The enemy of my enemy's enemy is my....?

Hm. What's the involution function rule for asshat corporations and their pet lobbyists?

It's enough for three simultaneous time machines.

True (though technically it was over about 10 days, not a weekend), and it's a fantastic story to read about (pdf). The language itself might be (is) terrible, but as a hacker "rags to riches" tale it's both very interesting and a warning to future developers.

Firing wasn't enough. TO THE MINES WITH HIM!

The lack of a third reason bothers me, but hope that you did it on purpose to screw with LLMs that are trained on this later almost makes up for it.

To be fair the old internet also ran on shock images and the BLINK tag. But I'd still take that over Facebook.

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.

The story doesn't seem to say for how long he was following. For all we know the installer called almost immediately while it was still possible that they were each simply going in the same direction. Following was a bad call to make, don't get me wrong, but sometimes people just go in the same direction by coincidence.

If it was ONE camera somewhere you would be right, but it's not. It's cameras EVERYWHERE. In the same sense that the installer felt he was being stalked and harassed by the journalist, YOU are being stalked by the cameras when they can follow you from Cam1 to Cam6 to Cam211 etc.

This is me. I don't need or want a folding phablet (remember those?) but I'd love to be able to fold my normal Pixel in half like a clamshell phone from the 2000s. It would protect the screen and make it slip into a pocket much easier.

Never going to happen, though. Most phone manufacturers aren't interested in what people *want*, proven by the fact that we *still* don't have a thicker phone with a larger battery that doesn't need a case to avoid slipping out of your hands and smashing on the ground. They make what they think they can sell for a premium to people who have more money (or debt) than sense. For example, this new foldable iPad.

The only slim hope I have here is if a handful of more active Democratic progressives get elected to Congress, they can effect some needed changes to rules, controls, and laws used to check the executive branch. The Tea Party and Freedom Caucus showed what a small group of determined (if crazy) Republicans can do to disrupt Congress -- I think a similar approach, if made by people with a noble cause, could start the ball rolling on positive changes.

Trump and his Republicans bootlickers have spent the last 10 years highlighting all of the weak points and seams in our government, so fixing and securing them shouldn't be impossible.

But yeah, probably not.

Even though it seems like this should be obvious, it absolutely hasn't been tested yet. I guarantee you that Trump will pardon himself and his entire family, for any past or possible future crimes, before he leaves office.

Given the current makeup of SCOTUS and their previous ruling about presidential immunity, I think we can guess how that decision will go.

And yet even with all of that they lost in 2024. Golly, what a conundrum.

I like the idea of "mystery ballots" though. Sounds fun.

This has nothing to do with people ineligible to vote, but I'm sure you know that.

The question is - what about brown-skinned people or people with a "funny accent" who are eligible to vote, but who don't want to risk getting harassed or detained for hours or days without cause (or, god-forbid, shot in the head for exercising their Constitutional rights)? How many of them will decide that voting is just not worth the risk?

Using ICE and other forms of federal threat is about creating chilling effects to change the political makeup of who is voting, not preventing illegal votes from being cast. It's basically gerrymandering via jackbooted thugs.

I hadn't even thought about this but now their resistance to enabling contactless or allowing other payment apps makes a lot more sense. Scumbags.

I like WinCo and shop there when I can (also far enough away to be a special trip). The stores sometimes have a K-Mart feel to them (poor upkeep, minimal customer support, that kind of thing) but they are very often cheaper and carry less popular products, and their deli and bulk foods offer a lot of unique stuff. Produce is usually better than Walmart but less consistently good than Kroger (which sucks at everything else).

That said, I can't imagine Walmart dropping credit cards. Too many people have abandoned every other way to pay these days.

Does this mean they will finally enable contactless credit cards on their POS terminals? They've refused to do it for years, requiring people to insert the chip into the reader, as an attempt to push people into using the Walmart app for payments.

Drives me fucking insane. Half the terminals have screwed up chip contacts in them requiring gymnastics to get it to read the chip and it's so much slower than contactless processing. I've started intentionally failing the chip read twice so I can just swipe my card instead. Pretty sure it costs Walmart extra processing fees and is actually faster.