A stretched the real numbers (33 states for Trump) for the sake of my joke.

Realistically, Maga passing a constitutional amendment repealing the 22nd (I think) that limits terms for Presidents is possible, but incredibly unlikely. It’s a lengthy process on purpose full of all sorts of ways to slow it down even further or derail it entirely. He has the political will and the power right now and for the next 2 years, but I’d bet if he’s able to pull off even some of his more spectacular plans, enough people would finally get it and he’d lose at least part of Congress, if not all of it.

…there’s no way that 3/4ths of all US states will agree to that shit.

We’ve had an extraordinary number of “there’s no way that…” moments in the past decade most of which have been connected to Trump, why tempt fate like that? The 2024 election map has more than the 38 red states needed to ratify a constitutional amendment.

It already is friend.

I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

I think you may have missed the point of the article. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume democrats don’t want to do anything about immigration. Trump and Biden both have basically the same plan to address illegal immigration. Harris’ plan is similar to both of theirs as well.

Illegal immigration is not nearly as serious as the average Republican might believe. They add strain to systems already working beyond their limits, but legal or illegal migrant workers aren’t displacing citizens at work and aren’t leading to the kinds of outcomes Mr. Trump would like his followers to believe. It does happen occasionally, but not enough to justify the alarming hate filled rhetoric.

The problem is that “poisoning the blood” is nakedly racist. The phrase has been used for over 100 years as a dog whistle for white nationalism. How can you have a rational discussion about addressing the real problems that enable illegal immigrants (American businesses hiring them) or the additional strain they put on already over worked and under funded public services if one side is ideologically set on the notion that migrants are evil?

I don’t think it’s reasonable to believe that democrats don’t want to address the border. Safe, legal migration into the United States benefits everyone. If we streamlined the legal immigration process and cracked down hard on businesses and individuals hiring undocumented migrants, that would address the bulk of migrants illegally crossing our borders.

Perhaps we make it a felony with mandatory jail time (per infraction) to hire an undocumented worker or own a company that employs them. Or perhaps we remove the exemptions some types of businesses enjoy from paying minimum wage. One of the reasons businesses hire illegal immigrants in the first place is they are cheaper than American workers because you can pay them less than minimum wage.

Right now there are a lot of businesses that benefit from cheap migrant labor, if we can break that trend, some of those businesses will fold, for sure. But do we want to let failed businesses that can’t stay open without breaking the laws of the United States to continue to operate?

Justice has very little to do with the US legal system.

Enlightenment: calling meetings yourself because nothing you do matters and getting paid to listen to assholes talk isn’t the worst way to pay rent.

Those are some thick, juicy crabby patties.

I don’t get everyone’s obsession with cybernetic implants. If I needed a replacement, sure. But could you imagine today’s enshittified corporate structure making a cyberlimb? 100% a massive up front purchase and a hefty subscription, especially if it’s not a functional replacement.

Personally I want a functional metaverse. Full dive computing.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

Eh, technical merit is only one of many factors that determine what language is the “best”. Best is inherently a subjective assessment. Rust’s safety and performance is the conceptual bible rustacians use to justify thier faith.

I also know religious people who have written books about their faith too (my uncle is a preacher and my ex-spouse was getting their doctorate in theology). Rust has the same reality-blind, proselytizing zealots.

The needs of the project being planning and the technical abilities of the developers building it are more important that what language is superior.

I like rust. I own a physical copy of the book and donated money to the rust foundation. I have written a few utilities and programs in rust. The runtime performance and safety is paid for in dev time. I would argue that for most software projects, especially small ones, Rust adds too much complexity for maintainability and ease of development.

I know religious people who could not explain their faith so specifically.

Is it really just old men saying stuff should remain in C/C++ to preserve their nostalgia? What a bunch of petty bullsh!t.

There aren’t many ways to organize raising the money required to build a better youtube or reddit. You could kickstart it, but you’d better hope whoever does the dev doesn’t sell. Another option would be a large open source ngo funding the development, but you’re still talking long timelines to completion.

There definitely is room for a more pro-social social media platform that isn’t a clone of something else. Paying for it is another matter.

SocialAI comes across as sort of a joke, or maybe some kind of meta-commentary on the concept of social media and cheap engagement, particularly after creator Michael Sayman helpfully explained: “now we can all know what Elon Musk feels like after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, but without having to spend $44 billion.” He also says it’s “designed to help people feel heard,” though, and is ostensibly a way to help people avoid feeling isolated.

Mike gets it. This is only the next logical step in social media. Why risk losing the ad revenue of users who feel more isolated using social media if they stop using the platform? Solution: ai sycophants that tell you you’re pretty.

That’s why we have police in the first place. After the civil war the South, in order to covertly recapture as many recently freed slaves as possible, created vagrancy laws, sundown towns, and armed police. In Alabama, where the video is set, the state made it illegal for black people to leave a job, once they took it. The police in the south, especially in Alabama and Louisiana, arrested thousands of former slaves and leased them out to local businesses, in some cases victims of that system would be put to work at the same place, for the same people where they were enslaved prior to the emancipation declaration.

It’s one of the most fucked up and evil things America has done. It’s made even worse because the practice has been in use for over 200 years and no one, outside a small percentage of Americans even care.

Private prisons and work-release programs need to be ended now.

Oh, so that’s where the creator of ReiserFS got the idea.

What would you have us do? Paxton isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and Texans do not have the power to recall officials. We can’t protest because in 2023 they passed a law making basically all protests illegal.

Even if Texas goes blue Abbott and Paxton are still in office because they’re not up for reelection this year. Plus the state is so gerrymandered, even if it did go blue nationally, locally the dems probably couldn’t retake the state government.

Hate to say it but even if Kamala wins any women or queer person in Texas who can leave, should.

I grew up in East Texas (and moved back two years ago). I promise you, most rural Texans will tell you the side Texas was on.

So the system successfully identified the kid as a threat, but was not able to prevent the shooting because the father bought the guy on behalf of the shooter.

How would you even prevent that? No way the 2a nuts would go for a temporary ban on firearm ownership (or at least new purchases) by family members. Besides something like that could be used maliciously very easily. You can’t take all the kids who post edgy shit online into custody, we just don’t have the budget and it’s probably not the right move anyway.

You could mandate therapy or some other mental health intervention, like a biweekly visit with the school’s counselor. But those nerds don’t need any qualifications so they might not be able to identify a credible threat or help talk a shooter out of their (likely unknown to the counsellor) plans.

There are a gajillion things we could try, if not for the blind ignorance of the 2a nuts.