Immigration is such a horseshit issue. Why are people dumb enough to fall for this shit?

Immigration will be “solved” come January, but not because Trump will actually do anything about it, but he’ll just say the problem is solved and then stop talking about it.

Too late for that.

Normal people: Biden being silly for the kids at an event.

Conservatives: Biden, running critically low on adrenochromes at a White House event, goes full mask off and attempts to bite a baby in the full view of the public to get at the nourishing blood supply in it’s youthful veins before the foul necromancy that binds him to this mortal coil wanes and the shell that houses his damned soul is reduced to the dust of aeons gone by.

I’d like to believe that the only reason 2020 got so ratfucked in the first place was that Trump was intentionally not putting the screws on anybody to do their jobs.

A second Jan 6th won’t happen, at least not this year. A MAGA mob will show up at the capitol and be met by a fully prepared and well armed national guard, because Biden is the commander in chief and he’s going to take threats like that seriously.

If the house declines to elect a speaker, Biden could in theory put pressure on them to pick one. The constitutional crisis can swing both directions - yes the Republicans will likely try to avoid certification, but then Biden could threaten to not step down unless the certification happens, or hand over the reigns to VP Harris anyway by resigning. I don’t see it working in their favor to try something like not certifying or not electing a speaker, because they don’t have the luxury of Trump in the white house to look the other way at their bad behavior.

At my company, they used to be a lot more tolerant of it, but we had exactly one person complain about excessive use of coarse language and then HR cracked the whip. They still don’t really care that much about using swear words when just interacting in person with other people, as long as it’s not bothering anybody else, but they heavily police our work chat to make sure that all of our messages are above the board in terms of professional conduct. Which makes sense, I can’t really argue against the logic that the work chat should be a professional setting where you can communicate your thoughts and feelings without having to resort to using profanity. Sometimes people have to be reminded to not use profane language, but they never call anybody out specifically, they just send out “reminder” messages whenever they see it and usually the person who is responsible knows not to keep it up or else there will be a more direct reprimand.

It would be hard for me to not sometimes utter “fuck” under my breath while I’m at work, but if my bosses were concerned about it, I would just start channeling that into more work-appropriate language.

This emoji has two meanings:

1. the “original” meaning is based on the “shaka sign” from Hawai’ian culture. It’s often paired with the phrase “hang loose”, which generally just means to relax, have a good time, etc.

2. When mobile telephones first started to become mainstream, they would have an antenna that extended up and out of the phone chassis a speaker and a receiver that you would speak directly into, so people picked up this gesture that mimicked the shape of a cell phone. Pressing it against your cheek with the pinky finger in front of your mouth and the thumb covering the opening of your ear would be accompanied by saying or mouthing “call me” was pretty universally understood and was one way to communicate the desire to speak on the phone from a distance where you could still visually see someone but shouting was ineffective or impractical.

edit: some people have clarified that the gesture predates cell phones, which makes sense.

Unfortunately, a lot of smart people are under his spell too. I had to listen to the CEO of a medium sized company wax poetic about how he’s a super genius and the greatest boon to human ingenuity in a century, desperately trying to hold my tongue as I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.

I think he’s an okay businessman. That’s about as much praise as I’m willing to afford him. He’s definitely charismatic enough to convince a room full of investors that the ideas he’s pitching are worthwhile. Part of that is that his passion for these projects are genuine, and when you put somebody in a room with a passionate guy, the enthusiasm tends to rub off on them just a little.

Most of his investments that garnered him his wealth are just him being at the right place at the right time. Getting in on PayPal when Ecommerce was in it’s infancy and partnering with Ebay to take advantage of shopaholics who just couldn’t help themselves. Buying his way into Tesla right when EVs were primed to take off and pushing hard for an economy class variant that could be mass produced rapidly (in an already-made factory that Toyota closed down, no less!). Founding SpaceX and pouring a shit ton of his own money into rocket and aeronautics R&D right around the time the U.S. Government was looking for cheap contractors to take over the space program. I think the only project he miscalculated on was buying Twitter for way too much money when social media was really starting to stagnate.

His politics are fucking weird, though. Him being a Trump nutter is really not helping his “I’m a genius” image. I find his personality to be pretty repugnant. I already didn’t like him because back in the early days of Tesla he pushed all the management to essentially become slavedrivers for the line workers. I live in California near the plant and I had friends who worked there in production that got nearly worked to death, extreme overtime and weekend shifts, few breaks, the only saving grace was the above average pay that kind of kept them trapped in that hell of a job for way too long. Then the whole Thai soccer team incident happened and I was so over him. Haven’t heard anything about him since that has made me feel like he deserves to be the richest cunt in the fucking universe.

I suppose he could dismiss them, but considering he just had two recent attempts on his life, that would probably be unwise to say the least.

The minimum sentence is a hefty fine, but the judge in that very trial already determined that fines do not discourage Trump’s behavior, given the contempt punishment that he ignored, so I don’t think it’s going to be a slap on the wrist for him unless the judge truly is a hypocrite or a coward.

That being said, even if he gets prison for each of his felony counts, he can serve them all concurrently, a maximum of 3 years per count. So he could theoretically be out of prison right before the next election cycle with a year left to campaign for 2028, that is assuming he truly is sentenced immediately after the election in November and it’s not just pushed back indefinitely due to recount horseshit or Trump crazies doing another insurrection.

But there are other trials that are far more likely to result in additional prison time, the most important two being the classified documents case and the Jan 6th case. I have faith that the justice system will eventually follow through with punishing Trump, but the system is set up to slow-walk the rich and powerful to accountability.

USSS won’t just let him get on a plane and fly off to Russia. His security is their top priority, so allowing him to secrete himself somewhere without first verifying his itinerary and securing both the mode of transportation and the destination, would be unthinkable. That means they are reporting all of his movements to local law enforcement. Can’t exactly flee the country in secret when every cop in the state will know his exact position and have eyes on him at all times. If the courts think he is a flight risk, someone involved in the process will know what he’s trying to do and prevent him from going anywhere where it will be hard to get him back again.

Aw, but all my other bones are so low maintenance.

The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it’s just only in the last decade or so that it’s been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it’s being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights… the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.

The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is “Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade” it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don’t really care about. It doesn’t help that very few people understand the relationship between “the economy” as outlined by experts and “the economy” as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn’t matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that’s what they will remember when voting next time.

Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.

Mine is Magic: The Gathering, except I fully realize that I am pulling away from it and why.

The game sparked an immense amount of joy when I picked it up in high school. Now I barely recognize the game anymore. It doesn’t truly have an identity of its own and exists in this permanent state of limbo where 3rd party IPs are taking over the demand for new product and the rules are becoming so bloated that they can’t fit them on cards anymore.

This is such an “old man yelling at clouds” moment for me, because I heard just about every reason under the sun for why people quit the game when I was playing from power creep to changing art styles to just getting priced out of the hobby in general. I realize now that those people were not wrong, they were just not the target audience anymore. I am no longer a profitable demographic to pander to. I never buy packs anymore, and I’ve even stopped buying singles and I don’t attend tournaments or collect anymore, so why would Hasbro/WotC make products for me? Especially when there are deep pocketed whales out there who will pay top dollar for their favorite crossover set, no matter how silly or out of place it might seem.

I wish I could enjoy the game the way I used to, but I just can’t be bothered to hop back in when it doesn’t feel the same anymore.

When I first signed up for reddit, the upvotes and downvotes were not only separately tallied, but also showed the usernames of the most recent people who did them if you hovered over the button. Then very shortly after that they changed it so that it made votes private by default, and you could override it in the settings, but almost nobody went to check that box back on. Eventually, they completely removed that feature around the time upvotes and downvotes were combined into one. which along with vote fuzzing was one of the worst changes to reddit comments, imo.

Lemmy feels like old reddit right now, which is a great spot to be in. I don’t think you necessarily need public vote info, but maybe it could be enabled on a per-community basis? I can see some communities like politics not wanting to add additional drama to the equation while other more content driven communities might enjoy knowing who was giving the feedback.

A Toyota Hilux is more suited for combat than that piece of shit.

Breaking News: Biden takes big sip of water from “World’s Greatest Dad” mug.

MBFC: “This source is left-leaning.”

I’m inherently distrustful of anything that tries to tell me if a source is biased or not. Who verifies that the bot isn’t also programmed to have an agenda?

I think I’ll just stick to plain old critical thinking skills and evaluate things for myself.

There is a procedure for this. To simplify the answer, Kamala Harris will become President on inauguration day in any of your listed scenarios, since she’s the current VP/VP-elect.

It’s theoretically possible that if Biden drops dead today, that the DNC could manage to pivot to a new contender, but there are two significant problems with that:

1. It’s suuuper late in the process. They already called the primaries for Biden, so he has the delegates. If he dies, they go to his VP, so it would be up to Harris to give them to someone else at that point if anybody else were to be selected (essentially dropping out of the race herself). This is a bad move because giving delegates to someone who didn’t even primary will seem undemocratic, coronating somebody that the people did not even endorse for the ticket.

2. Replacing Biden with someone else doesn’t give them much time to campaign. A big part of the election cycle is traveling to swing states to convince those people to vote for you. It’s not that those people are suddenly going to go vote for the other guy (Trump, in this case), but they’re far more likely to stay home because they won’t be energized for this newcomer who didn’t have enough time to court their votes, or to convince them to turn out for their policies/platform rather than be apathetic about the outcome of the election.

You have a curious definition of “strong argument”.

It doesn’t matter to anybody who has already made up their mind to vote/not vote for him.

It matters that justice is done and that the system holds him accountable.