ristoril_zip

@ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip

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ristoril_zip ,

If Trump had allowed his lawyers to mount the best defense they could, he'd probably have a decent chance at complete acquittal or a hung jury.

Instead he forced them to perform a "defense" aimed at his base and maybe some people with "soft" dislike of him and most importantly aimed at hurting his "enemies" and puffing up his ego.

I did hear a persuasive argument that he might be acquitted on the charges related to checks he didn't personally sign (his sons signed instead) but get convicted on the checks he did sign. From what was reported that means it's possible the first 10 verdicts will be "not guilty" and the last 20+ will be "guilty."

I actually sort of hope that's what happens because 1) it will prove the jury wasn't out to get him and 2) he'll be feeling really good for those first verdicts then get gut punched for the last ones.

ristoril_zip ,

I'll take the 34/34 but I have indeed seen a lot of "this just proves it was rigged from the start" etc etc already.

ristoril_zip ,

You forget your place, comrade.

ristoril_zip ,

There was a part of me that held out hope that she would at a minimum just not endorse Trump. Seems like she's decided to try to be his VP pick. Probably since Noem the dog slayer became unrealistic.

Indeed with Haley endorsing Trump now I think all the Trump cosplay idiots who've been showing up to court in Manhattan can hang it up.

ristoril_zip ,

What Republicans realized decades ago is this is fundamentally true. Every election is the most important election. They just leave off the "...so far" that should be at the end of the statement.

I think before Reagan (or maybe Gingrich) people could reasonably see some elections as less consequential than others. But the Republicans realized that it's all about building. Build a bench of charismatic, intelligent, possibly sociopathic individuals. Get them in local government and then state government and then federal government. Tell your base voters that you're building something that will one day pay off.

Just keep building, just keep building, and one day you have a juggernaut. Especially if your opponents didn't build to match.

Democrats spent the 80s and 90s assuming the status was quo. They spent the last half of the 90s and the 00s living in the fantasy that what people liked about Clinton was the fiscal conservatism without the religion, so they should be more conservative.

Only very recently have progressives started breaking through.

Now we have to build.

Luckily the Republicans have hitched their wagon to a human wrecking ball. That might let Democrats catch up sooner than they otherwise would.

ristoril_zip ,

Have to be careful on this one as you don't want to cause more harm than good. Make sure it's all focused on disabling pumps and valves while not increasing the likelihood of releases.

Some idiots would go around blowing things up causing massive environmental damage when what we really want to do is just leave the stuff in the tanks it's already in, or in the ground it's already in.

ristoril_zip ,

It's possible to build nice apartments that have a good amount of space to live in. But that's not as profitable per sq ft for the property management companies that have been buying up all the land.

There's also some minor regulatory reforms that are probably needed to allow a little more flexibility in building design, specifically around the required number/type/location of stairwells. But we have to be careful about that one because we don't want to make death traps.

ristoril_zip ,

We need to go back to a 90% or higher tax rate on income over some threshold, and fix the loopholes that let wealthy people have income that doesn't count as income. Especially the "take a loan and pay that back and all the activity there doesn't count as income for tax purposes" bullshit.

And tax corporate profits more, and make a corporate tax system that rewards real R&D (while auditing to prevent fake tax shelter R&D), rewards higher employee salaries and better benefits (instead of taxing those), and rewards infrastructure investments like new factories but also investments in efficiency, water use reduction, etc.

ristoril_zip ,

I guess on balance it's more important to me that the Democrats reject Greene than reject Johnson. It's clear to everyone that Johnson is "weak" (in MAGA support) and dependent completely on Democrats to get anything done.

Now that that's out in the open and he's slightly a MAGA pariah, he'll probably get back to more old fashioned Republican projects like destroying the environment, fucking over workers, giving billions to billionaires, and a blank check to the military.

I mean ... Freedom.

ristoril_zip ,

Keep in mind too these guys are writing and reading in like assembly or some precursor to it.

I can only imagine the number of checks and rechecks they probably go through before they press the "send" button. Especially now.

This is nothing like my loosey goosey programming where I just hit compile or download and just wait to see if my change works the way I expect...

ristoril_zip ,

Got a link for Biden calling them antisemitic (without also speaking against all forms of hate speech)?

I've heard Biden and others say that the protesters shouldn't be using antisemitic, anti Muslim, or any hate speech. I haven't heard him blanket call all the protestors antisemitic and only that. That's what they do on FOX "News."

ristoril_zip ,

Yeah it's frustrating when people say the equivalent of "the best thing you can legally do isn't good enough! do a thing you can't legally do!"

Rescheduling it is the best the Biden admin can do.

ristoril_zip ,

I'll let others address the "enshittification" angle but I thought I'd point out that "shareholder value uber allies" is a relatively recent ... "innovation" ... in economic theory, brought about by failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Milton Friedman in the last half of last century:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-made-chicago-school-so-influential-antitrust-policy

The rethinking of what the boards of companies are supposed to do (from maximize stakeholder value to maximize shareholder value) and how they can operate (from requiring justification to approve mergers to requiring justification to block mergers) really took off with them, and exploded when former union boss Ronald Reagan found "religion" (because Nancy's pussy was just that good) and ruined the economy for workers.

Lots of other people contributed, including Clinton after he "won" the 1992 election with 40% of the vote due to Perot splitting the Republican vote. His campaign of fiscal conservatism but without less bigotry became the model for the Democratic Party for the next two decades.

Anyway, Biden's FTC is finally working to help workers again, which might even release the death grip of the Chicago School from our economy. We'll see after November I guess.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/fact-sheet-ftcs-proposed-final-noncompete-rule

ristoril_zip ,

This genie is probably impossible to get back in the bottle.

People are going to just direct the imitative so called AI program to make the face just different enough to have plausible deniability that it's a fake of this person or that person. Or use existing tech to age them to 18+ (or 30+ or whatever). Or darken or lighten their skin or change their eye or hair color. Or add tattoos or piercings or scars...

I'm not saying we should be happy about it, but it is here and I don't think it's going anywhere. Like, if you tell your so called AI to give you a completely fictional nude image or animation of someone that looks similar to Taylor Swift but isn't Taylor Swift, what's the privacy (or other) violation, exactly?

Does Taylor Swift own every likeness that looks somewhat like hers?

ristoril_zip ,

What's really gonna suck is when people are like "holy shit why did they let us kill all the bugs if they were so important?!!"

Personally my property (2 acres) is free of all pesticides and herbicides. I'm killing introduced species of plants (trees of heaven and privet) by hand mostly pulling them out of the ground.

This year I might add Japanese honeysuckle to the target list.

I mean we're probably doomed to some sort of major collapse either way, but I'll do what I can on the micro scale and vote for people who will fight for the right path on the macro (e.g. never Republican).

PS - I do use poison bait inside for ants and cockroaches so not 100%. Only when they get noticable. Sorry.

Is there a more politically and ideologically diverse alternative for Lemmy?

I know the real answer is reddit but I really don't want to go back now that I've already grown used to life without it. I was hoping for Lemmy to be a viable substitute but it isn't. I can see how this place is wonderful for the certain type of person but that person is not me. My experience during the past 6+ months has been a...

ristoril_zip ,

I'm sure this will come if the wrong way but if you're genuinely concerned about discovering diversity of thought, you're going to have to tell us what your positions are for example.

I'm all for finding diversity, but so often what people who post these are looking for is an echo chamber. Like if you're really wanting to be challenged, and you're a conservative, go to https://socialistworker.org/ and read up.

But if what you're concerned about is the nerds in Lemmy seem to be left leaning, that's just the nature of smart creative people. We value skills and creativity over hierarchy and structure.

ristoril_zip ,

Don't forget the whole 13 billion years thing. The universe could be teeming with technologically capable life in the absolute sense yet have only a few intelligent/sapient species arise within the same hundred thousand year period, for example. Missed connections may abound.

ristoril_zip ,

I think what Snowden did was fundamentally good.

My only problem is that he could have chosen to violate the bad law in the way King and others have violated bad laws in an effort to shed light on their badness: break the bad law in the open where everyone can see, then get arrested, then put the bad law and the system behind it on trial.

By running away, he's given the people who are doing bad things a line of attack against him. It's bullshit, and doesn't change the fact that widespread warrantless surveillance is wrong. But some people will take the attacks against Snowden seriously. If he had turned himself in and gone to trial, that line of attack would be gone.

ristoril_zip ,

It just occurred to me that there are probably people who look at those bombings - after the war was effectively over BTW - not as evil (my view), nor as a regrettable but necessary way to avert American deaths, but as an actual heroic act.

Jesus, how do I live in a world where there are people like that running around having normal lives...?

ristoril_zip ,

I was with this article until the accusation that the Biden admin "stoked tensions" between Russia and Ukraine. It was Putin who invaded Crimea in 2014 and Putin who started backing and staffing separatists in Eastern Ukraine in 2018 and Putin who was talking about getting the USSR back together in 2020 and Putin who massed troops on the Ukrainian border in mid to late 2021, not even a year into the Biden administration.

It's absolute bullshit to blame those tensions on Biden. Complete brain dead, clownish buffoonery.

ristoril_zip ,

"Noooo it's our algorithm we can't be held liable for the program we made specifically to discover what people find a little interesting and keep feeding it to them!"

ristoril_zip ,

Do you mean "behind" like responsible for or in favor of?

ristoril_zip ,

The thing about this argument though is that what time we call the particular position of the Sun in the sky is up to us, and the way we schedule our lives around those times is also up to us.

If what is problematic to you about locking in either DT or ST is the way your work or school schedule interacts with it, change those schedules.

Or put another way if it's more important to you that sunlight time lines up with your arbitrarily imposed schedule is more important to you than the health & safety of your fellow Americans, you're "worse than dead" to us.

ristoril_zip ,

I mean, you're wrong because you're treating the times that work etc start & stop as somehow written in stone. So that deserves a down vote. We could have our schedules flex with the Sun if we wanted. Instead of flexing our labels of Sun positions to match our desired work start time labels.

ristoril_zip ,

I bet there wouldn't be a measurable increase in heart attacks that way.

ristoril_zip ,

I know of several large corporations that allow "summer schedules" for their workers. It wouldn't be hard to have four seasonal schedules.

ristoril_zip ,

Good. Replace them with housing. And or vertical farms.

ristoril_zip ,

This is Rockwell Automation management in a nutshell (in sure I'm not alone)

ristoril_zip ,

Most people are (probably correctly) treating this like attempted vote suppression by people who will definitely vote for other interests in 2024, or who otherwise stand to benefit from low US voter turnout.

But I'll take a shot at the premise: it's suspicious that subsequent elections could be "the most important."

But it's not really odd for "the most" to follow a previous "the most." You are the oldest you've ever been today, and tomorrow you'll be the oldest you've ever been. That will continue for your whole life. Most heartbeats ever. Most breaths ever. The longest modern humans have ever existed. The most times around the Sun Earth has ever traveled. On and on and on.

There are more humans in America today than 4 years ago. Even if importance of an election to an average American is roughly the same, the aggregate import to all combined is going to be significantly higher.

The real secret is that I think it will ALWAYS be the case that the next election is more important than the current one. But we only get to keep having elections if we keep voting.

ristoril_zip ,

Gonna be hilarious when someone does a meta analysis and sees that local cases spiked 3 weeks after every Trump rally.

ristoril_zip ,

Also it looks like she's reading Revelation so that's on brand

ristoril_zip ,

No.

That was easy.

ristoril_zip ,

I have a feeling she will be successful if they DQ her and she challenges it. Interacting with the bureaucracy of the state we are expected to do what reasonable people would do to comply with the rules and regs, such as follow the directions on the forms provided and follow instructions from officials.

It's unreasonable to expect a person to go digging for extra rules and extra regulations if there is no indication they might exist.

If the form had a place for aliases or prior names, then it would be ok to disqualify anyone who left out a previous name. If there were instructions to provide a list of previous names in a separate document, it would be ok to disqualify. Hell, if the person handing over the document or the website you download it from specifically stated that all previous names shall be disclosed, it would be ok to disqualify.

Most financial documents, for example, specifically ask for that. A lot of government identification applications (passports, drivers licenses, etc) ask for that. So when one encounters a form that doesn't ask for that, there's no reason to suspect that it's necessary.

A good lawyer will have her on the ballot no problem.

ristoril_zip ,

I'm sure there were sneaky C suite jerks who tried to use return to office to filter out some headcount, but I'm not sure it would actually be wise from a practical standpoint.

If office workers can get their work done at home, there almost certainly also doing extra work, 15 more minutes here, 30 more minutes there, because they're already at home. Spending a few more minutes isn't going to get them stuck in worse traffic. It's not going to mean their 7 year old is home alone. They won't be late for dinner.

The only people who lose in a remote work paradigm are the people who spent their time wandering around "working" by dropping in on their direct reports. Surprise, it turns out we don't actually need that!

ristoril_zip ,

Man I hope they vacate him, too. Only need a few more Republican resignations and the Democrats can take over this year...

ristoril_zip ,

They're idiots, then. Debates don't matter, but NOT going to a debate if your opponent does/will matters.

As far as Biden taking on Trump, that matchup will be fine, just about the same as last time with less COVID.

ristoril_zip ,

I'm confused, are you claiming the US is a tyranny of the majority or authoritarian? Or are you saying there are tyrannies of the majority in some state or local governments?

Nationally, we're definitely neither of those things. The presidency is determined by a minority because of the electoral college. In 2020 it was just a happy coincidence that it also lined up with the popular vote.

All through 2021 and 2022 the desires of the majority were stifled by the Senate because of the minority rule that's enforced there by the 2 senators per state part of the Constitution.

Looking at the House, it's minority rule there, too. Thanks to gerrymandering by state legislatures, a lot of Republican representatives are representing 60/40 districts and a lot of Democrats are representing 90/10 districts. You can see it by adding up the total votes by party. The Democrats would have a significant majority if seats were apportioned by the popular vote.

Now maybe it's the case in some states and counties and cities that you have tyranny of the majority. That definitely sucks if they're being abusive. But it's not the only alternative to authoritarianism.

ristoril_zip ,

It just never ends if there are 3+ people in the house. There's always clothes to gather, load, wash, move to the dryer, unload, or fold. Each individual load is maybe not that big a deal. But the ever present work lurking in the periphery... Ugh.

ristoril_zip ,

They're easy to understand: they are privileged and insulated enough from potential Republican fuckery that if Democrats lose elections, they are mostly going to be ok. They're mostly middle class or higher with secure employment or other economic support (parents, spouse), straight (or closeted), their religious status isn't contentious, mostly they're male.

The other group I'd expect would be extremely low information voters who believe all politicians are the same and it's a Coke or Pepsi kind of thing. That's not going to be super common with anyone identifying as "progressive" due to the very politicized nature of that term, though.

ristoril_zip ,

I didn't know Truthout was a CCP propaganda outlet. Glad to know.

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