So how could she have broken with Biden as the current VP?

If elected, I vow to cease all offensive arms and munitions shipments and funding for such to the State of Israel on day one.

What Hamas did on Oct 7th was an outrageous act of terrorism committed against a civilian population, but the response from the Netanyahu administration has caused orders of magnitude more death and destruction against innocent residents of Gaza, and this over zealous military response has enflamed tensions in the region and risks escalation into a much broader conflict.

I will still supply the Israelis with defensive funds for their Iron Dome, we will send them Patriot missile intercept systems, but we will no longer send artillery shells, bombs, ammunition, anything that can be used to further their wildly mismanaged offensive operations.

Further, I will actually commit to setting up and operating a temporary harbor for food and medical supplies to enter Gaza.

… Something like that, blah blah blah, make it clear that all sides in this have some level of culpability for wrong actions and that she will do what she can to minimize the harm the US is culpable for.

Let’s say she does that. Do you think with the numbers that DJT turned out that she’d have gained so much more than she would have lost that it would have made a difference?

IMEU polls in July and August showed roughly that 30% to 40% of likely Dem and Indp voters in multiple swing states would be more likely to vote for a Dem candidate if they did what they could to halt the Gaza genocide.

Would this turn off likely Republicans voters from her? Basically no more than they already were turned off from her. But she would have gained a whole bunch of Dem voters who specifically could not bring themselves to vote for a candidate complicit with genocide.

Let’s further say that she did, and it was, and she won the election. She’s now thrown a long-term, strategic ally under the bus on the world stage. Not only that, she’ll have to forcibly disarm them, potentially feeding them to the wolves in the Middle East.

Nope. You can stop enabling offensive action by ceasing to supply offensive systems and munitions, and still maintain your commitment to Israel’s defense by giving them defensive supplies.

You don’t need to totally disarm the IDF. That would involve going into a ground invasion war against our ally which is obviously insane.

This would not be throwing an ally under the bus. It would be stomping your foot down and reigning in an ally that’s gone on a mad rampage with bombs you have given them.

And please don’t mention “genocide” in your reply. That’s already a know variable in play.

Nah, I’ll use that word, because it is an accurate descriptor. I am not sorry at all if this somehow offends your sensibilities.

Ding ding ding!

Winner winner, idiot dog barfing up your chicken dinner.

Unless they just rewrite those rules/regulations to avoid that.

Which is their whole plan.

If you are talking about deontology and utilitarianism from two to three hundred years ago…

Maybe your characterizations are accurate.

But uh, in more modern ethical theory…

Both camps have realized that pure adherence to the older forms of these ideas leads to absurdities and moral prescriptions which do not broadly match actual empirical responses to hypothetical scenarios.

As a result, most modern ethical theories are some kind of a hybrid of deontologic and utilitarian principles.

Nurse bursts in to OR

Doctor!

This new study show that there is a 30% chance the patient will die if you ignore this allergic reaction they may have if you keep pursuing your current treatment plan!

Doctor scoffs

It can’t be that big a deal, if this was serious, the patient’s family would have let me know by mailing me that study with appended handwritten notes from my favorite peer reviewers from JAMA, and a gold star sticker!

But Doctor! It’s not the job of the family to know how to practice medicine, that’s your job! And anyway, I have a copy of the study right here!

Pff, no appended notes, no gold star, ignored.

Patient dies.

Huh, damn, things might have been different if the family had told me how to do my job in the exact, precise manner in which I accept advice. Oh well! Maybe the next patient’s family will figure out the correct way to tell me how to do my job next time. After all, I can’t be held responsible for not accepting information readily available to me… without a gold star sticker!

So uh, skipping a bunch of excess lore:

“Dogs are one of the most beloved pets in the world. They are loyal, friendly and make great companions. Despite their differences, all dogs share a few key traits – they are affectionate, protective of their owners, and eager to please. Dogs require proper care, including regular exercise, grooming, and veterinary checkups. In return, they provide unconditional love and can even improve their owner’s physical and mental health. Whether as a family pet or a working animal, dogs have been an integral part of human society for thousands of years.”

The chat bot is named after a dog because a dog-named chatbot is more likely to make users treat it with patience, kindness, and understand that it does silly things sometimes, but it means well.

Its marketing. PR.

Yep.

It would mean that a law that passes that just appends ‘and you are male’ or ‘and you are white’ now is legally valid without requiring judicial review.

Hopefully they are financially stable and have good enough job prospects to just be able to find a new job of equal pay in their area fairly quickly on a timetable of ‘i have no idea when i am going to be blacklisted’.

They did know it had a serious impact on likely Dem voters, and likely Independent voters, in swing states, and they did it anyway.

… Unless you’re going to tell me her campaign was somehow unaware of this fairly widely published IMEU poll.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/kamala-harris-israel

From July 25 through August 9, pollsters asked voters if and how the Democratic nominee pledging “to withhold more weapons to Israel for committing human rights abuses against Palestinian civilians” would impact their vote. In Arizona, 35% said they would be more likely to vote for her, versus 5% who said they would be less likely. The figures were similar in Georgia (39% versus 5%) and Pennsylvania (34% versus 7%).

Even bigger shares of voters said they would be more likely to support her in November if President Joe Biden—who dropped out of the race and passed the torch to Harris last month—secured a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. In Arizona, 41% said they would be more likely to vote for her, versus 2% who said they would be less likely. In both Georgia and Pennsylvania, it was 44% versus 2%.

…

Biden dropping out and being replaced with Kamala was an opportunity for Kamala to change the Dem stance on this.

Kamala would have stood a much better chance at winning if she massively broke with Biden and did an about face on Gaza, and there is basically no way her campaign did not know this.

If you have a particular ideological hang up revolving around the difference between explicit and implicit consent to be governed…

You can view yourself as morally correct for not voting for anyone whom you do not fully support.

Thus you have not given explicit consent to either candidate, or the voting system itself.

Its basically ‘Don’t blame me, I didn’t vote, therefore I am not responsible.’

Its the trolley problem, but you just walk away from both tracks and the lever, and then claim that you did not consciously act to cause any harm, therefore you are guiltless.

…

Unfortunately by this logic it does also mean that you give implicit consent to literally everything your government does if you do not speak out against everything it does that you don’t like, or take some explicit action to countermand.

…

It’s an extremely sophomoric, cowardly and irresponsible stance to take in a situation like this, but there is an underlying logic to it… its just that this logic is ridiculous and absurd.

Until they get purged for not towing the party line.

Unless they’re synthetic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond

Apparently, ‘grown’ diamonds made up as much as 17% of the cosmetic diamond market in 2023, and by 2017, they were 15 to 20% less expensive than traditionally mined (almost always blood) diamonds.

I am fairly sure these graphs indicate changes only for federal income tax brackets, no capital gains.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/kamala-harris-tax-plan

Briefly mentions debt and rent.

No numbers though.

Rent/Housing Costs are 420% (up 320%) of what they were in 1982, assuming you live in or near a city, you know, where jobs are.

Wages are 120% (up 20%) what they were in 1982.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1raP7

Also, debt levels continue to skyrocket with approximately a third of Americans having a negative net worth.

https://www.creditkarma.com/about/commentary/americans-have-a-net-worth-problem-and-its-not-positive

But of course the article doesn’t want to get too specific.

If the goal is having less Americans living paycheck to paycheck, the solution is crash the housing market and also consumer (credit card) debt relief.

Until then, the beatings growing class divide will continue until morale improves.

Any streaming service with multi episode shows.

Even though EAC and BattlEye have both supported linux for 3 years now, and the devs don’t actually have to do anything as Proton functionally ports the game from Windows to Linux automatically at no cost to them.

… They’re lying.

Maybe for a smaller game studio, I could actually believe they don’t know these things.

But massive AAA studios that have direct business ties to MSFT?

They’re lying.

They’re saying anything they can to slow down linux adoption, because MSFT wants to dominate as a PC gaming OS.

They used to just ignore, play dumb, feign ignorance or perhaps just actually be incompetent… now they’re just lying to our faces.

Sure Apex. Show us your stats for how many cheaters you caught who were running on Windows vs running on Linux, and show us how at least a smidgen of methodology you used to determine the bare metal OS of someone running on a VM.

Cheating software running on Linux is more challenging to detect than Windows-based kernel-level tools, and they require an increasingly higher level of attention from the Apex Legends team.

So, for starters, this is not a direct quote (of the interviewed Apex dev), so this is basically just the author’s opinion.

More to the point: Purchasable cheats that currently defeat AC on Apex are far, far more easy to find for Windows machines.

… and they defeat Kernel level AC on Windows all the time.

Also, Apex uses EAC which uh… supports linux, has for 3 years.

https://onlineservices.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck

EDIT 2: The article states Apex uses BattlEye, not EAC for AC… but all the info I can find on Apex says they use EAC? Maybe there was a recent change?

Either way, BattlEye supports linux/SteamDeck as well, also for 3 years now.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3104663180636096966

https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-deck/proton-battleye-anti-cheat-support

I mean maybe there is some truth to cheat developers preferring to develop their cheats on linux…many programmers prefer to develop things on linux… but they develop them for Windows users.

Like… I obviously do not support cheating, so I won’t post the links… but a quick web search very, very easily reveals that all the cheats one can purchase… well they work on Win 10/11… no support for linux is indicated.

Granted I am no uberl33th4x0r, but I don’t see any Apex cheats which are easily acquirable which support linux.

…

EDIT: Oh right, it is probably also worth mentioning that after CrowdStrike Y2K’d half of the world’s enterprise Windows machines… through pushing a malformed update… that interfaces directly with the Windows kernel…

… MSFT is now re-evaluating giving kernel level access to 3rd parties, and is looking to create higher level APIs (above the Kernel) that are less likely to expose Windows to massive system stability errors from 3rd parties, and looks to want to at the very least have much more involvement with reviewing any 3rd party code that accesses the kernel:

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3483641/crowdstrike-backs-microsofts-demand-for-reducing-kernel-level-access.html

https://www.securityweek.com/microsofts-take-on-kernel-access-and-safe-deployment-practices-following-crowdstrike-incident/

Maybe these Kernel level AC proponents are a bit worried about their Kernel access on Windows being either much more stringently reviewed, or limited, and are making a fuss about it by scapegoating linux, you know, as a misdirect?

Just a thought.

EDIT 3:

A quote from the article I linked pertaining to BattlEye

BattlEye’s Steam Deck compatibility is great news, but its arrival on the handheld comes with small print. According to the anti-cheat solution’s clarification, developers will have to “opt-in”, suggesting that specific games could forgo compatibility. While it’s hard to think of a compelling reason why a company would want to do this, Valve’s PC competitors could, in theory, use the option to their advantage.

Pff, what an outlandish notion, that giant AAA studios (who all have massive business ties to MSFT) would exert pressure to limit linux marketshare/adoption, what a baseless and silly worry.

=P

The problem I am aware of is moreso that the number of programmers that know COBOL is vanishingly small, it … COBOL does not seem to really be taught anymore…

…so if something goes wrong at that level, you may be SOL if you cannot find an increasingly rare programmer that knows COBOL well.

DARPA has unironically been funding a tool that purports to translate C / C++ into Rust…

https://www.darpa.mil/program/translating-all-c-to-rust