We live in a two party system. The only viable way to oppose the party in power is to support the other major party. I suppose one could also decline to vote at all.

But again...if you're not actively fighting satan-hitler by any means necessary, you're carrying water for him, eh?

Like I said before and will say again: a two party system seems to reward the extremists, thus it is necessary to throw in with the extremists who scare you less. Trump scares me less than the proferred alternative does.

I'd have to go back to 2016 right after he was elected the first time around. He made some conciliatory noises in an interview he gave to one of the major networks. That got drowned out by the pee tape or something.

If memory serves, he also condemned the neonazis in Charlottesville...except that got drowned out by the words "very fine people" in the previous breath. And....well...since he's literally satan-hitler that condemnation couldn't have actually happened.

Now I would like to pull on a thread: is it better to be openly crude, the way Trump is, or is it better the be slick, polished, say the right-sounding things, but to actually execute some pretty extreme policies?

Like school closures. Like blanket mandatory covid vaccination without regard to individual circumstances. Like deliberately declining to enforce immigration laws. Like shutting down the government in the service of political messaging alone (fun fact: the shutdown may be "over" but their massive air bubble it created in defense contracts sure as fuck isn't).

I don't claim to have a monopoly of truth on the human condition, or on statecraft, but I know what is unacceptable to me.

And tallying the unacceptable on both sides, I assess the Democrats as presently constituted to be more unacceptable to me than the proferred alternative.

I don't like the legalized jailbreaks.

I like even less the declining to arrest, prosecute, or imprison literal serial criminals who are free to kill innocent women on the train instead of rotting in a hole somewhere.

For example.

I did use my brain. It processed the following

https://x.com/KamalaHarris/sta...

as egging on the looters and rioters, since it was a literal appeal to raise money to bail out people arrested for looting and rioting.

What was I supposed to do? Vote for the woman who literally egged on the looters and the rioters in 2020 instead?

Fuck dude. If your side could field a candidate who didn't mindlessly wink and nod at the nihilistic vandals of society who insist that things like "whiteness" and property rights are pathological conditions, I might actually vote for some of them.

But then y'all have a hard time doing even that.

Here in Massachusetts, Seth Moulton is challenging Ed Markey for the Democrat nomination for Senate. Moulton actually had the gall to say that boys shouldn't be playing in girls sports because "trans" after the last election. And Markey is a nutjob. So I thought, maybe I re-register as unaffiliated so I can vote in the Democratic primary and vote for someone more normal than Markey who actually stands a chance of winning (whoever wins the Dem nomination will beat the Republican candidate by at least 2 to 1 here)...so I was thinking...

And then Moulton calculates that he can't primary Markey from the center so he has to go full left: Votes for the shutdown... repeatedly, promises a "trans bill of rights" whatever the fuck that is, and is out grandstanding in front of the local ICE office about how we shouldn't really be putting teeth in our immigration laws cuz that's mean to the lawbreakers or something.

So I think to myself.. am I going to go out of my way to change my voter registration and make myself cast a ballot for a guy who, however normal he may play-act at, is going full retard in his voting record and campaign platform? Fuck no.

Trump? Yeah he's a crook. But he seems to have at least some sense of self-preservation that nominally extends to at least some of the rest of the country.

Democrats? Also some crooks in there (politics after all), but zero evidence of being able to refrain demonstrably and obviously nihilistic national suicide policies.

You're making the mistake of thinking New Shiny zealots give a shit about portability. All they care about is winning their moronic argument.

Oh no, not the F word! How would the snowflakes cope? As for misgendering, that's just made up crap to placate magic thinking morons. You might as well talk and misspeciesing idiots who identify as fluffy animals. GTFU.

Okay bud. Whatever. J6 disabused me of the notion that our side did a good job keeping the whackjobs in check...right after the summer of love of 2020 permanently disabused me of the notion that the Dems were capable of anything resembling good stewardship of our country ... and four years of Biden technically being in office did nothing to convince me otherwise.

Both sides, indeed.

I've seen too much with my very own eyes to ever again believe that shameless cretinism has a partisan valence.

The Sierra Club and their associated treehuggers will fight tooth and nail to close down and/or prevent the construction of all of them, indiscriminately.

Electricity just magics out of the wall socket, dontchaknow. Why do any dirty building or generating if it's just there?

Unsurprising that antivax also (used to at least) overlaps heavily with environmentalism.

Sure that will keep the sort of monkeys that cobble together JavaScript snippets taken from Stack Overflow posts away, but C was already a hard enough language for them to learn so they were already kept away. The language itself still can't prevent people from doing stupid things or ensure that they follow best practices as the recent CloudFlare outage showed.

It may be slightly worse because there's nothing quite so dangerous as someone who believes they're not in any danger because they've got some kind of magic rock. I'll take someone who knows that they're handling something dangerous (bonus if they've got the scars to prove it) and treats it like it's something dangerous. Rust (or any tool for that matter) is of no benefit if it makes the people using it more complacent towards the problems it can't prevent.

Probably pretty good. Even if she's just an average developer (or average for Stanford) just having a father who started a business and a lot of other investments is going to give her a massive leg up on getting funded. Even if it's probably a crap product that won't amount to anything, VCs fund dozens of those every year because one or two don't turn out to be crap and pay for all of the others that lost. The description of what she's made certainly sounds like the kind of buzzword laden idea that attracts angel investors and that just leaves a matter of getting them to know about it.

It's probably a good investment if for no other reason than it will get loads of free advertising just because she's the daughter of Bill Gates. Half of the battle that all of these startups face is attracting users and she's bringing free attention to the product. She can absolutely milk the women in tech crowd if she wants as well for even more free publicity for the product. Even people who want to hate on her because of her father are just generating more publicity and when there's an ocean of AI slop apps out there, having yours be the one that people think of first and download is incredibly valuable.

Just because something was standard for centuries doesn't mean we should continue doing it if it's no longer necessary unless you'd like your doctor to go back to chiseling holes in your head to let the bad spirits out. There are still a lot of jobs that require people to work on premises because they need specialized tools or equipment that can't be operated in their homes. Software developers are not those people and while there may be occasional benefits to getting people together in person, that's hardly something that needs to happen daily.

Over time the companies that insist on this will go out of business. The best developers will tend to take the jobs that allow them to work remotely and the companies that employ more of those remote workers will have lower costs because they're not paying for expensive office space that they don't need. Perhaps none of the existing behemoths will drive this change, but some startup will figure out they can maximize their investment dollars by getting top developers who are glad to be able to work from home while saving a ton of money not having to rent expensive real estate. They'll be more successful on average than the startups that don't and over time their model will become accepted.

I don't think "US tech" is really the problem here:

The target has relatives back in China. China says play ball, or your sister gets it.

Sitting in a cafe in the city of Mykolaiv right now, everything runs on generators. Earlier today, around 7:45 local time a few shahed drones flew over the city, this was after a lqrge attack from about 6 hours prior. Multiple energy distribution systems were hit in multiple regions. There were people killed, some drones hit homes, there were myltiple kinjal (dagger) missiles launched from mig-31 platforms. I crossed the border to Ukraine over 2 weeks ago, spent a week in Kiev, a day in Lviv, a day in Odessa, etc. Everywhere there are issues with energy distribution. Where I am now there are issues with watwr as well of course. People keep going because tbat is what people do, nobody here wants to give up anything to ruzzia, they want to stop the war in a way that prevents future attacs from the scourge that is ruzzia. As to this lawsuit, it is completely justified but it is not enough. Europe is giving ruzzia more money every year in oil and purchases than Europe spends on this war, given tbat Ukraine is protecting Europe from putin taking this war further west, I find this behaviour atrocious.

Clearly you didn't read the link. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/1... CCP hates human rights and are not afraid to admit it.