Well, I know about that, so I guess I should have been more specific. What I don't get is the perpetual falling for it again. They get nothing they were promised, or they get a little bit of it temporarily (like Trump(1)'s tax cuts for lower income people which expired after two years) and then it gets yoinked away and they just come back for another round.

It really has to be the cultism that I don't get? Because I think we've all been where we thought we could do things we couldn't, some of us just extrapolated from lessons learned from failure...

I'm an oldhead programmer (still) in the games industry. You're thinking of DigiPen. (I didn't go there.)

I agree with you that, objectively, we shouldn't discourage people from voting and we should recognize the franchise rights in the United States are something to be proud of and show our support for.

However.

When you consider the electoral collage, gerrymandering, corporate lobbying and PACs, billionaires literally writing million-dollar checks to people to get them to vote (for "any candidate", wink wink), and now the Federal Executive trying to put its thumb on the scales by controlling which and how people are allowed to vote, it's really hard to feel like one person voting makes a damn bit of difference.

I live in a very red state. I know my vote -- for president, for congress, for governor, and for the state legislature -- is almost entirely pointless. Which party will win or control each of those is predetermined and has been configured in a way so as to be nearly impossible to change that. Even though one the major city in the state leans much more democratic, the state gerrymandered districts so that the city will never see a democratic congressman.

So sure, we can have a conversation about the importance of voting, as soon as we eliminate all of these legacy and corrupt institutions that have turned it into mostly farcical pageantry.

it's just a pipeline for techno-oligarchs

A commodity is an investment when you invest in it, expecting it to increase in value.

Most people didn't choose that part of this consciously, because they didn't understand it, and if they did, they didn't believe it.

What I don't get is how those people can think they're smart when the counterevidence is so persistent.

Because it costs money to leave, and I don't have enough. Another in a long line of stupid questions from cowards there, jerkoff.

No need to tell us you don't care about anyone but yourself, because you've told us in so many words many times before. What a waste of everyone's time.

Since you don't care about anyone but yourself, caring about what you think or have to say is inherently destructive to anyone who wants to have a working sockety.

I call it a stupid fucking idea that can't work proposed only by idiots, assholes, or assholes who are idiots.

The side where they commit fewer crimes than the people hired to police them, and pay more in taxes than it costs to support them. You Nazi maggots don't have any good arguments, run along now.

Surely we can trust Microsoft's statements on the matter! They have never lied before!

What drugs? There was no evidence of drugs, only of war crimes.

Between that and all of the AC posts about how anyone who thinks American officials should be held accountable is supporting Iranian terrorists this place is creepy AF. It's like the haunted woods in Oz.

Yes, but same for America as we know it. It's always operated as an oligarchy, no matter what dressings-up have been wrapped around that. It was founded on genocide and treaty breaking and slavery is in the constitution today and we still have slaves picking cotton.

And we were informed at least about the number of strikes due to an Obama EO which Trump tore up, but not until after through it we learned that he was authorizing four times as many strikes as did Obama.

I know that there was some text after this that's relevant, but there still must surely have been a better way to put this. Also, the odds of anyone responsible being held accountable for that ever are roughly zero.

Didn't it arguably already end with learning autocomplete?