Curious about what time you were referring to when Democrats were better. I suppose they were OK during Obama (ACA was a corporate-friendly solution, there was a huge wealth transfer from the government to financial institutions and corporations, there were tons of drone strikes, and anti-immigration ramped up though). During Clinton they cut social programs significantly, and implemented the draconian three-strikes law.
Yes, but large amount of resources are put into controlling and influencing the population. It’s a fight, and we aren’t fighting back enough. It’s my opinion the problem is systemic, and merely trying to be more mindful of consumption isn’t going to improve things much (it will improve things some, and people should do it). For instance, there’s a good chance those cage-free eggs involved some sort of very low-paid and abused workers. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.
Yeah, I used aircrack to gain access to one of my neighbors wifi and used it for about a month when I moved into my first apartment. After I got my own connection, I set up a guest network/SSID that was open,
Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.
Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.
Available jobs are below the worse time during COVID, and I’m pretty sure the number of CS grads has greatly increased (but couldn’t find a good chart).
Liberal three-percenter lore?
I mean, I do think non-violent disobedience can be effective, but the state usually makes it violent. State sanctioned protests where most obey most of the rules isn’t disobedience. Is a good start though, and I hope things progress (in a good way).
So much more than an init system though, which I think is why people don’t like it. Personally, the only annoyance I have is I preferred log files over journald.
Israel, Iran, or the US?
Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.
I think there’s a massive oversupply of software engineers world-wide, and investors and executives are heavily pushing offshoring to countries where there are even more engineers that are even more desperate to find work. The ideology or focus of the entire US investor/executive class seems to have shifted as soon as Musk gutted Twitter. I fear this may be another, “these jobs aren’t coming back,” kind of thing the manufacturing industry went through. Perhaps we’ll see a boom of bootstrapped start-ups ran by engineers (or preferably worker-cooperatives), but that’s extremely hard to do.
Yeah, that’s how they sell it. Problem is, studies have shown the fraud in these programs isn’t much of an expense, in the broader context. And, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, who stole $205M from Medicare, which tells you they don’t really care about that. These programs are actually pretty efficient, and spending funds to investigate small-time fraud would often cost more than just letting it happen. It’s not like tons of people wish to be on our shitty social programs that don’t even supply enough help for the people that absolutely need it.
From the people I know, who do depend on these programs and like Trump, they don’t believe they will have their benefits reduced. The think the other people, “taking advantage” of the system will be kicked off. It’s being sold as reducing fraud and abuse. The right-wing has been pushing this framing for decades, and many people have bought into it.
I know a couple life-long Republicans I sometimes briefly talk about politics with (one family, one acquaintance). Neither of them like Trump, but like the idea around Project 2025. One is an evangelical Christian, the other is a Catholic.
The Catholic strongly believes government should be run like a business, and the president should be like a CEO, so he should be able to fire everyone and replace them, if needed, with workers that will execute his plans. He’s also an anti-abortion, and tough-on-crime/immigration type. However, he strongly disapproves of Trump seemingly being pro-Russian now, Trump and his cabinet’s personal lives (he’s always strangely fixated on people’s personal lives, in a moral sense, for some reason), the take-over of the FBI and CIA, and the tariffs hurting his stock portfolio.
The evangelical Christian just doesn’t like Trump as a person, and doesn’t like Russia. He’s a just-world-hypothesis, small government, women are subservient, pro-business type; but also low/lower-middle-class, and has needed, and will need the social services he opposes. I guess his opinions are pretty similar to the Catholic’s, just a little more extreme on the social side, and supports policies that have always hurt him. I mean, Republican policies hurt the (fairly wealthy) Catholic too, but at least they get to say their taxes are lower and there’s less red-tape.
I used Swappa to buy my last phone. Not certified, but much cheaper. The condition of phones is “graded,” and the sellers have an incentive to keep their reputation on the platform high. I had good luck, the one time I used it, at least.