I can’t remember another recent candidate in the US that not only wasn’t super pro-Taiwan, but said the US should just hang them out to dry if the PRC were to invade the island. They probably like that side of him.
Plus, an incredibly vain, greedy and self-confident idiot is not the hardest of targets to get to do what you want.
They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.
A combination of factors made it happen. First up, you had low turnout. Only 20.5% of voters actually voted in that election, the lowest of the past 30 years.
Aside from that, Adams had strong support amongst voters of color. For people who don’t live and/or work in these communities, it can seem like voting against their interests and be surprising, but non-white voters are not a monolithic block. Quite often, majority black or Hispanic neighborhoods in the Bronx can prove more conservative than many people might expect, for example, particularly on social issues. A lot of my older co-workers from Latin America at the time, along with my mother-in-law, didn’t view BLM protests as legitimate actions to begin with, and just thought of them as troublemakers looking to break stuff and loot. The “tough on crime to raise quality of life” message was really powerful for many of the people I know, and they took it completely uncritically. There’s also a ton of super religious folks that won’t support Democrats over things like LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and other culture war GOP talking points. I can’t really speak to the Black community, but if you learn Spanish, there’s also just a ton of casual racism, sexism and homophobia that would probably shock people.
In addition to conservative social inclinations, lots of these folks are not what you would describe as well-informed. My elderly Ecuadorian, Dominican and Peruvian co-workers at that time were constantly buying into totally baseless conspiracies they got sent on WhatsApp. That and the 2020 presidential election cycle was super frustrating at home, as my mother-in-law would religiously watch the news on Univision, where they would trot out “scandals” and conspiracies that had been disproven weeks earlier and abandoned in the English-media, but Univision knew they could get away with airing for the significant portion of their audience with limited or no English. I even remember watching the news with her, my wife and her sister, who are both fluent in English, and the three of us getting upset that an interview in which we could hear the original English statements were being translated entirely inaccurately.
When I have an option not to, I don’t. Unfortunately, the way health insurance works here, I often don’t have an option. With the insurance I had through my previous job, basically as soon as I requested a second refill, the pharmacy benefits would go “Hey, we won’t cover this anymore, unless you switch to 90-day refills via CVS Caremark.” At some points last year, that could easily have been $500-$1,000/month more for me to pay for my meds in order to keep getting them at the pharmacy two blocks away, and I just didn’t have it. Instead of going there and having pretty much all my prescriptions filled in an hour or less, I got to enjoy Caremark not letting me refill until the last minute, then encountering shipping delays with medications I really shouldn’t have been abruptly missing doses of.
It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.
X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.
There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.
If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.
For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.
Maine is also plenty drunk, somebody needs to cut off the Allen’s coffee brandy supply and let them sober up.
At first, I thought this must be some abandoned barracks or aircraft hangar that got retrofitted into a private residence, but then I saw it was purpose built in 2004.
Yes, clearly everyone is in a position to just walk off their job at any point in time, with no consequences for being unemployed.
I don’t know why you’re trying to say that the people who work these jobs, and largely live paycheck to paycheck, have the same sort of freedom as people who are financially stable. I was making my state’s minimum wage at the time, which was entirely insufficient to pay for any decent standard of living. My co-workers who were undocumented were paid even less, had no recourse if they were fired for complaining about conditions or working “too slow” according the bosses, did not qualify for unemployment insurance and had a significantly harder time finding new work than I would. Just like the majority of people out working on farms in the US today. But yeah, let’s pretend it’s as simple as walking off the job if it’s uncomfortable for everyone.
Your comments make it apparent that you’ve never worked these sorts of jobs or been in these sorts of conditions. What, you’re going to just walk off the job because it sucks and become homeless when the weather and working conditions suck? Because that’s the sort of choice that faces millions of people in the US today. It doesn’t even need to be in agriculture, you can find similar conditions in so many non-unionized positions doing things like landscaping, manufacturing jobs, kitchen work, etc. Florida literally just passed a bill that removed employer responsibility for providing rest and water breaks based on heat stress during work being performed earlier this year.
But sure, everyone has several months’ expenses in their bank accounts and work in a field where they can get another job from one day to the next…
How on earth is this enlightened conservatism to point out that these are not fatal temps for an otherwise healthy individual? I guess the whole population of the third world that lives in the tropics and doesn’t have air conditioning just have superior genes according to you? Fucking hell, literally millions of people around the world live in conditions where they see temperatures as high, or even worse, and you want to pretend like it’s saying “Well this guy should have just been stronger and worked harder,” to point out that these conditions are generally not fatal for a person without other issues.
No, they are not good conditions, and the state has an obligation to provide decent conditions to all those who are incarcerated, but it’s asinine to act as though healthy individuals routinely drop dead from spending several hours at 96°F or higher in high humidity environments in absence of some aggravating condition.
A person working in hot conditioms has the ability to back out and find AC and shade if they are starting to feel heat sick.
Welcome to working in agriculture, where you don’t get to do this, unless you can afford losing your job. Keep on telling me how it is in a job you’ve obviously never worked, though.
Lol, tell me you haven’t worked in agriculture without saying it. These are not wet fields, it was drip lines strung over pots with a black plastic tarp laid out underneath, so you get to enjoy the heat being reflected back up to you. Yet another liberal on the internet that wants to speak on behalf of people whose experiences they have no frame of reference for.
How? Yes, it is absolutely abusive behavior, but these are hardly the worst conditions people work in. It’s literally been hotter and with higher humidity in New York for a couple of weeks, let alone the sort of conditions that many work in in tropical countries, or even a significant portion of the South, a great number of which are not known for extraordinary labor rights. It’s entirely possible to point out that something should not be permitted, while also recognizing it generally wouldn’t be fatal to an otherwise healthy adult.
This does not attribute any blame to the individual, nor does it reduce the culpability of the officers that subjected them to these conditions, fwiw. Just because something should not generally be fatal does not in any way mean it’s okay to subject someone to those conditions.
My experience has been that my coworkers across several jobs that have kids tend to be both less educated and more religious. Regardless of income, my less ignorant coworkers tend not to have kids.
I mean, I’ve worked in agriculture pulling weeds in those temps and setting up irrigation lines. It was literally 30° F hotter in my job where I stand in front of the kitchen door a couple weeks ago. It’s a far cry from comfortable, especially if you don’t have access to water, but I can’t imagine dying from it, absent some other health condition that was aggravated by it.
Also, just to be clear, I absolutely think it’s abusive to leave an inmate in such conditions without access to water and shade, I’d just be surprised to hear it was fatal in an otherwise healthy young person.
Sure, but many people seem to suffer when it comes to distinguishing facts from opinion and interpretation.
For example, it’s a fact that Biden had a very poor performance in the debate. No one is really disputing that, though there have been various justifications offered for it. All good up to this point, but it falls apart when it comes to interpreting what that means for the Democratic campaign. Some are of the view that it’s too late to change the candidate and have Biden stand down, and that to do so would tank our chances of beating Trump. Others, myself included, feel like the hit he has taken is likely terminal, and that our best chance is to have him bow out and spin up a new campaign as soon as possible, in order to have the best shot at viability. Personally, I think the longer the delay on doing so, the more it becomes a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Either way, absent someone with a functional crystal ball or some time travelers that can give us a definitive answer, both stances are subjective and fallible interpretations of what the best course of action would be, based on facts. Yet, in the couple of hours I browsed Lemmy after my post-work nap today, I easily saw a dozen people accusing posters who stated Biden should step down of being trolls, Russian agents, useful idiots, and/or arguing in bad faith for merely stating an opinion. I’ve seen people who think Biden is the best shot get called stupid for holding that view, but it rarely seems to have the same power to kill a conversation dead in its tracks as, “You disagree with me, ergo you must be a Russian shill.”
To deny these disinformation campaigns, both foreign and domestic, are real is to be deluded, yet so is dismissing any and all criticism of the party or views that don’t hew to the party orthodoxy as being pure propaganda. Heck, even for people who have fallen wholeheartedly for such propaganda, you ignore them and dismiss them at your peril. If you don’t successfully reengage with them and manage to bring those individuals back into the fold, they could quite easily make up the margin that ultimately could swing the election. According to this NPR article, the last two elections were essentially decided by less than 80,000 votes each in a few swing states. Unless Democratic strategists have a surefire method that’s guaranteed to juice their votes by millions in those states, they really can’t afford to be leaving anything on the table if they want to win.
I don’t think it’s necessarily being so concerned with integrity as to deliberately self-sabotage, but rather that this was a potentially viable strategy 40-50 years ago, and many of the eldritch horrors in party leadership, Biden included, just haven’t gotten the message that the situation has changed in the interim. Part of Biden’s campaign pitch was that he’s worked in Congress for so long and has the relations that would let him reach out to the other side to get stuff passed, and he just gets taken advantage of when trying to do so. The Republicans have long since moved on to a strategy of “Ram through whatever you can while you’re in power, and obstruct, obstruct, obstruct when you aren’t.” They generally aren’t concerned at all with what non-GOP voters think of them and their actions, which lets them just bulldoze their way through the process while racking up points with their base for being effective at advancing the agenda, regardless of how hypocritical/immoral they are in the process. Just see Mitch McConnell when Obama tried appointing a justice to the Supreme Court near the end of his term versus his response to Trump doing the same.
I would also say there’s just a fundamentally different level of at least the appearance of integrity necessary on the Democratic side, and Democratic voters are less willing to accept that the ends justifies the means. This is clearly illustrated just by looking at the fallout for pretty much any Republican having a sex scandal, versus it happening to a Democrat. In his initial scandal, Anthony Weiner didn’t even engage in a criminal act, having sent a 21-year old woman a sexually explicit photo. In less than a month, Nancy Pelosi had called for an investigation into it and he’d resigned his seat. In contrast, Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case and has had heaps of sexual assault and harassment accusations brought against him, yet the party of family values, good, Christian morals, and law and order is still completely behind him.
For some of their more conservative members, they’ve certainly done so in the past, but I’m pretty sure that @[email protected] is just talking about the self-defeating obsession that Democrats have with appearing non-partisan. Yes, they do need to compromise to an extent to get something through the house at the moment, but they have essentially self-sabotaged in the past when they had the majorities to not need to do so, yet insist on negotiating with the Republicans anyway because they hope moderate Republicans will give them credit for not ramming legislation through in a one-sided fashion.
This really only works when the other party is engaging in negotiations in good faith, which the Republicans do not. As a result, the Democrats give the GOP initiative on steering bills and policies as they like, winding up with compromised legislation that doesn’t please their actual base, while also not getting credit from the Republicans they’re hoping to sway in some sense.
For an easy example of this, look at talks about eliminating the filibuster earlier in Biden’s presidency. Manchin and Sinema made it a dead idea, but even before that, Biden has been opposed because of his obsession with reaching across the aisle in an age where trying to do so only serves to stop his agenda dead in its tracks. Rather than get their elbows out and bully the two hold outs into falling in line (which was supposed to be what Manchin was good for, at least. I kept hearing, “He disrupts things, but he falls in line when it counts,” but pretty much never saw evidence of this), they just shrugged and collectively let the agenda die or get neutered, because to do otherwise would not be bipartisan.
Part of this seems like it’s attributable to changes in lifestyle and material conditions of younger people, relative to their parents. Different aesthetics might mean their parents’ stuff looks incredibly gaudy to them, and doesn’t go with anything else in their apartment. My parents’ home is larger than any place I can reasonably expect to be able to afford, so I also don’t want their big dining room table that I’d have to pay for storage on for years before I can afford a space that it will immediately fill all of. Even if it’s a nice piece of furniture, that’s just a pain in the neck to go through, all for something I might never get to use.
On the topic of collections, boomers just fundamentally ignore key parts of collectibility. First, old collectables only became so valuable precisely because people weren’t obsessively hording and caring for everything with the intent of selling it down the line. Old Superman comics are rare and valuable due to people who bought them at the time they first came out largely treating them as disposable. They didn’t assume they were anything special that merited being held on to and cared for, so they didn’t. When everyone and their dog buys up commemorative plate sets, or Beanie Babies, or whatever other collectable grift boomers fell for, and they take great care of them, they don’t generally see their value do anything but decrease. The supply doesn’t get significantly reduced, and everyone else can see that they didn’t pan out as the collectable investments they were billed as, so who would want them?
That said, even for collections of items of genuine worth, you mostly need to hope that whoever you’re looking to give it to is as into whatever hobby as you are. If I were planning on having kids, I think it would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to know what to do with my fountain pen collection, unless they were into them as well. Otherwise, it’s just a ton of fussy pens that seem to have a fair number of duplicates that are really only distinguished by knowledge I couldn’t expect them to take the time to go gathering. Then, it’s still a big pain to actually identify things, make sales listings and sell them off. Hell, I have the knowledge, and even I find it annoying to do so.
Maybe we could address this, in part, by normalizing expanding options a bit for inheritance. If my hypothetical kids aren’t going to know how to make heads or tails of my pen collection, but I’ve got a younger friend who is just as into the hobby as I am, it would be nice if I could just leave them that specific collection, without having to worry it’ll kick off some acrimonious squabbling. Failing that, have parents indicate who they trust to sell an item for a fair price if nobody wants it. You can take it and think about it, but if it’s just not for you, you’ve got a trusted source to sell it off for you, so you (hopefully) don’t have to go through an ordeal trying to find someone to sell it for you that will give you a fair shake.