• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Wouldn’t that be great, and I hope you get the chance to vote for it if such a candidate emerges. The extra gerrymandering and crippling of voter rights or just, you know, suspension of elections between now and then may have something to say about it though.

    Trump is not doing anything but saying “I’ll do this! And I’ll do that! And I’m the best at this!” And as long as he says enough bullshit all the voters say “of course he lies and says what he needs to say to get elected, but not about my thing!” Even if every week he contradicts the last thing he says.

    Short memories, unsophisticated voters, and single issue voting mean this strategy will basically always work. Remember, they have voters with single issue in, and you (or at least many in this thread or on Lemmy) are single issue out. Maybe well meaning, but functionally not a particularly smarter approach to getting the best available leader. It’s all “Fuck you, me!” and take the rest of us with you.


  • Right. Need to support everyone, universal healthcare, universal basic income, without religion, no with religion, with feminism, with support for men’s rights, with support for immigration, not too much support for immigration, with support for small businesses, without enabling corporate America, and ranked choice voting, and younger people, more minorities, elect a woman, with more communism, no, more socialism, with consequences for the right, with unity for all and put the past behind us etc etc etc.

    We get Trump because some entitled fuckers from every. single. camp. (often with conflicting interests) say “earn MY vote” or go to hell. The straight white cis bible thumping camp is voting as a bloc all the time. This is why D can’t get anything done: there is no sparkling unicorn candidate. Sometimes a little better is all you get. Lefties complain about people on the right being single issue voters, then turn around and single issue don’t vote.

    Thanks for the nut punch of a president.





  • Just two cents on “downloading”. System setup and programs are basically all from your distro’s package manager with sometimes a couple of things from GitHub if you have particular needs.

    For the rest of stuff (media / files / more) there is no windows defender and I don’t personally try to chase down antivirus. You can totally get malicious stuff out there so maybe don’t click pop ups and download everything the pirate bay has to offer, but security is more baked into the Linux permission structure and user space. Find a guide and do it “the Linux way” if you decide you need to go set up deluge or transmission with a private tracker to get some Linux ISOs for personal use.

    Some people do a lot of sweating over the security of the system, but I would generally say if you need that… you’ll know it. Sure a VPN is a good idea (I don’t use one for anything), good permissions are important (I don’t play the immutable OS game), and encryption may have a place for you (or maybe not, not everyone needs a luks filesystem system encrypted at rest); but you’re making a setup that you can use / prefer to use. Make your own call, basically anything on the beaten track is safe enough and sane enough.



  • I guess I just don’t see it that way. Ive been to some “sellout” 100 person venues that do a fine business (for the business, the band doesn’t get a huge payday) and I’ve never thought to myself “wow, most people would pay money for this”. They were decent entertainment while I drink a beer.

    Most people are just not that talented, or they are decently talented but disillusioned about their probability of success. My ex BIL went to school and did a four year degree for timpani. Not to teach it, to play it. Do you know how many pro timpani positions there are in the country? For good orchestras, it’s fewer than his graduating class in college. Accessible or not, there is just not wide appeal for “pretty good”. I’d be more likely to pay people to stop singing or playing guitar while I’m eating dinner than to buy an album. I’ve also got a friend who is, IMO an extremely good and qualified actor who has been trying 10 years to make it in NYC. He sells real estate. EVERYONE there is an extremely good and qualified actor.

    Not everyone, and not even most, can make it in B.A. professions. It just isn’t a good choice of career or study unless you are exceptional and by definition, most people are not. A B.A. degree is like going out for the NFL: basically nobody makes it.




  • The money is going to the 11 people who are actually desirably good at those things as well as the networks of people / businesses / etc who support them. Make no mistake, there is bloat there and people who are undeserving but still.

    You can’t control what people like, or how good others are at doing the thing people like. Consider the lines of people who try out for American Idol or so you think you can dance, or everyone you know who has ever been on a garage band. Basically none of them makes it big. People like things that are exceptional, and will not pay the same price for something your friend Clancy is “really good at” or “really likes to do”.

    Edit: Unless you mean “produce” like the actual printing firm that makes and distributes books famous people write, in which case it just seems like a job: I don’t know that anyone gets rich or starves doing that.