I was in NC and remember the energy in 2008 (tbf, I was in college so my bubble was definitely all-in for Obama).

I was also in NC in 2012 when the state voted to pass Amendment 1, making gay marriage illegal in the state’s constitution. Everyone I knew was against it, but because that was true for them too, no one could imagine it passing and so they didn’t even bother to vote. 35% turnout with 61% voting for bigotry.

All that to say, if you’re in North Carolina, go fucking vote. It doesn’t matter if your district is gerrymandered to hell and there’s no chance of it going blue; don’t let that make you apathetic. Your vote matters for how the state assigns its electoral college votes!

It wasn’t good phrasing, but I think their point is she needs to take action on day 1, not start researching/planning on day 1. “Trying to find out” being the operative words, versus, “now that I’m in office, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.”

Ok, it’s worse than I thought. I expect Trump to make comments about it being rigged, that’s normal enough.

What I didn’t expect, even despite the title here, is that he’d claim the White House pushed Facebook to suppress content in 2020, making it a rigged election. But he was the White House at the time!

Zuckerberg also referenced a now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop article in the New York Post. Zuckerberg writes in his letter, “the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”

Trump writes: “Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.”

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

Texas is also a voter apathy state. A lot of the apathy comes from gerrymandering, which I’d call a form of voter suppression, so your point still stands.

Also reminder for every state except Maine and Nebraska: your voting district has NO effect on who gets the electoral college vote for your state. Even if your state is gerrymandered to all hell and there’s no chance your district will go blue, that has literally zero affect on whether your vote is counted for president.

So go vote, even if it’s hopeless for the local races. Your vote can help flip a state!

The blonde girl with a ponytail in the top right and bottom right look like real photos from a rally. The other photos of groups of people with the “Swifties for Trump” shirts all have the plastic sheen and soft background that’s indicative of AI. If you start zooming in there are little oddities here and there that also make them look generated.

So I’ll buy there is one girl out there with her own shirt who got photographed twice at the same event, but I don’t believe any of these other photos for a second.

That sounds a lot like advice I read in some book (maybe Atomic Habits?). What I remember of the point was that your habits will follow your identity. If you’re a “former smoker,” you’re a small step away from becoming a smoker again. If you’re “not a smoker,” you have to consciously defy your identity to pick up cigarettes again, and it is hard for people to change their foundational perceptions of their identity.

I thought it an interesting premise. It seems in some ways opposite to the guidance of Alcoholics Anonymous, which as I understand it is that everyone there identifies as an alcoholic, no matter how long it’s been since they imbibed. That’s supposed to keep them conscious of the choice to not drink (though it might also be intentional to drive the community mindset and participation that’s also foundational to AA…)

Do you not remember all the leaks showing extreme bias towards Clinton, derision of Sanders, and even deals between Clinton and the DNC?

The emails and documents showed that the Democratic Party’s national committee favored Clinton over … Bernie. … The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership’s publicly stated neutrality, as several DNC operatives openly derided Sanders’s campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton’s nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. source

Or that DNC leaders argued in court that they didn’t need to hold impartial primaries and could select whatever candidate they wanted?

… DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate. source

For their part, the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise—political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts. The Court does not accept this trivialization of the DNC’s governing principles. While it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way, the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle. source

At the end of the day, yes, Bernie got fewer votes. But that is a small part of the iceberg, ignoring all the things that led up to it and all the biases at play in the organization putting the vote on in what I would (and did) call a “rigged” primary.

I agree with everything you said, except worrying about November. Stay worried, stay motivated to vote, and motivate others. Too often right-wing policies or candidates have gotten voted in because the left thought they had it in the bag and didn’t bother to vote.

I threw an idea out in response to a comment here right after Biden backed out and the more I think about, the more it seems likely to be right.

My theory is that the DNC likely timed Biden stepping aside so it would be late enough they couldn’t hold primaries for the nominee. It came out in 2016 that the DNC was basically rigged for Clinton to win, regardless of what voters wanted. The 2016 primaries caused dissension with voters leading to lower turnout, and I think that was also somewhat true in 2020. By waiting as long as he did to back out, Biden took voter choice out of it and helped rally everyone behind Harris.

I could absolutely be wrong, but every time I run it through my head it feels more likely to be true. And if I’m right, it is a bit sleazy. However, I have to admit I’m surprised and impressed by how it’s turned out. I didn’t expect people to rally so strongly behind Kamala, and I’m excited to be a part of it!

My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

Age 79 and up. They make up almost 5% of the US population. Source (Btw, 0.13% of the population is in the generation before the Silent Generation!

However, the 5% goes up to about 6% of the voting population. (Math: Using the source above, we can take out 12.76% for all of Gen Alpha. We can probably drop Gen Z to 15% total under the premise that if the same number of people were born every year, ~70-75% of them would be too young.)

6% still sounds fairly small, but that is over 16 million people.

Yes, there’s physical and mental decline at that point, but most of them still probably have the facilities to vote. Fuck, the current sitting president is in the Silent Generation and yeah, obviously there are questions about his capacity to continue for another 4 years, but he’s definitely capable enough to vote. There’s also mail-in voting that’s heavily used by these demographic groups.

It’s probably because it’s a city that has a large enough venue to host nearby rural folks who are his target demographic. If I had to guess, it will have low local attendance and the audience will largely be made up of people whining about Asheville and its residents.

Hey, I just made a post about this the other day! https://lemm.ee/post/39037973

TL;DR: in every state except Nebraska and Maine, the popular vote determines the electoral college vote for the state. So no matter how badly gerrymandered the districts are, the presidential candidate elected by the state is NOT affected!

The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.

Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.

One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.

In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.

IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.

And to put numbers to your points, London’s population density is 14,600 people per square mile, while urban Houston is only 3,340.

And if you want to talk about the broader metropolitan area, then London goes down to 3,900 people/sq. mi., which is close to Houston’s urban area. However, if we look at Houston’s equivalent to that the density drops to 862/sq mi.

Also, London’s metro is 3,236 square miles. Houston’s is 10,062.

Anyone who compares these as equivalent is disingenuous or ignorant (not necessarily maliciously so, but likely just unaware or oblivious to the massive sprawl that Texas cities have).

There are 2-4 HOV/toll lanes in the middle depending on where you are in the city. I only see 2 in this photo, and they aren’t called out in OP’s title.

There are some demographics where its usage is extremely common. I’ve come across multiple people who are on FaceTime calls while in public. Just walking around on video and speaker, talking to someone else. I can’t conceive of using it this way, but in some social circles it’s totally normalized.

This page has some interesting quotes. Reading through, it sounds like it’s hovering at or below the top 5 most common video chat tools. There’s a lot of bias towards quotes about 2020 usage so that’s obviously skewed, but that year at least 9-25% of various demographics were cited using FaceTime daily.

I use FaceTime 2-3 times a year to talk to my nephew, and maybe 3-5 times a year to screen share or show my mum things. But I do use Teams video calls literally 5 days a week (I try to avoid the video part when I can, but there are a few in leadership who really push for it. My company is never doing RTO, so I’ll accept a bit of video calling for the sake of permanent WFH!).

I think replacing the physical home button with a haptic button on the iPhone 7 also helped them improve their IP rating (i.e., water resistance). I could be misremembering that, though, and I have no idea if it’s relevant in this case.