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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I get it - I think at this point Trump could empty an AK47 magazine into an orphanage and his core voters wouldn’t give a fuck.

    I’d imagine there is a good chunk of silent “left-of-Republican” market though - people who have voted red because that’s what they’ve always done, maybe because their household is overwhelmingly Republican but they’re ready to break ranks, or even those who boarded the meme train in 2013 or 14 but are ready to get off.

    I suppose an awkward analogy is being in a group of twenty people trying to get in to a bar with one or two cunts who are beyond mangled - the sensible ones looking at them and thinking “yeah I’ve stuck with them this far, but maybe I can make a change and enjoy the rest of the night with people who are largely sensible”.


  • Outsider view from across the pond:

    It appears from the outset that the Trump camp is tripping over it’s own feet and stepping on landmine after landmine. Literally all Harris seems to have to do is stay on message, bat off anything too controversial, and let the opposition’s trousers fall down by themselves.

    It’ll be interesting either way. The only real surprise to me will be whether I’ll learn about key moments from news outlets or from mad memez first.





  • Oh man, this is awesome - it’s wonderful hearing from the practitioners of the art!

    I’m just trying to figure out what driver establishing the tipping point for breaking or the ban hammer - is there any empirical data to drive these decisions, or is the fediverse user base small enough that you act on “feel” or “professional instinct”?

    Managing emerging technologies fascinates me so any input - including the germs you’ve already volunteered - is very much appreciated 👍



  • Thamk you for the insight, instance administrator views are valuable and unique.

    At the risk of sounding like I’m presenting a bad faith argument, why ban them? I don’t like the whole “free market” analogy but surely it’s one of the liberating features of federated servers, being able to to largely express your votes or content as you see fit within the legal framework of the host nation. Wouldn’t the odd one or two mass downvoters/upvoters/theyvoters ultimately be a statistical abberation or is the fediverse still small enough for this sort of shit to carry weight?

    Open criticism of my view welcome, as always!





  • Thanks for taking the time to get back to me, it’s appreciated from across the pond.

    As for point 1, I thought that would be a strength. I don’t think anyone from backwardsville would vote Democrat anyway so his sexuality wouldn’t be an issue, but I’d have thought a different viewpoint would have been appreciated little more amongst the blue electorate.

    As for the second and third points, I guess that’s a valid concern. I’m hoping that the pivot away from ancient politicians taking top roles will make more of an impact and allow those with a shorter track record to shine - very much like the Trudeaus, Attals, or Marins elsewhere in the world.

    Thanks all the same!






  • Another story from the workplace probably worthy of a “who, me?” segment on el reg:

    An old admin grade at one of my last workplaces was… unique, in her approach to her workload. In the times that we haven’t had an admin assistant in post, the workload gets shared out amongst the team so the job still gets done, but it’s primarily menial and trivial stuff. It’s not difficult, but the way the civil service works, sometimes a ten second job takes ten minutes. It wasn’t that she was particularly awful - just a bit useless and had all the critical thinking skills of a common housebrick. Anything that needed a decision made became someone else’s job.

    Someone went in to to see her wanting another AA battery, to replace one in the clock to stop people from losing their minds having done a few hours in the office, but still only seeing half past nine on the clock. There’s none left in the store cupboard, so she logs on to the ordering system, and realises that they come in nondescript “units”, rather than the SKU style setup you see on most retailer sites. So, she goes for 10 - thinking ten packs would be enough for a while.

    A week later, a lorry pulls up at the office, with a pallet for delivery. Nobody’s expecting this, and we can’t lift it off the lorry for it being too heavy, and we had to get a neighbouring unit’s forklift driver to pop it off the lorry for us and leave it at our side door, probably for a pack of fags and a coffee. We opens it up, and hurrah, our batteries are here!

    All ten thousand of them.

    Turns out, a “unit” in this branch of the civil service is “per thousand”, so we literally had nearly a tonne of batteries on a pallet outside. We tried phoning the distribution centre, and they’re clearly not giving a fuck about something as low value as this, and certainly aren’t sending a truck to get them - this was now an “us” problem.

    One of the lads pulls out a stick of batteries, goes back into the office, comes back ashen faced…

    “Boys, the clock needs AAA batteries”

    We had a slowly dwindling mountain of AA batteries for about three months, literally people taking strips of batteries home at Christmas to put in toys, people bringing in old Game Boys or Game Gears just to try them out with a supply of new batteries, and a Sky Digital remote control with a now perpetually infinite lifespan.

    God bless the civil service.