“Am I interested in other DEs?” and “Will I install them?” are two different questions though. Yeah, I had fun running i3 years back, but i3 isn’t the new hotness anymore, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of me feeling like I have the time to learn and configure another WM. Absent my suddenly striking it rich and having entirely too much free time, I sincerely doubt there will come another time where I feel like I have that sort of time and nothing I’d rather use it for than such a mundane and endless task.

While pointing out that the public at large is just wildly ill-suited to be making policy decisions on many topics which absolutely need to be regulated, lest companies cheap out on worker safety and get people killed, you’re missing the far more pressing matter with this idea. This level on granularity is just absurd for direct democracy. The sheer number of votes such a system would entail would rapidly induce voter fatigue. Besides, even if it’s just opening an app and clicking a button, how many voters have the time to stay informed on relevant developments related to upcoming matters to be voted on to actually have an informed opinion on the topic, and of those, how many would actually turn up to vote for the thing? NY had 39.6% of eligible voters not cast a vote in the 2024 presidential election, slightly below the national average of 36.1%. Last year alone, Governor Hochul pardoned 24 people, according to her site’s press releases, 11 of which were the day before New Year’s Eve, smack in the middle of the winter holidays. You folks really think you’re going to get meaningful voter participation in 24+ elections a year (ignoring how many elections Trump would trigger with his presidential pardons, because this number is already unreasonable enough), when nearly 40% of eligible voters sat out the most heated presidential election in decades?

You can have direct democracy to an extent, but for the most part, you’d still need to leave the politicians and technocrats to do their jobs. Sure, there ought to be mechanisms for either the people or the government to trigger a popular referendum on a given matter (say, voters strongly feel that none of the politicians or governing bodies are reflecting their will on a matter, or a broadly popular policy is being blocked by obstinate opposition factions in a closely divided legislature, for example), but they really ought to remain exceptional incidents. Otherwise, you’re doomed to get bogged down by rule by committee under a different name, and nothing is ever going to get done.

I don’t hate it, I just never got into it. I watched a few episodes which didn’t really do it for me, and I just didn’t really feel any need to continue it.

Mainline SMT games are a rather different beast. They don’t have any of the social sim elements of the Persona games, and tend to be old-school first-person dungeon crawlers, with an emphasis on exploration, the acquisition and fusing of demons, and developing a balanced team of demons to face off against the enemies and bosses you encounter in the dungeons. They also frequently feature a good/neutral/evil alignments that offers different endings, including different final bosses, depending on which alignment you wind up with as a result of the choices you make throughout the game. They’re a lot of fun if you’re into those sort of things.

I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that the things that interest me aren’t often recognized as valuable in our society, but just because a mad world doesn’t recognize their worth doesn’t mean I’m not improving myself with them. Studying history, learning languages that interest me, learning how to cook or sew, none of them are likely to get me a particularly well paid job or anything, but they’re all either skills or knowledge I can take with me, even if nobody else appreciates it at the time.

Man, Microsoft doubling down on the whole “Let’s force most of our customers to purchase entirely new computers to use the next release!” strategy after it went so well for Windows 11 is just hilarious. Especially with hardware costs skyrocketing due to AI BS.

I might specify more often to clarify, like “All the female medalists/athletes,” but that’s quite different from when you hear someone say “Oh, you know how females can be.” It’s like their vocalization process includes a filter that converts “bitches” to “female” at some point between the first thought and actual speech, because they finally got the memo that not everyone is a misogynist like they are. You can hear the disdain in their voices when they say the word female.

That, or they’ve recently moved from somewhere much colder and still haven’t acclimated to the new temperature range. I was this guy for a solid year after moving back home when I’d spent two years living much further north and getting used to a far colder climate while I was at college. 15 years later, my feet start getting cold if I don’t wear heavier socks and boots when it dips below 20°C, but I also don’t feel like I’m sweating enough to flood my apartment when it starts pushing 40°C in the summer any more.

A few months ago, the local dispensary was out of the vape I would normally buy, so I tried a new one instead. Took a hit, thought “Well, guess I’m going to bed right now, then,” and laid in bed. That thing hit me so hard, at one point I had to check the news on my phone to confirm whether there’d been another earthquake, or if I’d just ripped a massive fart and not realized.

We don’t need an autopsy, just like we don’t need another article telling the public, who has already long since realized this, that Israeli influence and Zionism in our politics is toxic and that we need to cut ties with it going forward. We really just need a few things to happen. Least likely of all, if Democratic leaders finally pulled their heads out of their asses and started paying attention to doing their jobs and winning over voters, rather than just focusing on their bank balances, it would potentially preclude the need for more if they had the fear of their constituents turning on them to keep them in line. Failing this, it would be great if more people got politically active and, along with taking action and organizing between elections, they showed up to the primaries and voted out assholes like Charles Schumer. Finally, it would be great if current electeds and progressive candidates who manage to primary zionists in the party actually began taking steps to initially isolate the remaining Zionists, with the aim of eventually expelling them from the party if they don’t renounce Zionism and stop screwing over the civilians of Palestine (along with the other nearby countries Israel is constantly trying to steal land from), this country as a whole, and the world at large. The Israeli state, as it has existed since its founding in 1948, is a force for evil in this world, and needs to be stopped entirely. In a just world, Israel would be as isolated on the world stage as North Korea is at present.

The Democrats need to clean house already, and stop the shit with “Oh, but we’re a big tent party, so we have to be open to a littlel support for colonial genocide amongst our members.” Everyone alive knows this is a losing issue for them and is only getting worse by the day. The names of leading Democrats, like Jeffries, Pelosi, Harris and Schumer, are all going to be black marks in the pages of world history in the future. Quislings for a new age, but now they can claim they’re multicultural, since they’re not just reviled in their home land, but by anyone with a conscience and sense of morality the world over who comes to learn of their existence and actions. And I’m sure they’ll still be trotting out that Schumer is hated only by antisemites, Pelosi only by misogynists, Jeffries by white supremacists, while Harris gets the distinction of being hated by racists and misogynists. It’ll be just as effective at getting them back in the good graces of their constituents as it’s proving to be now.

Because you can improve and refine your technique. For example, I no longer need to open up duckduckgo to figure out what that one command was that worked for me 6 months ago. Now, I just type away. ctrl-r, ffmpeg, and bam, right there in my shell history, all I need to do is change the inputs and outputs.

Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.

No, the issue is one that has been around a long time now and has been completely ignored because most people don’t speak Spanish. Almost all mainstream Spanish media, from shows, to news, to social media has been far, far, FAR right for decades now. Like, it makes Fox News look like MSNBC.

Aside from that, they know they have a captive audience for many of their viewers, who are unable to go fact check them by consulting English-media. This is true for monolingual Spanish speakers, but also for many folks who have learned enough English to get by in their day-to-day lives, but who are not comfortable following or discussing something more complex like politics in English.

Pretty much every time I would watch the news with my mother-in-law, if they had an interview or clip from a politician dub over into Spanish, I’d catch them engaging in some fuckery with their translations. Either they would deliberately omit parts of what was said to make the translated part sound worse, or they would choose key words where they would pick a translation that is related to a more accurate word for the English word spoken, but with a much more negative connotation to it.

They’d also ignore when right-wing conspiracy theories get debunked in English, and just keep on pushing them for months after they’d been discredited with no mention of this fact, as though they were widely held, mainstream beliefs.

Then again, white Americans who don’t interact with either group very much seem to consider all Latino and Black Americans as two monolithic voting blocks, ignoring the reality of the many different cultures, national backgrounds and ethnicities that comprise either group. Lots of white people just think of them as solid, unreachable Democratic voters, for some reason. There are plenty of people in either group who the Democrats can’t reach, because despite agreeing with the rest of a Democrat or Progressive platforms, they hold deeply conservative religious or cultural beliefs on abortion and sexuality. Like, I hear people saying “¡Maricón!” on the daily more often than I heard edgy kids dropping the f-word on the middle school playground back in the day, and nobody bats an eye because rampant homophobia is still a cultural given in a lot of places, unfortunately. If you actually interact with any people of color on a regular basis, it’s probably not as surprising to see how the right can pull in greater numbers of POC by playing to the right themes for those deeply held views and prejudices.

Every time I bring this up people down vote me into oblivion

This is because you’re parroting blue MAGA nonsense while ignoring reality. Racism and sexism can certainly play into it, but you’re never going to be able to turn things around if you ignore other contributing factors and just go “I can’t hear you over the racism and sexism in your voice,” as you shove your fingers in your ears.

Attributing everything to racism and sexism when there is a massive and glaring factor that even the DNCs own internal audits place higher priority on, is like walking up to the scene of a car accident, seeing the black ice on the road and the skid marks leading up to the tree the car is wrapped around, and concluding this wouldn’t have happened if the driver had kept up with their scheduled oil changes. Nobody is going to take your analysis seriously when you ignore all the other contributing factors.

You know what? That’s all on me. For some dumb reason, I had it in my head that she was a Democrat. I’ll just go put away my pitchfork now.

How many times do this rogue Democrats have to buck the party line to work with the fascists before we actually get some party discipline? Yes, I get the whole “big tent party” thing, but there should be a point (which has long since and repeatedly been passed) where the party closes ranks and starts either censuring these members in a meaningful way, like a monetary fine or loss of some campaign funds or something, and escalate right up to expelling them from the party and making them campaign openly as the republicans they really are.

I’m not saying they should be policing every single action of them, but when you have assholes like Joe Manchon or Susan Collins, who tank key pieces of legislation that represent major planks of the party or directly work against the interests of the constituents, it shouldn’t be up to grass roots movements to primary these bastards, much to frequently do so against the DNC continuing to back them. They should already be gone based on their part misdeeds, and the party should be proactive in this.

How did has that big picture thinking work out for them? Considering they couldn’t take the presidency or either chamber of Congress, it doesn’t look like it’s worked so swell. Egads, could it be that the holy DNC has screwed up and it’s their fault? Heavens, no, it must be the ignorant peasants, too feeble of mind to understand the profound strategems of the DNC.

Eh, I’m sure they’ll be back to have this same conversation again in a couple years when the DNC pushes another candidate to drag the party further right and then blames leftists not voting for the candidate who delivers none of what the democratic base asks for for their loss that go of it, too. Clearly, years out from a primary is not the time to criticize the party either, I must just want Trump or his appointed successor to run away with it, again.

I’m sorry to learn your inability to parse meaning from text extends to even text you yourself wrote. Maybe you should seek treatment.

The text you quoted essentially absolves the Democrats and DNC of all responsibility, placing the onus on leftists to either put together someone with enough money and backing to displace the entrenched political parties who dominate our politics, or shut up and take whatever is offered by the DNC lest they become the new whipping boy, yet again. You’re already gearing up to blame leftists for the DNC tossing the next election, and you don’t even know who their candidates will be, or what platform they will run on. 2028 could be the corpse of Nancy Pelosi running on how mean people are to Israel, and shouldn’t we let them just massacre a bit more to vent some stress, and you’ve already laid the groundwork to blame leftists if they don’t fall in line to vote for the DNC with your asinine “flip” or the original image, which conveniently absolves the DNC of any responsibility for their own repeated failures to win elections.

No, you want to play this dumb game of Schröndinger’s leftists, where we are simultaneously a group too small to merit making any concessions to, yet also such a massive force that our not voting for Dems apparently decides elections all on their own, thus fair grounds to single out for extra scolding this go around of it. I’m just pointing out the DNC leadership is suspiciously holding pistols of the same caliber as the weapons that put those nice holes in their feet. We got here with them insisting they know what their constituents really want better than even the constituents themselves do, and it worked out swimmingly for them the last go of it.

I’m calling you out specifically for engaging in such stupid and disingenuous activity with your nonsensical flip. The DNC are not the last bastion of political genius in this country, and managing to lose the last election should be an indictment of their strategies and platforms employed. Going to the right to become the GOP-lite didn’t work, so obviously, the solution is to browbeat leftists and whip out some non sequitur about them raising their own candidate with the funds to beat the entrenched political establishment, rather than maybe considering for even a fraction of a second that the DNC’s own strategies and their tendency to cave and give the GOP everything they want on a platter while also gaslighting constituents about key factors like how well the economy is doing might have a tiny bit to do with their inability to win elections or get policy pushed through.

But yes, it’s the leftist who have ruined everything by not voting for Kamala last go of it. Just a thought, but if any single group is so powerful as to singlehandedly decide the outcome of national elections like the blue MAGA brigade has been whining about leftists doing on here since the elections finished, wouldn’t it make a bit more sense to actually listen to those people and throw them a bone on occasion? But no, it’s clearly the leftists fault for not waiting their turn when Kamala had seniority in the party, and they need to be punished and ridiculed further, even if it costs the Democrats more elections.