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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It’s a real fear, but they can’t outright fire most federal employees. It’s why they’re so into the schedule f thing, because it allows them to reclassify a ton of jobs as at-will appointment jobs and that would allow them to summarily terminate and replace those positions.

    It’s why they’re planning so many other moves like arbitrary relocation (they say ok your agency is now gonna be based out of Iowa, you can move or quit) blocking and cutting funding so that hiring is impossible and people don’t get raises, can’t find projects, etc.

    But based on the rhetoric I would agree that there are some very nasty things brewing, and being reclassified and then terminated for being a democrat isn’t a crazy outcome, which is bad.

    I have read that at first they’re gonna tread lightly, because if you outright destroy major agencies it causes huge visible blowback. So it may be slow at first. But on the other hand, it’s pretty clear after this election that no one cares about what people want, and they may be assuming that there won’t be more elections that they can’t fake so they don’t have to worry about people being pissed off after they get rid of all the agencies that work to keep things functional.



  • Unless we get a blow-out for either candidate that cannot be challenged, which does not seem likely based on the polls and battle lines, even if we have a Biden-esque victory for Harris, I’m fairly unsure of what will happen next. I personally doubt full on Civil War like in the Garland movie, or the actual civil war, but I would expect all kinds of shitty legal tricks, possible Supreme Court involvement and of course, stochastic and targeted violence, particularly towards immigrants and minorities. In other words, win or lose, I think the US may be in for a bad time. Hopefully I’m working in my assumptions here and it is somewhat more boring.

    To better answer your question though, assuming things don’t completely fall apart: the two sides already don’t mix much, which is part of the problem in the first place. We’ll get more govt inaction due to gridlocked congress, probably more defense spending and some states, in the absence of federal legislating, will continue to take a larger role as they have been doing already in the recent era.

    So basically more of the same, on a not-great trend line. Something has to give at some point, it’s hard to imagine how you could put the genie back in the bottle now, particularly with overall conditions in the world due to late-stage capitalism and climate change constricting each year.



  • I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:

    1. It ignores the very real number of voters who chose not to vote democratic or vote at all simply because of Clinton as candidate.
    2. it ignores massive mistakes made by a hubristic campaign that couldn’t fathom losing to trump.
    3. it supposes that people that voted green, would have gritted their teeth and instead voted Clinton, which is not a safe assumption.

    Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.

    I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.







  • It makes me wonder—would the dynamic change if there was only an upvote? So you could choose not to upvote, but the default action would be a neutral one, and if you liked/wanted to support/etc you could signal that.

    I see tons of posts on here now that are downvoted to oblivion, because they are a legitimate article that says something a group doesn’t like. There won’t even be comments on the post. So like a Reuter article that discusses Palestinian casualties and no comments and like -20. This doesn’t seem like a super useful mechanism. Or at least, it’s just functioning today as a content preference “I don’t want to see this typed content” as opposed to “this is bad info, out of line with the community, etc.”

    And despite ranking my list by either hot, or top day/six hours, I still see the downvoted posts regularly so the mechanic doesn’t even really do anything in terms of visibility. Or possibly there’s just too little content on a given community for it to get filtered out.


  • This is it, I’m pretty sure. I had plenty of brushes with nettles as a kid, but I’m not super aware of them to be able to avoid them as an adult. However I spend less time in high grass and forests, since I need to be present in the spreadsheet factory, and when I do make it into the wild, I usually wear pants and the like to avoid scratches, ticks and poison ivy; so less likely to get nettles.

    Side note: we bought some nettles from a local farm last year and made a couple dishes with them. Pretty tasty, if you already like tho ha like spinach or mustard greens (think saag paneer)





  • Everything about this screams fake. It also all sounds like a horrible idea. They’re basically discussing traumatizing inmates at 10x speed. Given that a lot of criminals come from a background of trauma, I’d wonder here if you’d be doing more harm than good. There’s claims in this article that are absurd, without some form of clarification. What the hell is a “creative scientist” as a title—I’m not familiar with that discipline. Also, let’s uhh say am that all this was real, and possible. This tech would be a net evil in the world. If you can use it to brainwash inmates into cringing when they think about doing crime, you can also use it to torture dissenters into conformists. Given that the tech is already aimed at an element of the state security apparatus, there’s like no chance this wouldn’t get used for much worse purposes. I think they’re also misunderstanding how prison is used in many places. In NA, prison does not seem to be about rehabilitation, but just punishment and getting free labor.



  • Dude I don’t think even the democrats would float this sort of plan. It’s one of those weird moments between planning the three stooges reich where he just glomms onto some idea that is actually super progressive without knowing it. Ultimately trump is apolitical personally I think—he acts based on narcissistic self interest, which is why it’s possible for weird shit like this to happen. He also just takes notes from whatever whackos are around that day, so you can be sure that any actual good or progressive ideas will get removed from the platform by one of the far right grifters he has in perpetual orbit, but still amusing to see.

    The democrats would say they wanted to do this, then complain they’re not allowed to, and then produce a plan that provides green cards to foreign grads if they agree to live in an underserved neighborhood for 5 years, have a specific blood type, and complete a post-secondary degree within 5 years with the intention of working in green energy development after. Like some caveated-to-hell means tested crap that lets them say they tried, while effectively making it near-impossible.