Welcome to 1995.

Demeanor...yes. Policy? Mixed bag at best. Some things obviously good like telling NASA to go full private sector for launch services. Some things obviously awful like incentivising mass illegal migration by de-facto legalizing a large swathe of illegals through very tenuous legal authority and/or prosecutorial discretion.

If congressional Republicans hadn't had their heads firmly up their asses at the time (but I repeat myself) they should have impeached and convicted Obama for exceeding his authority on daca.

But again: people lose elections for being meanies, and they win elections by giving away free stuff, so there we are.

There's a Futurama joke from 25 years ago encoded somewhere in that comment. Oy I'm old.

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

Digitized voice signals and used an OTP distributed as matching phonograph records. Operational in 1942.

You appear to be reading from a songbook written for an audience I don't belong to, friend. I don't know what it is that you truly believe either.

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.

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.

Might as well spread the joy around developing challengers (not like that!). It's not like the prime mover in New Space is going to need any part of NASA's whopping $40b annual budget.

Selling your body scans as a VR skin. AI enhanced, naturally.