The hardball/no hardball train left the station a while ago.

The "I'm going to save democracy by blowing up a portion of it" line of messaging and action the Dems have taken up in the last decade is the thing that's both new and considerably more unpalatable than the regular back and forth.

Here's another example of how "fuck the republicunts" works in action. In my home state of Massachusetts, one may request a mail-in ballot by filling out an online form and then typing in an arbitrary mailing address. To authenticate oneself to the form, all that is necessary is your name, the town where you are registered to vote, the address at which you are registered, and the registered voter's date of birth.

There is no evidence that any ballot fraud has occurred under this system. And as far as I can tell there could never be evidence of such fraud. But considering I have to click through five captchas and give over my credit card just to be able to buy cheap shit on amazon, this quintessentially blue state prioritization of access over authentication is at best incongruous.

And here's the thing: if they made you show six forms of id to vote by dropping a stone into a jar in person, Massachusetts election results would probably look much like they do now. But it's the fucking hypocrisy of saying a transparently unsecured system is secure that leads me to conclude the dems have shit for brains or at least think the public does.

Idunno dude. Maybe got lost somewhere in between the race-bating nutjob...I mean wise latina...Obama appointed at his first chance.

Not saying it wasn't hardball (and one hell of a gamble) but you gotta get out of your own head and understand when it is you're spooking your adversary into thinking he's got little to lose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

and the subsequent explanation that seemed to strongly imply Hawaii put a borderline retarded individual in charge of emergency alerts for the state.

Of course. What better way to restore the people's faith in OurDemocracyTM than by openly planning to manipulate the machinery if government for narrow partisan gain?

Look guy, I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, at least not this morning, and when I came up in the 90s and early 2000s the Dems at could at least claim with a straight face that they were some kind of adults in the room about stewardship of national institutions and traditions. But that eroded with Obama playacting as revolutionary and it almost completely disappeared during Trump 1.0 and the summer of 2020.

Trump 2.0 is in many ways a similar disappointment to Trump 1.0, but given the proferred alternative in '24, and given the likely proferred alternatives in the pipeline, I wouldn't change my vote, and I'll vote for JD Vance's head grafted onto Ken Paxton's crotch before I vote for a democrat ever again. Last time being 20 years ago when I voted to reelect Ed Rendell in Pennsylvania.

The text never repeats itself or restates the same thing in a different way. There are grammar oddities that only humans make. There are no extra words for the sake of words. This doesn't look like an AI article, sorry.

For businesses physical access poses a problem, but for the mere plebs that have a computer at home it's not really a problem. Good thing we can still afford a home computer! (looks at memory and storage prices) err maybe.

This. If you had good speakers and an (at the time) good sound card, the music just got in the way of immersion !

Oddly in Skyrim I leave the background music but it is set very low, and there is still immersion. But not for DooM.

- you hear hooves in the next room..

So will be the eventual case for AI.

If you are the one trying to learn, you don't need some know-it-all doing the effort for you.

But if you want to cheat yourself into being a dumb adult, use AI all you want to cheat yourself out of learning.

I didn't say that's what they did. I'm saying if someone were to do that, it ought to be a firing offense, and I'm implying it's the sort of thing you might do if you have no qualms about talking that kind of trash at random strangers on the internet

Yeah. There's definitely a constitutional right to scrawl cartoons of your 9 to 5 supervisor as a subhuman animal on the breakroom wall...but only if it's about politics.

If I'm you're boss, and you are openly opining on why the business model that I am paid to make succeed is bad/immoral/unethical, then how on earth am I supposed to trust your work?

Or is the next democrat president going to pack the supreme court so that it identifies a constitutional right to corporate sabotage?

and subject to considerations and incentives of politicians rather than X mission success and success alone.

If a private actor were to lead with their own subjective considerations rather than mission success, they would either make it work or they'd fail entirely on the merits and demerits of their judgements.

If a government actor leads with politics and falls flat, you and I pay for it and if the politician gets reelected in a landslide for giving away our taxes to his or her constituents...well then, who's to say it was a failure at all?

Student loans are a but one example. Running the money printer to the tune of 25 trillion in the last 25 years is another. Look under any rock and you'll find many more but far less spectacular examples of government actors getting side-tracked by politics and wasting time and money in the process.

The one of the more innocuous examples I'll cite is the wall of text in my kid's public school teachers' and administrators' email signatures telling my about all the many rights public education and comminication in the obscure language of my choice I have that I need to be reminded of every time my kid's principal tells the parent-teacher organization thank-you for organizing some activity or other, or my kid's teacher sends a reminder about show-and-tell.

This is in contrast to analogous emails from the private daycare we used where all emails contained the necessary communication and no extraneous mandatory fun in the signature block.

Umm...that's not how it works here. While they're "laws", they're not laws as you know them. They're more like...suggestions. For example, if somebody breaks into your car and steals your shit, you'd call the police right? Where you're from, they'll file a police report. But here? The police say "That'll teach you not to put valuables in your car, dingleberry."

No, they're not secret beliefs. At all. I mean, I'm a diver, so I've mentioned how cold the water is even with a 7mm wetsuit before, and how I think I'm going to finally spend the money to get a drysuit.

Sometimes you'll have a situation like this: You're riding in the car with some friends, and the driver narrowly doesn't avoid a pothole. The same pothole that has been there for years. Somebody in the car bumps his head on the roof and says "Ow...Why don't they fix that shit? Our gas prices are supposed to be insanely high to pay the taxes that pay to fix that." So another one of us says "What DO our taxes pay for here?" and the answers range from "The high speed train to nowhere" to "Hell if I know"

In my experience, everybody who isn't a politician and lives in this state has a much lower opinion of its politics than progressive idealists outside of California do. That includes actual card-carrying members of the Democratic Party residing in this state.

Case in point: rsilvergun loves the fuck out of California's politics, and he's never even set foot here.