I queued with two guys in a video game Wednesday morning who spouted that line. I was taken aback. How do you effectively respond to someone who says that? I didn’t handle it well, but I have thought about it a lot since it happened. I remember playing with shock humor when I was in high school, but that is beyond the pale.

Misinformation has been shown to be extremely effective. We just potentially voted away our democracy and the people that did so legit thought they were saving it.

We would just need Wisconsin or Pennsylvania to adopt it if the currently “pending” states adopted it. This is actually a lot closer to being possible than I thought.

I know this is about Fox, but I want to continue to share that neither is NPR. It is an independent nonprofit that operates independently of the government and gets less than 1% of it’s operaiting budget from federal sources.

This will certainly be brought up in his next bail hearing, eh? He’s a flight risk!

2023 Minnesota law Walz signed mandating free menstruation products in all public school restrooms used by students in grades four to 12.

Yep, that’s a scarlet badge of honor in my book.

Leave spacex board and sell or we nationalize.

Seems like a solvable problem though. We have a list of federated servers inately built into activitypub, right? Just need to tag results from those servers as being linked to a “lemmy” keyword search.

I’m sure I’m oversimplifying it, but all the pieces are there, just need search engines to be smart about how they index. Since there are a couple of federation based models that would be good to index, not just lemmy, it would probably behoove them to figure it out.

As I understand it, Lemmy, being FOSS, is pretty immune to this since there are no big tech shareholders to appease. Lemmy is susceptible to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) via something like Threads, however.

There are plenty of private companies that are shitty too. It definitely helps being private (and maybe is a requirement?), but you also have to have the right owners for private companies to be good.

2. fair point, agreed. I typically like things that move with changing times so the same logic works in 100, 200 years. Ages are more static than dollar amounts. Not tying the gas tax or minimum wage to inflation or cost of living has put us in a major bind, which is what I was thinking about.

3. Let them play that game (and hopefully get caught). Better than the in-the-open shit they do now. At least try

4. I’d rather it not specify so we can play around changing it with laws instead of having it hard coded in the constitution. There are ones that I like even more than straight ranked choice. Just get rid of the EC, though maybe just dictating ranked choice would be the right move.

This is a “should happen” list not a “will happen” or “could happen” list. No delusions here, just felt good to say it out loud, given today’s news. I’d also take that unicorn. My kids would go bananas.

Articles of impeachment is fine as this process stinks and I think this court failed, but we really, long-term, we need a constitutional amendment to make it clear that this is not okay.

I love the constitution, wonderful framework, but it needs the following amendments:

1. Anti-corruption measures on the judiciary (looking at you Thomas). Provide some teeth to enforce recusal and avoid conflicts of interest.

2. Term limits for justices and age limits on all elected/appointed officials at the highest level (justices, pres/VP, congress). Tie those to either the retirement age or a percentage of life expectancy (as we get older as a society, and work into our later years, federal officials should be able to remain longer too).

3. Divestment requirements for all federal elected and appointed officials. i.e. no more insider trading, sorry.

4. Replace the electoral college with a popular vote.

5. Replace the filibuster with nothing. Fuck that thing. Let the legislators legislate. If, whatever it is, is a bad idea, it’ll be shown to be a bad idea and the next congress will fix it. This is especially important now that Chevron is no more. The court just replaced rules created by executive offices with the most dysfunctional branch of government (congress) without any prospect of undysfuctionalizing themselves.

6. Congress shouldn’t be allowed to block supreme court justices without a vote. Once they are announced, they have X days to approve/deny or they are auto-approved.

7. (edit) I can’t believe this has to be done, but the President is not above the law. The president must follow the law while in office, following “official acts” or not. This is a fucking democracy, not a dictatorship.

While I know there are other ways to approach a lot of these and those ways are easier is not the point of my post. These are things that the constitution is currently WRONG about and it should just be fixed.

This is not really that surprising. Trump’s line is that Biden “stole” the 2020 election. People who believe the big lie actually think that Biden circumvented democracy. There’s no clear thing to fix this, that I can think of.

The only good thing with this in my mind is that, in their minds, they think they’re protecting democracy by voting for Trump, which means, if you take away the lies and fraud, the norms/belief/expectations of democracy including peaceful of transfer of power and regular elections are still expected to happen. Once the liars stop lying to them, our democracy should kind of self correct. The downside is they’re too far invested in Trump to recognize that democracy might be taken from them by a dictator and they’ll believe they still have power.

Our best hope is that, once Trump dies or is out of the picture, no one else can capture their imagination the way he has and he was a one-off. However it’s a big country and I think Trump might be just a blueprint for someone with higher aspirations than just narcissistic personal benefit.

Linux supports network accounts of all kinds.

They even have a guide for that! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install

Looks a lot like Immersed’s Visor glasses. Not sure which one is more likely to actually be released and actually meet expectations.