places that can be analyzed for a certain person’s movements once there’s a warrant.
That’s the whole fucking point of warrants and 4th amendment protections. Just because the technical ability exists to analyze somebody’s Personally Indentifiable Information doesn’t mean you just get to do it. Just like you don’t get to listen to any phone call you want, or plant bugs and trackers on everybody you are curious. (A group of three-letter agencies enters the chat, lol)
I think they mean the corporate veil that is typically assumed, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
It provides a layer of liability protection for the personal assets of the humans behind the company when it comes to debts. But it also provides protection from criminal liability in many cases when it comes to horrible non-financial crimes.
I think it’s just the economics of it, as it almost always is.
Solar panels have been dropping logarithmically in price for 50 years. Battery improvements don’t hurt either.
I am a fan of nuclear energy, but its cost has not done anything like that. It would be a good thing for us to develop cheaper fission and build more reactors. I know there are companies trying to bring it back, at least.
I think 1 is a not-implausible joke, and 2 represents a whole spectrum of real risks even if that’s not exactly how they’d do it.