Schadrach

You know that AR doesn’t stand for assault rifle, right? The AR is for Armalite, the inventors of the design. It’s just a semiautomatic rifle with a detachable magazine, it’s pretty common to use as a hunting rifle.

And yeah, you see AR-15 and it’s workalikes all over the place because they’re flexible. Literally the most common rifle in the US. That’s why they’re so common in public mass shootings - those shooters generally aren’t buying a gun specifically for that sort of shooting, they’re using a gun they already have access to or what they can readily purchase off the shelf.

It’s not the best gun for any scenario, but it’s a good enough gun for most and that’s because it’s modular and the guns and parts are both commonly available.

See, that’s fine the first time it happens. But after a couple of iterations you should have enough experimental data to know the answer that means you don’t have to sleep on the couch.

Why does moving to renewables necessarily mean nationalized/socialized utilities? Imagine not being able to imagine a world where one thing you support is not inexorably tied to every other thing you support.

Why would renewable energy necessarily mean fewer billionaires? Major solar/wind generation plants have to be built by someone and somewhere, it seems like the best you’re doing is making billionaires pivot their investments/changing which people the billionaires are.

Right, but that’s not related to these emails as far as anyone knows.

If I recall that case was dismissed without prejudice, which means they can fix the bullshit issue Judge Cannon came up with to delay things, re-indict him and ideally convict his ass. Can’t use executive privilege as a defense (no matter how strained) for shit you do after you leave office. That’ll kick up a mountain of idiots on Xitter screaming about “double jeopardy” despite not knowing how any of that works though.

Assuming of course he doesn’t get reelected and pardon himself or some equally absurd bullshit.

Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that’s actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that’s older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.

I think fear that if a Republican wins office it will be the end of democracy and we will collapse into a single party totalitarian system is probably unfounded, yes.

I suspect the Democrat party feels the same way behind closed doors, otherwise we wouldn’t have heard their candidate at the time (this was before Biden quit) say “I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all and I did [as] good a job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about." That’s not a thing you say if you genuinely believe that this election is the last chance to save the country from becoming an authoritarian fascist state.

But really that’s besides the point - the point is that both sides actively engage in trying to terrify their voters into voting for them because neither can present a reason why we should want to vote for them in remotely enough numbers to win otherwise.

A man that wins votes by instilling fear.

This is one of those things you can honestly “both sides”. Trump tries to get votes by instilling fear of immigrants and trans, Dems try to get votes by instilling fear of Trump. Because neither for the most part are willing to present a positive reason to vote for them that would remotely get enough votes to win.

You do know there’s a big difference between a “default” option and a “mandatory” setting, right? Specifically that you do, in fact, have a choice to change a default?

Not forcing the user to proactively make a choice is not the same thing as denying the user the ability to choose.

Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn’t seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.

Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.

Don’t they, err, already do this?

I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don’t think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.

There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.

Oh now, we’ve been predicting the weather far longer than you imagine. We just haven’t been very good at it until fairly recently.

Biden is just as likely to win/lose as Kamala is, as is Bernie, and so on.

Thanks to ballot access deadlines in several key states, this just isn’t the case. It’s Biden or Trump unless one of them dies in the meantime. If you tried to field Kamala as a replacement against a living Biden, you’d end up with a number of electors under faithless elector laws required to vote for Biden despite him having stepped down to make way for Kamala, possibly enough to trigger a one vote per state decision.

I’m still of the opinion that Trump has gone way too far and there will be so many people coming out to vote against him, that he’s essentially running against himself.

You aren’t wrong about him essentially running against himself. It’s entirely about whether or not people who would vote against Trump actually go out and vote for Biden (or his replacement should he die) in sufficient numbers.

But it’s nearly always the GOP running against themselves, turnout is basically what decides US presidential elections. It’s just writ lager with Trump.

Theres more important things than physical fitness and debate skills.

Sure, sure. That doesn’t change that we’ve got a choice between an easily manipulable narcissist owned by proto-fascists and Russia and a case of elder abuse who at this point is lucky if he can string three coherent sentences without a teleprompter, or sometimes even with one.

Obviously we should all vote for the case of elder abuse, but the fact that this is the choice that we have is the core problem.

And yes, I needed to make reference to people being outraged at Biden being described as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” because holy shit were people angry at that characterization and holy shit would most of them be happy if that was the worst we could say about his mental acuity now.

Which is a real problem because his Vice President favorably compared Trump to Hitler and wants to ban porn

It wasn’t a favorable comparison. He was a “Never Trumper” until Trump was the obvious nominee this time.

The choice is between a narcissistic buffoon who will do whatever his handlers want him to so long as he gets to look important and powerful playing along or someone who belongs in a nursing home rather than the White House that people raged about being called a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” months ago because they thought it was an unreasonable because his admin was doing such a good job at damage control.

Part of it is that various states require that all candidates already be registered before now, so it’s Biden or bust in those states - they can’t swap him for a different candidate on the ballots there and they can’t officially transfer any pledged electoral votes for him either if he wins.

There are enough such states to win Trump the election if they go to him essentially by default. And if they all went to Biden despite Biden stepping down then we’d be in a one vote per state election between the top candidates, which leads to a Trump win.