They didn’t have a Project 2025 game plan going in like they do now.

The Republican Party has the will of the Supreme Court. That means they can rule for, or against constitutional changes unilaterally.

They have already ruled that the President is immune to the law if they are acting in ‘official capacity’, which they have left to themselves to decide if its official or not.

The presidential candidate has said he wants to go after the ‘enemy within’ directly referencing his political opponents.

He can go out and round up anyone with significant pull from the Democratic party, detail them illegally, (but now legal because its in an official capacity)

Anyone else who speaks out against the brutality will summarily be included in that.

How far off is that from where Putin has established himself, where elections are things they say the have, but is really just a form of performance art?

And I’m sure the Germans who “never supported the Nazi’s” were proud of their acts of abstinence after the fact.

Its a terrible system with FPTP for sure, but doing anything that makes it easier for really bad guys to get in power is enablement, full stop.

Will the really bad guys care about a protest vote? No, they’ll thank you.

Will the not so bad guys care about the protest vote if they get elected? Not really, they got elected while ignoring the voice of the people, so why change?

To fix the system you need to get the least worst option elected, and then get out and protest, and cause as much pain for the elected officials as possible to get anything changed. Means protesting at a level that is significantly impacting the economy.

Don’t fuck around with a ‘protest vote’ that’s going to do as much nothing as electing the Meh option.

No, its not like that at all.

It doesn’t matter who Meh and Oh no are for that voter. The results are the same.

If you have a Meh candidate, and Oh No candidate, and a Please Something Else candidate, and you vote for something else, its now easier for Oh No to get elected, because Meh has fewer votes.

Google (used to) scrapes the specific details authorized by robots.txt and uses it to make your content visible.

OpenAI scrapes everything it can technically see, ignoring robots.txt and feeds i to a black box and regurgitates it claiming it’s something new, that it deserves to be paid for.

Quite different actually.

I don’t know what part of the world you grew up in, but that hasn’t been my experience at all. All the women I know have been brought up to know this is the old way, and any man who thinks along those lines is a man to avoid.

It’s relatively easy to self host your own git repositories.

It’s just that Github adds a lot of extra value added features that help streamline things for larger projects, and this is why many people use it. For most people, the value they get far outweighs the inconvenience when it goes down for 10 minutes here or there.

Using git (or equivalent) is pretty important. Using github is pretty optional.

No, its a consequence of increased security and the inconvenience of have to sign out and create a new account when reselling the phone was an acceptable compromise, rather than an intended ‘bonus’ side effect. A lot of times companies do do that, but this wasn’t one off them.

This was your friend’s fault, and yours to trade cash before understanding how the system worked.

So cute!

What issues with minimum wage, other than the capitalists who are desperate to keep their costs down from crying wolf about inflation?

I’m still waiting for anyone to show data that raising the minimum wages leads to higher inflation. Should be pretty easy to show looking at the minimum wages across countries over the last 25-50 years, while also looking at the inflation rates over that same period.

As far as governments not raising the minimums, that is the result of poor policy when they were implemented, to not tie the minimum wage to inflation in the first place. People are more aware of that issue now, so hopefully that mistake wouldn’t be implemented.

I don’t really expect UBI to be implemented on a larger scale because the people who buy the laws won’t allow it.

Having the mass majority of the population trapped in jobs that pay just enough that they put up with it, while giving away all their time and energy to a corporation is exactly why the average person has no power. They’ve had the will drive to force real change sucked out of them.

UBI is a mechanism that can help them take back their time and energy to affect real change.

If someone doesn’t like how I look, oh well, that’s life. Seems this is a lesson most people learn in grade school - some people aren’t going to like you, you’re not going to like some people.

You’re not entirely wrong, but you’re also totally missing the fact that people are 100% judged by stature and not just in attractiveness, but in their value period.

The taller you are, the higher salary people will assume you already are making. During hiring, this means you’ll be offered a higher starting salary to try and make the offer more appealing to you.

Here’s an article that references the study I’m thinking of. https://merryformoney.com/height-salary/ If you care ,you can maybe dig up the original study somehow.

This sort of bias is pretty inescapable in our culture and will be I think regardless of our language. Preferred body shapes do change over time, even within the span of a single generation. Maybe tying more positive words around these words is part of that change.

If we want to fix the bad stuff corporations are doing, simply put a larger cost on those things. It’s that simple. Pollution, Safety, Health, whatever… price the negative externalities (economic speak for bad things humans don’t want) properly and the market will sort itself out.

The part where it goes right off the rails however, it seems now that its cheaper to buy and own the politicians, and buy and own the media to manufacture consent to kill these regulations than it is to operate responsibly. Which seems to be right around where we are now.

I don’t have much advice, but I’m in a very similar place, and I appreciate you asking and generating discussion.

This seems like a poor analogy.

“I don’t have experience with the ‘Megamart Pool TM’ brand of pools, but I’ve got my Lifeguard certificate through a training program that operated at a nearby lake.” Oh sorry, we want our applicants to be familiar with our specific pool with 50+ hours of paid visits logged. Please come back next year after you’ve gather this.

It doesn’t have to all be bad. If the city could get the head out of their ass, they could sort out the codes and get it done. Let people who work downtown live downtown. Shrink the driving and parking infrastructure, turn it into a walkable, bikeable area.

Rents/leases could go way down for the mom and pop shops that can survive in the new design.

Other businesses can move further out where the people are, so the suburbs can become more walkable.

If we made the focus on reducing waste, and making things easy for everyone, rather than how to make rich people richer, theres lots of solutions.

It does add context though.

If I just said “it adds context”, it’s not seen as a counterclaim to your claim. It’s just a new standalone statement.