Man, Microsoft doubling down on the whole “Let’s force most of our customers to purchase entirely new computers to use the next release!” strategy after it went so well for Windows 11 is just hilarious. Especially with hardware costs skyrocketing due to AI BS.
We don’t need an autopsy, just like we don’t need another article telling the public, who has already long since realized this, that Israeli influence and Zionism in our politics is toxic and that we need to cut ties with it going forward. We really just need a few things to happen. Least likely of all, if Democratic leaders finally pulled their heads out of their asses and started paying attention to doing their jobs and winning over voters, rather than just focusing on their bank balances, it would potentially preclude the need for more if they had the fear of their constituents turning on them to keep them in line. Failing this, it would be great if more people got politically active and, along with taking action and organizing between elections, they showed up to the primaries and voted out assholes like Charles Schumer. Finally, it would be great if current electeds and progressive candidates who manage to primary zionists in the party actually began taking steps to initially isolate the remaining Zionists, with the aim of eventually expelling them from the party if they don’t renounce Zionism and stop screwing over the civilians of Palestine (along with the other nearby countries Israel is constantly trying to steal land from), this country as a whole, and the world at large. The Israeli state, as it has existed since its founding in 1948, is a force for evil in this world, and needs to be stopped entirely. In a just world, Israel would be as isolated on the world stage as North Korea is at present.
The Democrats need to clean house already, and stop the shit with “Oh, but we’re a big tent party, so we have to be open to a littlel support for colonial genocide amongst our members.” Everyone alive knows this is a losing issue for them and is only getting worse by the day. The names of leading Democrats, like Jeffries, Pelosi, Harris and Schumer, are all going to be black marks in the pages of world history in the future. Quislings for a new age, but now they can claim they’re multicultural, since they’re not just reviled in their home land, but by anyone with a conscience and sense of morality the world over who comes to learn of their existence and actions. And I’m sure they’ll still be trotting out that Schumer is hated only by antisemites, Pelosi only by misogynists, Jeffries by white supremacists, while Harris gets the distinction of being hated by racists and misogynists. It’ll be just as effective at getting them back in the good graces of their constituents as it’s proving to be now.
Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.
No, the issue is one that has been around a long time now and has been completely ignored because most people don’t speak Spanish. Almost all mainstream Spanish media, from shows, to news, to social media has been far, far, FAR right for decades now. Like, it makes Fox News look like MSNBC.
Aside from that, they know they have a captive audience for many of their viewers, who are unable to go fact check them by consulting English-media. This is true for monolingual Spanish speakers, but also for many folks who have learned enough English to get by in their day-to-day lives, but who are not comfortable following or discussing something more complex like politics in English.
Pretty much every time I would watch the news with my mother-in-law, if they had an interview or clip from a politician dub over into Spanish, I’d catch them engaging in some fuckery with their translations. Either they would deliberately omit parts of what was said to make the translated part sound worse, or they would choose key words where they would pick a translation that is related to a more accurate word for the English word spoken, but with a much more negative connotation to it.
They’d also ignore when right-wing conspiracy theories get debunked in English, and just keep on pushing them for months after they’d been discredited with no mention of this fact, as though they were widely held, mainstream beliefs.
Then again, white Americans who don’t interact with either group very much seem to consider all Latino and Black Americans as two monolithic voting blocks, ignoring the reality of the many different cultures, national backgrounds and ethnicities that comprise either group. Lots of white people just think of them as solid, unreachable Democratic voters, for some reason. There are plenty of people in either group who the Democrats can’t reach, because despite agreeing with the rest of a Democrat or Progressive platforms, they hold deeply conservative religious or cultural beliefs on abortion and sexuality. Like, I hear people saying “¡Maricón!” on the daily more often than I heard edgy kids dropping the f-word on the middle school playground back in the day, and nobody bats an eye because rampant homophobia is still a cultural given in a lot of places, unfortunately. If you actually interact with any people of color on a regular basis, it’s probably not as surprising to see how the right can pull in greater numbers of POC by playing to the right themes for those deeply held views and prejudices.
Every time I bring this up people down vote me into oblivion
This is because you’re parroting blue MAGA nonsense while ignoring reality. Racism and sexism can certainly play into it, but you’re never going to be able to turn things around if you ignore other contributing factors and just go “I can’t hear you over the racism and sexism in your voice,” as you shove your fingers in your ears.
Attributing everything to racism and sexism when there is a massive and glaring factor that even the DNCs own internal audits place higher priority on, is like walking up to the scene of a car accident, seeing the black ice on the road and the skid marks leading up to the tree the car is wrapped around, and concluding this wouldn’t have happened if the driver had kept up with their scheduled oil changes. Nobody is going to take your analysis seriously when you ignore all the other contributing factors.
You know what? That’s all on me. For some dumb reason, I had it in my head that she was a Democrat. I’ll just go put away my pitchfork now.
How many times do this rogue Democrats have to buck the party line to work with the fascists before we actually get some party discipline? Yes, I get the whole “big tent party” thing, but there should be a point (which has long since and repeatedly been passed) where the party closes ranks and starts either censuring these members in a meaningful way, like a monetary fine or loss of some campaign funds or something, and escalate right up to expelling them from the party and making them campaign openly as the republicans they really are.
I’m not saying they should be policing every single action of them, but when you have assholes like Joe Manchon or Susan Collins, who tank key pieces of legislation that represent major planks of the party or directly work against the interests of the constituents, it shouldn’t be up to grass roots movements to primary these bastards, much to frequently do so against the DNC continuing to back them. They should already be gone based on their part misdeeds, and the party should be proactive in this.
I mean, it’s absolutely a sign of weakness - which is to say, it’s a sign that the incumbent isn’t popular.
It doesn’t have to be, though. Even framing it this way is kind of playing into the DNC’s hand on this matter. A primary just means that other people think they could do a better job of it than the incumbent, for whatever reason. It could be that the incumbent is unpopular, but it could also be that the challenger brings a new perspective or new knowledge to the table that makes them more suitable to hold the office. It could just be someone who wasn’t eligible to run in the previous election for that position, but they are now.
I’m sure there’s a cli program to just do batch audio conversion, but in favor of simple and least amount of hassle, it wouldn’t be that much work with fre:ac. You should be able to just open up the game’s directory in your file browser by going to the game properties in Steam, clicking “Installed Files”, and then clicking the browse button in the top right. Drag the wma files into an open window of fre:ac, make sure mp3 is selected for the output in your preferences and click convert. Or if you installed it in Wine, just browse to where you installed it, then continue the same once you have the wma files. Then just replace the wma files with your new mp3s, and you’re done. Honestly, you’ll probably spend more time waiting for your package manager to install fre:ac than you’ll spend on everything else in this process. Not as easy as just running out of the box, but really not as bad as it might sound at first.
but I think Americans just aren’t sure which plan will work.
I don’t even think it’s that complicated. Look at the overlap between Trump voters and AOC or Mamdani voters, or Obama->Bernie->Trump guys. From my perspective, it seems like there are a lot of people who want massive change in how things operate in the US, and a good number of them are willing to vote for whoever says they’ll really shake things up in office, regardless of the details of said shaking or the candidate’s political affiliation.
The Democrats’ problem isn’t messaging, it’s their message. They destroy their credibility with voters when they claim they’ll be able to fix things and make life better on the campaign trail, yet once in office, they work tirelessly to maintain the status quo voters are already so unhappy with. And when they do have a candidate come along who promises the sort of change people are looking for, who people actually believe are being sincere when they say they’ll change things and deliver for the working class, the Democrats and DNC have shown they’ll do everything they can to prevent that person from actually winning and sideline them as much as possible in the event they do win. The politically engaged are tired of busting their asses to get people elected or promote their policies, only to see the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, rolling over and watering down their goals in the name of bipartisanship, often before the Republicans even ask for it. If a Democratic Senator told me they were campaigning on free ice cream for everyone, I’d expect to be brought down to “One cup of skim milk for everyone at or below the federal poverty line, provided they can complete 20 pages of paperwork to prove they really deserve it, and submit this documentation on a website that’s only operating between 1-3pm on February 29th, but closed every other day during leap years and completely inoperable in regular calendar years,” by the time a draft materializes, much less after Republican obstruction and pushback.
It’s no wonder people have soured on them.
That thing better be running on TempleOS and be coded with HolyC, or I’m calling BS and telling people they’ve just found a new way to make LLMs even more annoying than they already were.
And idiots lap it up and moan about how the Schumer shutdown is going to impact their appointment at the doctor next month if all those crazy socialists, like Nancy Pelosi, don’t listen to reason.
That’s not really an inherent problem to buses or trains, but rather a problem with poor implementations of them. Build out mass transit and fund it properly, and they largely go away. At rush hour, I have 3 different train options that would get me from my neighborhood to the city center faster than I could by car, and cheaper on top of it.
If we keep on saying, “Well, it’s not good enough now, so forget about it,” we’ll just be having this conversation again in a few years, lamenting the fact that we didn’t take the chance to build out now, but probably with more people having even more cars.
National Socialist, I’d guess.
The head of Health and Safety at my previous job used to work at a mine, and he said that gains in PPE were basically a victim of their own success, in his opinion. Wearing your respirator and other PPE will go a long way towards mitigating these risks, but they’re not the most pleasant things to wear for hours on end. He told me that lots of younger guys would come in, start working and see all the old guys at it with their respirators on, but they’d opt not to wear them whenever they thought they could get away with it, since they didn’t personally know people who developed black lung in the field. That’s just what he had told me, so I couldn’t say how accurate it really is, but given the attitudes I’ve seen from guys in other fields towards wearing all their PPE, it wouldn’t really surprise me if it were largely true.
Would all the Linux versions out there be subjected the same 15 years of updates??
They shouldn’t be, since the model for updates is quite distinct from Windows or iOS in a way that I would argue should effectively meet the requirements anyways. If a distro releases a new version twice a year, outside of enterprise situations where a company is paying for support, there’s nothing to really stop anyone who wants from upgrading. They don’t charge for it, and while new versions might add out-of-the-box support for new hardware, it’s pretty rare for Linux to suddenly change minimum hardware requirements in a way that requires you to buy a whole new machine in order to run the latest release. The only case that immediately comes to mind is that of distros increasingly removing support for i386 machines, but in fairness, Intel discontinued manufacturing of i386 chips 18 years ago.
Of course, this all assumes that the people in charge of making these decisions actually understand the technology in at least a general sense, and it’s not being left up to a bunch of idiots who have refused to keep up with any innovations more recent than the fax machine, so odds are kind of crap.
I don’t play too much in the way of action RPGs, but it’s definitely an annoying thing that tends to pop up in JRPGs, though less so nowadays. Still, I do appreciate being able to dial the difficulty down as an option if I’m enjoying a game, get 30 hours in, and run into one of those two issues. If it’s not an option, I’d just drop the game, but it gets annoying when you’ve sank in a month or so of free time, only for a game to pull that on you.
I think that comes down to the genre and game. I’ve definitely played games where I was enjoying the story and wanted to see its conclusion, but couldn’t be bothered with a boss rush in the middle of the game. In a similar vein, games with sudden difficulty spikes in the mid- to endgame portion might benefit from it.
At the end of the day, I’m a working adult, trying to fit in having some fun with all the other crap I need to do. I don’t have time for games that need me to treat them as a second job to get good enough to make any progress in them, but games with random difficulty spikes or boss rushes that just serve to pad out play time by making you grind for levels or the ideal equipment or skills/summons out of nowhere feel like an annoying bait and switch to me.
It really isn’t, in this case. The issue is not the currency being used for the transactions, but rather two companies having a duopoly on processing those transactions that allow them to dictate terms to other people on how they can legally use their money. If there were two similar points of failure in processing cryptocurrency transactions, they would be just as vulnerable to having whoever occupied those two spots throwing their weight around. Sure, I suppose in that situation, companies could take payments to a new wallet easier than they could open new business accounts, and bypass the restrictions temporarily, but it still wouldn’t be a viable solution in the long term.
While pointing out that the public at large is just wildly ill-suited to be making policy decisions on many topics which absolutely need to be regulated, lest companies cheap out on worker safety and get people killed, you’re missing the far more pressing matter with this idea. This level on granularity is just absurd for direct democracy. The sheer number of votes such a system would entail would rapidly induce voter fatigue. Besides, even if it’s just opening an app and clicking a button, how many voters have the time to stay informed on relevant developments related to upcoming matters to be voted on to actually have an informed opinion on the topic, and of those, how many would actually turn up to vote for the thing? NY had 39.6% of eligible voters not cast a vote in the 2024 presidential election, slightly below the national average of 36.1%. Last year alone, Governor Hochul pardoned 24 people, according to her site’s press releases, 11 of which were the day before New Year’s Eve, smack in the middle of the winter holidays. You folks really think you’re going to get meaningful voter participation in 24+ elections a year (ignoring how many elections Trump would trigger with his presidential pardons, because this number is already unreasonable enough), when nearly 40% of eligible voters sat out the most heated presidential election in decades?
You can have direct democracy to an extent, but for the most part, you’d still need to leave the politicians and technocrats to do their jobs. Sure, there ought to be mechanisms for either the people or the government to trigger a popular referendum on a given matter (say, voters strongly feel that none of the politicians or governing bodies are reflecting their will on a matter, or a broadly popular policy is being blocked by obstinate opposition factions in a closely divided legislature, for example), but they really ought to remain exceptional incidents. Otherwise, you’re doomed to get bogged down by rule by committee under a different name, and nothing is ever going to get done.