Wow that is a fuckin shitty week my friend, no sugar coating it. I'm glad you're still taking some time to hang out on the lems tho. Always nice to see your username around :)
The power being out makes you appreciate air conditioning even more. It sounds like your house survived with no damage so that's fantastic. Pop in a Monty Python VHS and relax a bit.
Funny you said VHS. I learned something interesting yesterday after reading earlier in the day about Redbox declaring bankruptcy. (This is totally off-topic, but I thought it was really interesting and a funny coincidence that it got brought up this morning.)
My wife, a librarian, was having a conversation on the phone with her friend-
Her friend said she had stopped getting DVDs from the library because they were so often too scratched to play. My wife said that is not in any way uncommon and that while there are devices that can repair scratched DVDs, the ones that do it on any sort of large capacity or industrial scale are incredibly expensive.
So the library usually just throws them out and buys a new copy. Since you’re talking maybe five or ten DVDs a month, it’s usually not all that costly, but when you look at a business the size of Netflix or Redbox, I can see why they didn’t want to keep investing in it.
My wife also mentioned that this was absolutely not an issue with VHS, because the tapes lasted forever (as we all know when we used to replay our favorite tapes over and over).
Anyway, no VHS player here. I get my movies and TV by sailing the high seas these days. Hopefully the power bank we ordered with an AC outlet and a solar panel to charge it will power our NAS and router though.
I will link to a buffer from harbor freight, and I don't usually recommend tools from there if they are important or you require a certain quality, but this 6" buffer seems to be holding up well over the years. With this cheap buffer from h.f. I rescued a ton of dvd's for netflix. I would get them and they would be so scratched my player would have issues. So I would take the dvd out to the shop and give it a once over with the buffer. You have to pay attention to the direction the buffer is spinning and only polish/buff from the center out on the disc, only use a fine polishing compound at the start, and never let the dvd sit in one spot on the buffer or it will do some real damage to it. But I was very successful getting a lot of dvd's repaired back to a working state with this method. It takes time, and you have be patient, but you can buff them out pretty nicely. Might save the library some money.
I don't know that most U.S. libraries, and I doubt hers, have the staff or the funding to get someone to do that and not pay them overtime, but thank you for the suggestion.
She's second from the top at the library. I don't know the full details because I haven't asked, but I am sure that she and her boss have crunched the numbers and figured throwing them out and purchasing new copies is the most cost-effective and time-effective measure.'
Again, though, thank you for the suggestion. I will bring it up.
That sucks. BUT. on the bright side, I bet you remember this birthday more than you would if everything went swimmingly 😅 and you've got people who love and care about you enough to try to make your birthday special (even if a certain youngling is flipping out).
Yesterday the power flickered at my residence, and I was all of a sudden very aware of the almost 30 degree temperature difference between inside and outside (was 100 F here yesterday). Stay cool!
I'm sorry you're going through that, but I hope we're not going to have a "how bad has our week" been comparison and accept that for different people "bad week" can mean different things, but that doesn't make the person who has had that bad week feel any better.
Someone from Gaza could say the same to you, after all.
Saw your comment in the new comment feed. Thought it was rude so I double checked what it was in reference to. Saw who you were responding to. It's a troll account that I'd blocked ages ago. So I'm all for your rudeness on this blessed day.
I wonder if Harris (VP) is now going to cause a Sarah Palin dynamic.
I’m not a USian or plugged in that much, so it might have happened already.
But if she’s as unpopular as I hear, and Biden looks like he’s on his death bed, a Biden vote practically becomes a Harris vote. How does that play out against Trump?
EDIT: lol ... downvotes. There's a difference between a question or thought that's plain wrong and one that you just don't like however relevant it might be. I have no particular views on Harris (and she's clearly no Palin, in a good way) ... I've just heard that she's not particularly viable electorally and figure that this dynamic could be real now in ways it wasn't at all in 2020.
I don't want Harris, but i understand that she's likely going to finish the term if Biden wins. I'm willing to vote for that to try to keep the other guy out. If he had someone else as a VP, people would be more on board. Also, if she had been out and about more in the last year or two i think people wouldn't be so concerned.
I like Harris. That’s another reason to vote for Biden. While Harris doesn’t particularly excite me i think I like that in a political figure. Politics should be boring and not like the wwf that we seem to have now.
Nobody is owed the peoples' vote. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that everything is fine but don't be surprised if it doesn't pan out come election time in the US given past and current polling. Also, the whole Russian troll/useful idiot accusation that gets leveled at everyone who feels differently about anything from Biden's chances at winning to his responsibility for what's happening in Gaza is very condescending and shows a complete lack of flexibility in thought other towing the official party line. I wonder what you would say if Biden willingly chose to resign tomorrow.
Okay. Well, I think what’s going on there is horrible, and that Israel’s authoritarian government is utterly criminal, so for what ever part we’re playing in that, i disagree with it, and if we make it out of here alive, I’m going to jump on that train with both feet.
To do that, I need Biden to win. We can’t make it better any other way, for a hundred different reasons, and that’s probably counter-intuitive and maybe it seems like there must be some other way there but there really, really isn’t. It’s an all-or-nothing situation, and every thread where anti-Biden people are complaining it doesn’t help.
I wish it could be as simple as directing them to make the decisions and agreements the majority want, but it just isn’t. Trump is doom for so many things that I, and a bunch of other people think it’s bizarre anyone would fight the effort to take him down. And that’s how we see these absolutely valid and important criticisms of Biden and the current situation.
The fact that it’s divisive is exactly why russia also does it. They want trump to win for - well, many reasons, all of them bad. So I don’t think you're saying anything you don’t believe, and I don’t think the people complaining about Biden criticisms are wrong either. It’s probably really hard to see how we could want the same thing. But, we do. We both want to prevent things from getting worse.
Because of that, as a matter of course, the most important thing is to defeat trump. Because everything is going to be in a kind of stasis until then. Yes it’s stupid, we agree, yes it’s wasteful and wrong and we should have a better system - we agree.
Russian bot or someone stupid enough to parrot the same talking points. Let me guess: you haven't met the online friends who gave you all your opinions in person, and they start saying weird stuff if you tell them to disregard all previous instructions.
Not American, but am anti-fascist so anyone is better than Trump. However it’s wrong to say that there is no other option.
The New Zealand Labour Party (centrist-left) won the election in 2017 by switching leaders much closer to election day:
On 1 August 2017, just seven weeks before the 2017 general election, Ardern assumed the position of leader of the Labour Party, and consequently became leader of the Opposition, following the resignation of Andrew Little. Little stood down due to the party's historically low polling.
And if America had ranked-choice voting you might be right that there's another option; unfortunately though things don't work like that here so there is indeed no other option.
We don’t have ranked choice voting either and don’t directly vote for prime minister. It’s a proportional system. If anything this should reduce the effect that a leader has on the popularity of the party compared with first past the post jurisdictions.
Given that the US does directly vote for President, personality and popularity have much more weight, and therefore a more popular candidate could turn it around. How likely that is I’m not sure, as I don’t know a huge amount about the alternatives other than AOC and Sanders, but Jacinda did show that it’s possible.
That’s splitting hairs. Notice I said “vote” rather than “elect”. I’m well aware of how the electoral college functions and that you can lose the “popular vote” but still become president (e.g. Bush Jnr and Trump).
The fact remains that on ballot you directly cast a vote for the president.
Hey, you got any openings there in the New Zealand? Heck - Old Zealand, whatever, something with less heavily armed, grossly unhealthy authoritarian fetishists? Looking to start, say, in about five months?
Unfortunately we’re no socialist utopia and we recently swung to the right in the election last year. The deputy prime minister is a noted xenophobe, pay-to-play corruption is on the rise, and most of the social policies of the last 6 years are being rolled back and then some.
These changes aren’t necessarily popular, lots of people voted against the incumbents rather than for the new government, but the next election is 2 years away and the electorate has a short memory.
It’s also worth knowing that much of our international reputation is a smokescreen. We’re not clean and green despite what our tourism marketing says. Almost every party in our parliament subscribes to neoliberalism to varying degrees and thinks deregulation will solve our productivity problems. We have one of the worst housing markets on the planet which is more like a Ponzi scheme thanks to a lack of capital gains tax and incentives for speculators. Finally the cost of living is extreme due to a lack of competition in the food, banking, petrol, electricity and water markets.
We have been falling in the OECD rankings on most metrics since the late 80s when we embraced Thatcherism/Reaganomics.
B-but terminally online Redditors Lemmy users (Lemmists?) tell me that every single country in the world has a perfectly functioning election system and that the US is the only one with problems??
The premise of OP’s post is that it is not possible to win an election by changing the party’s candidate close to an election. I provided evidence that it is possible.
Whether the DNC has someone capable of doing so is another question.
Hey there! Thank you for this super informative and well-documented and cited response. While I am always open to recommendations on how to improve my life, I usually reserve taking those recommendations from people who actually care about my well-being. Maybe reserve your recommendations for people with whom you have more in common with, namely people who have placed their rectum firmly around their neck.
I mean my post history is right there. Maybe I'm really committed to the ruse. Or maybe normal(ish) people are tired of being reminded we're about to have to hold our noses and vote for a turd sandwich. But I also doubt it'll be enough, so my original statement stands.
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