If it was worth stressing about, it was worth discussing with me when I was on the clock. The entire premise of a job is that I work in direct exchange for money. No money? No work. Pay me or wait until next shift.

So it seems like if you’re using Office on desktop, not SaaS, but they do offer it in a browser, so would that count? Technically, if it’s in JavaScript or something like that, computing is handled locally, but it still feels close enough to count.

These apps aren’t SaaS, but their alternatives are in at least some cases. LibreOffice competes with Microsoft Office, for example, and Microsoft wants people to pay a subscription for it, although I think you can still buy it outright. Pretty sure I’ve heard similar for Adobe products. Not super familiar with all the options, so can’t say if it’s true for all of them.

Somehow, I doubt it’ll be the same

A bunch of racist assholes made that claim while Obama was in office, but they notably never produced even the tiniest shred of evidence that it was even a possibility.

So no. He wasn’t born in Kenya.

QuakeWorld and old school Doom for FPS, Beyond All Reason for RTS, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup for roguelikes, Hedgewars for a Worms-like.

Running a server is very doable. There are packages to deploy and configure almost everything for you and removing a ton of headache.

Getting your email recognized as not spam by the major providers is pretty much impossible. You need all sorts of stuff to help verify integrity including special DNS records and public identity keys, but even if you do everything right, your mail can very easily get black holed before it even reaches a user’s inbox because of stupid shit like someone abused your rented server’s IP years ago, and you can’t seem to get it off everyone’s lists.

Email as a decentralized tool has effectively been ruined by spam and anti-spam measures. You’re effectively forced to use a provider because it’s near impossible to make your outgoing mail work as an individual. I think some of those anti-spam measures are anticompetitive, but I do think some are just desperate attempts to reduce the massive flow of spam.

To get a job that pays more than under the table work because most legit employers will demand it.

I’m pretty sure the military cares, at least to the extent that it will cause instability. I’m 99% sure there’s something from the Pentagon to support that. I wanna say Pentagon wants us to address it before it starts making them do their job a whole lot more.

The problem is they lose their email address, which is tied to just about every digital account they have. Losing your email can royally fuck you. Many sites send an email to the old email of you try to change it, so you’ll have to get in touch with support to get it changed, and then support will want proof it’s your account somehow, and the whole process is gonna take days or weeks to fix all your accounts. God help you if you forgot any passwords because now you can’t login or even reset the password since that goes through email.

I don’t see that as a viable path forward. If lack of voters decide the election in favor of the opposition (from your perspective), the party most aligned with you will move away from you to stay competitive. If sufficient votes for third party decide in favor of the opposition, you might get some decent movement towards the third party. If there are so many third party votes that your favored main party loses and the third party rises, the dying party may want to enact change, but they’re out of power, and the newly entrenched party won’t want to do it because it’s now helping them.

Note that none of these result in voting reform. We know because it’s happened. It wasn’t always the Democrats and the Republicans, but it has pretty much always been a two party system once we got through a few elections.

If you want voting reform, unfortunately, the only way to make that a serious possibility is by making it a serious campaign issue and by fighting to enact it locally and work our way up to the federal level. It’ll be hard to go straight for the top, but some areas are starting to experiment and prove it’s viable. Next step is to go a little bigger or expand into new areas.

Unfortunately, a first past the post voting system always eventually results in a two party system. Rarely, a third party can rise, but always ushering the demise of one of the previous two. The only way we can escape a two party system is by reforming our voting systems to something like ranked choice or approval voting.

For individuals, particularly those without piles of cash, you’re probably right.

For large corporations and the owner class, though? Eh, that’s not so true. Being able to fund an army of lawyers means knowing exactly when you can tell the government to get fucked and being able to fight about it if the government wants to.

You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

That’s not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don’t go after Trump. He’s in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.

So then our problem is that we allow moneyed interests to monopolize home ownership so they can extract wealth from people who actually generate it. It is quite literally the definition of rent seeking behavior.

I didn’t realize I needed to have a formal policy plan before I opener my mouth. I’ll freely admit I don’t fully understand the intricacies of how we handle real estate, but the general belief that real estate prices must be protected and they must generally trend upwards is the unhealthy core of the problem. It prioritizes profits over human needs.

Aren’t there currently more empty homes than homeless in the US? Like, by a decent margin, too? I think that statistic is getting a bit dated, but I also don’t expect it to have improved. What we really need is to treat homes as homes, as essentials for life, instead of as investments. But, of course, that’d cost rich people money instead of giving them a way to make even more money, so we can’t do that. I’m sure some towns and cities could benefit from more homes, but the core of the problem is societal, not material.

It does limit choice, but so long as you aren’t retaining the generation list somewhere an attacker can find it, how are they to know your list? As long as your list is incorporating less common words, your attacker can’t even simplify the problem by focusing on the most common words. Just one rare word can expand the list they need to use by tens of thousands of words.

Trigun is a fucking classic. I need to start Trigun Stampede and see how that is… I’m skeptical, but it deserves a shot.

It’s wild that everything you ascribe to NATO is clearly some Russian shit. As if you’re steeped in the Russian view and trying to project it on the west. You think NATO is going to punish Ukraine for effectively losing a war they didn’t even start with a former global superpower? Western countries may have their own problems, but the geopolitics are too coldly pragmatic. Until Ukraine fully sides with Russia, they’d want to do what they can to prevent that.

the Ukrainian people, especially the ones being forcibly conscripted to go die on the front in a war they don’t want to even be involved in.

Another clear example. Ukraine largely wants to remain free. Russia is having to trick people into enlisting, including foreigners, and forcing them to fight. But no, it’s the Ukrainians that should give up because they’re the ones that don’t want to be fighting? For their own freedom?