Become more involved. Do you know your mayor?

If you are not helping pick the candidates on the ballot, then you just need to pick the lesser evil. If you want to do more than that, then be part of the decision of WHO ends up on the ballot, because that process has already started.

There’s a significant hurdle to run for even the mayoral office: it doesn’t pay well relative to a corporate job, and doesn’t have the same job security. People can only run for the decision-making positions when they already have enough wealth to be comfortable without a “real job.” Help find or select people with your values and we can take this back.

If you are mad at your options, the solution is not to give up, but to make better options.

It’s almost like you read Lucid’s message, decided to type up a reply, but then missed the fucking point. These establishment dems are only ‘allies on some issues’ because we keep fighting amongst ourselves on what the top priority is instead of getting anything useful done.

Yes, we have “dems” that are not solid on issues we/you/I think are important, but the result is that when we don’t vote for them, the much worse regressive party wins and makes things shittier for everyone.

I do agree that the solution is to get involved. Start local and engage with your local democratic org. Help support or find people to run for office with your opinions, but - and this is crucial - when someone better than a republican is on the ticket, fucking vote for them, even if they are not your perfect politician.

If you are not involved in local org politics, you can use our favorite mantra: vote blue no matter who. By doing so, you are ceding your opinion to the people who have more at stake or are more invested, but at least you are not letting evil win by default.

Fully agreed. On the service-provider side, we have ‘safe harbor’ laws: A site isn’t liable for copyrighted user-generated content as long as they have mechanisms to take down items when notified.

Liability-wise: The payment processors should have no fucking insight into what is being sold, only that they handle the transactions. Therefore, they should have no liability, similar to “safe harbor”.

Reputation-wise: I can almost see a history where Visa, for example, used a statement like “we don’t handle transactions for X” as a marketing ploy… but that is way past where we are. There’s no chance of reputational damage to a payment processor for the items for which they handled a payment. Combined with the above, if I say I’m giving $20 to Tim, you give $20 to Tim and take it from me. Done. Not your problem.

As another commenter stated, the payment processor should be a dumb pipe, and anything illegal being sold should be a liability for the seller or buyer. The idea of a moral judgement of the processor is as stupid as a water pipe to your house cutting off the flow if your shower runs too long.

The real problem is the politicians, or lobbyists/influencers, who are sending bribes to each other to gain advantage… but visa doesn’t have a problem handling a venmo transaction for ‘tuition’.

Let me buy horny games until after you block world superpower corruption first. But honestly, don’t even do that. Just handle moving the money when someone send it. That’s your only job.

This look to be amazing. I live by a CLI, but most browsers have some keyboard shortcuts at best. This one seems to have the capability to be fully KB using a VIM-like command line, which is awesome.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Another thing you can do is to separate the grease from any residual solids.

If you have a jar of bacon grease with brown bits floating around in it, you can put it in a pot with a similar amount of water and bring it all up to a boil or just near it for just a moment. The grease will sit on top of the hot water, but anything else will fall down. Then let the pot cool and put it in the fridge to solidify the grease. You can then scoop the now-solid grease in big chunks and put it back in the jar and discard any bits in the water.

I learned this from people who do at-home soap-making from their rendered fats. They would repeat it a few times before adding lye, as it will leach impurities such as salt, aromatic and favor compounds from the fat, but I find doing it once or twice leaves me with a nice cooking fat that still has bacon-y aroma.

I really hate statements like this. Not because you are right or wrong, but because your word choices obscure your true meaning when used this briefly.

In the context of this thread, which is clearly US politics, “liberal” has a somewhat different meaning to the majority of the audience than I think you are using. I almost think you are just making rage-bait, but I’ve seen it so many times that I have to respond to someone.

We have a clear dichotomy of our political parties, since we effectively only have two… some words I might use are ‘republican’, ‘conservative’, ‘democrat(ic)’, ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’, ‘socialist’, ‘fascist’, ‘leftist’, ‘right-wing’

Because of human language, these may signify different things based on context.

I identify as a “liberal” in my country. I am also a “democrat”, as well as a “socialist” and a “leftist”. I am anti-trump. I would vote for Mamdani, but I’m not in the area.

When you make absolute statements like “liberals will ALWAYS support the fascists,” you ignore the context. Perhaps in the dictionary sense of the words, a liberal will prefer a fascist government where wealth makes power and they get all the benefit of their work over a socialist one where their input helps everyone. That describes a giant swath of business owners for sure, as well as the ‘taxes are theft’ people. In the US, though, a liberal could mean a person more focused on bodily autonomy, social equality, social safety nets and other more ‘socialist’ concepts.

Another way to put this is that the political words are a 3D venn diagram. When you put your line of liberal = capitalist against someone who is thinking liberal = democrat, you are going to have friction because, based on context, that word lands in different places. I’m going to ignore any ‘all democrats are capitalists’ arguments, or complexities around our election systems. See my post history if you want my opinions there.

If anything, I’d recommend that people clearly define their words, such as a liberal vs a liberal. And even then, you can see that both are capitalist by those definitions even though, colloquially, a person may identify as liberal while preferring socialist ideals.

Basically, any absolutes, especially in the realm of political ideology, makes you a Sith (probably). Also basically, anyone firing off a one-liner in a conversation this fraught is a troll (probably).

I get the thrust of the song, but I have a question for you and/or anyone else who has insight:

I make small aggressions, like OP, where I assume I’m costing a corpo and giving to an artist through it, even if minuscule.

Examples:

Similar to OP, I have a streaming service ‘downloaded’ playlist of songs I like. I tend to leave my PC playing them in shuffle/repeat during my workday. I might have my volume on or off depending on my level of focus, but I can’t see how that “engagement” doesn’t benefit the artist without costing me anything – maybe a smidge more electricity.

Since I saw The Spiffing Brit’s runtime video, I no longer close a youtube tab if I decide I want something else. I mute the tab, set the speed to .25 and ignore it for a while. Costs me electricity, not that much bandwidth, and presumably pays the channel more than usual. Maybe fucks with analytics per-video, but probably not enough to bother the creator, and if it fucks with ‘the algorithm’ and pushes people to channels I already like, then that’s a google problem.

I also have an Epic Games account, where I “buy” every single free game. I assume these have either already paid the developer a fixed fee for supporting development, or are paying based on sales volume. Either way, they presumably paid money to be able to offer these as a loss-leader. Most are games I would not have bought anyway, so I’m not costing the developer a potential sale and I will never buy anything through Epic games, so it should be just a loss. I actually want insight on this one, in case there are devs/publishers here. If this costs you when I buy your free game, there might be others like me who just need to know we’re not helping.

Aside from the fact that my engagement with these platforms could be used as leverage (’ we have X million active users…'), I can’t see any negative to my attacks on them. It’s possible the artists can’t perceive it, but if the corpos love it, they wouldn’t make me pass a CAPTCHA to buy a game.

The question, then, is: Am I hurting the artists, or helping them?

This. We’ve seen what republicans want to do. We need to stop them and vote ‘not-republican’ when we can before the ability to do so is gone. The problem is we cannot stop there and only vote every 2-4 years for the least-bad option, we need to make better options. “Both sides” is reductive and hides the problem.

Get involved: find and support people who have your views for all offices: city, county, state, federal, maybe even HOA. Most of these are important. If the incumbent is not working for us, we need to fight them and suggest someone better. If the incumbent is unchallenged, then that’s a travesty and they need a primary, if the same party, or an opponent.

For the a while now we’ve seen the ‘left’ chase the ‘center’ and people like OP are mad at this. The solution is not ‘vote blue no matter who’, but that is a bandage to slow the bleeding and will resonate with the less-involved allies we have. The solution is to prove that we are the majority and push our own into leadership roles where they can make things better.

If you’re angry right now, run for office or canvas for someone who is. Being mad, depressed or just bitching online isn’t fixing anything. You can make things better, and it starts with finding a ‘blue’ worth voting for.

That looks great!

Growing up, I despised eggs except the ones that were thoroughly disguised(as in leavening)… I had a bad egg-salad experience as a kid and it stuck with me. In the last few years, though, I’ve come around and can enjoy them.

I’ll have to give them a shot as a pizza topping. I imagine they vaguely fit the same texture/umami role that a slice of mozzarella does for a margherita pizza.

Thanks for the suggestion and enjoy yours tomorrow!

Everything except the eggs sounds great – and I’m not judging the egg, just curious:

I don’t think of egg as a topping that would survive being baked. Does that go on before or after cooking? sliced or diced?

I just tried to open a soda can with my somewhat modern can opener (try them, btw, no sharp can edges) but it doesn’t fit the lid of my can. My day is ruined.

Like many things, a tool is only as smart as the wielder. There’s still a ton of critical thinking that needs to happen as you do something as simple as bake bread. Using an AI tool to suggest ingredients can be useful from a creative perspective, but should not be assumed accurate at face value. Raisins and Dill? maybe ¯\(ツ)/¯, haven’t tried that one myself.

I like AI, for being able to add detail to things or act as a muse, but it cannot be trusted for anything important. This is why I’m ‘anti-AI’. Too many people (especially in leadership roles) see this tool as a solution for replacing expensive humans with something that ‘does the thinking’; but as we’ve seen elsewhere in this thread, AI CANT THINK. It only suggests items that are statistically likely to be next/near based on its input.

In the Security Operations space, we have a phrase “trust but verify”. For anything AI, I would use 'doubt, then verify" instead. That all said. AI might very well give you a pointer to the place to ask how much motrin an infant should get. Hopefully, that’s your local pediatrician.

Brother is the other secret, though it seem like maybe even they have turned… the problem with making a solid piece of equipment that will last for a decade is you consume your customer base and can’t show ‘growth’ constantly.

My Brother color laser (model 3170, bought in 2016) doesn’t print the perfect photos, but that’s not what I use it for. I print coloring sheets and camp forms for my kiddos and random forms for adult life. It ran on the original toner carts for around 5 years, with black being replaced first on its own. There’s no inkjet in the world that will have 5 year-old carts work, but laser toner doesn’t dry out.