AngryDeuce

So when do we hold the democrats accountable

When weve got the Christofascists in jail where they fuckin belong.

If someone comes at me with a gun while someone else is trying to set my house on fire, im going to focus on the dude with the gun, then deal with the fire. Theyre both a threat, but one is more of a threat than the other.

What you guys are basically wanting to do, to continue the metaphor, is go running around trying to find the hose while youre being shot at. And you know, thats fine, you do you, player. But dont act like its not completely natural and justifiable if most people, like me, would put their energy into stopping the bullets before giving even half a shit about the fire. The fire will have to be dealt with once the bullets stop. The fire will be dealt with, but there are bigger threats right now.

Im not defending anyone. You notice I literally called them Corporate Whores, right?

What Im saying is people need to use their brain and think strategically about the situation and not be all Pollyanna about it. I’m sure 80% of the people that voted for Kamala didn’t give a fuck about Kamala, I know I didn’t, but the FACT is, every person in a purple state that voted third party likely contributed in some way to where we are now.

You’re on a bus with 100 people and they take a vote for lunch. 40 people want Tacos, 40 want Pizza. The other 20 of people all want something different from everyone else…a few want sandwiches, this guy over here wants Thai food, those two old ladies want to go to a steak house. Are any of those people going to get what they want? No, obviously. It is a mathematical certainty that they will not.

But those 20 people, knowing they’re not going to get what the want, can still at least take steps to not get what they absolutely don’t want. They may not want either the tacos or the pizza, but they probably have a preference between those two. They can at least cast a vote for the meal they can live with, even if it’'s not their favorite. At least they can eat something, and won’t be sitting on a bus fucking starving for the next 6 hours until they stop for dinner.

As you said, people can vote for whoever they want. But here’s what you can’t do…you can’t dig your fucking heels in, refuse to compromise, and then whine and complain afterwards when the bus is pulling into Taco Bell and not Pizza Hut if you fucking hate tacos. You could have cast a vote for Pizza, it might have won, and you could have at least had that and not Taco Bell. It might not have, of course, but at least that was a possibility. The Thai never ever was. No matter how much you wished it were so. No matter how much you cry and complain.

This is like, functional adult sort of stuff. People have to compromise every single day, that’s life.

Thats the thing people that have never gone under or fainted cant conceptualize…its not like falling asleep, its a literal off button.

Ive fainted a few times in my life, as well as been put under, and its like one second youre doing thing, next second youre on the floor, and the funniest part is, at least for me, when I came to after fainting, I felt like I slept for 12 hours…like rested in a way that I never feel waking up from normal sleep.

I wish DisplayPort would become the standard already. It’s superior in every way.

HDMI is the microUSB of the video world and I wish it would die already in lieu of DP and USB-C/ThunderBolt.

First thing I thought too lol

Second I thought was “Prepare three envelopes”

If there’s a realistic choice beyond “Corporate Whores” and “Corporate Whores who also want to institute Christian Sharia law in the US”, and you still support the whores, then yes, I will be right there front and center to call those people scumbags all day long.

However, everyone knows that is not the case in US politics within the electoral mechanisms we’re currently operating under. Through that lens, being the person that knowingly votes for some niche candidate that they know isn’t going to win any election against those two, knowing full well that by doing that you’re making it that much easier for the Christofascists to scrape out a win and continue pushing this morality horseshit on the people…no, you don’t get a pass. Not anymore.

The cost of a dozen eggs is of no fucking consequence when LGBTQ+ society is under assault. The price of a gallon of gas pales in comparison to the fact that ICE is out there literally wiping their ass with the constitution every day and the courts have no recourse to stop them. The fact that your property taxes may be a point or two higher or lower means precisely dick when you’re watching a war be instigated and fought that nobody wants solely to distract the people from the fact that our president belongs on a sex offender registry so his movements can be monitored for the rest of his disgusting life.

I haven’t considered myself a supporter of the Democratic party since they sidelined Bernie, but if my choice is them, or someone that thinks the things I listed above are just fuckin great, you’re goddamn right Im going to pick them. Because at least with them we can stop the fucking bleeding. With the other guys, we’re just counting down until someone decides to trigger a nuke and once that happens elections as a concept are going to seem quaint let alone all the other luxuries we enjoy like running water or a functioning power grid.

We’ve normalized saying “bless you” after a good burp lol

My wife cannot abide me asking my son to pull my finger so I save that for when she’s not around.

In the lord of the rings mmo back in the day you could play an instrument and actually play notes and program songs to play them in game but most people would just post up at the inn, like dozens of people, and just play the most discordant faceroll shit imaginable to the point where you had to disable it in the settings.

Kinda broke the immersion a little bit, unless roving squads of bards performing the medieval equivalent of a yoko ono song in everybody’s face was a commonplace occurrence in those days.

When I turned 30 I was quite ate up about it.

Now almost 20 years beyond that point, when a colleague turns 30, “oh whatever you’re still just a baby lol”

Funny how that works

Working in IT, what I’ve seen so far has been terrifying enough on a technical level, but the effect on the way people think is so, so much worse.

It’s like the joke people make about how, before smart phones, you could rattle off a dozen phone numbers by heart, but now you can’t even remember your immediate families? You’ve offloaded that part of your brain to the machine. So have I, almost everyone has. And when you’re without your phone for whatever reason and need to get a hold of someone, you’re boned outside of like 1 or 2 people maybe.

But what happens as more and more of these tasks get reduced to queries and the thinking part starts to atrophy? As we offload more and more to the machine. Like why even read at all if you can just have the machine read it for you and you can listen in your airpods? And what happens when you eventually can’t even verify if what the voice in your ear is saying is correct and not just a digital hallucination?

Anyways, not trying to be argumentative, it’s just, through the lens of what I experience day to day it’s extremely concerning how quickly people are losing their ability to do things without leaning on AI, and more importantly, how quickly they’re forgetting how to do things without it.

Just wanted to add that you’ll pay out the ass for them compared to consumer trash, but there’s a reason for the higher price tag. They’re often made for heavy usage environments where they’re on like 24/7 for years showing slideshows and shit in office lobbies. Consequently, they often lag behind the feature set of modern TVs which may or may not be a problem (personally I hate all that image enhancement shit but everyone has their preference) and the higher refresh rate is not as big a selling point so not a huge comparison there if you’re looking to use it for gaming or something. They also have a much more clear repair path though replacement parts can be fuckin stupid expensive. It’s bullshit that the only way you can get around the enshittification of consumer electronics is by paying the enterprise tax but that’s how it is.

I work in IT and about once a year or so I have to spec out that sort of stuff for clients, and they’re always like “WTF?!” when they see the cost of some of that Enterprise/Professional grade stuff, but the difference is, the no-name crap they could get for $1499.99 from a big box is going to burn itself up within 18 months and be trash while the $5000 display will be humming along for as long as replacement parts are still available.

There’s a world of difference between having lessor skills or ability and offloading it all to a machine so you don’t have to be bothered. Namely, effort.

Its not the fact that people can’t write well that bothers me, it’s that people don’t care to even try to write passably almost at all anymore that bothers me. We’re going backwards, not forwards. This is not some niche skill, the ability to communicate concisely. This is a fundamental part of being a social animal. And people are leaning more and more on machines to do it for them.

At what point does the language start influencing the thought?

I have a Vizio TV I bought in the mid-teens that only lets you change the source and turn the volume/channel up and down with the remote. Everything else…the display/audio settings, naming the inputs, setting the channel names…requires the Vizio app on your phone. Literally no other way to access them. If I’d have known at the time I would have returned it immediately, but unfortunately I didn’t discover this for a couple weeks as it was on sale and I was leaving for vacation, so I bought it, dropped it at home, and didn’t actually touch it until it was past the point where I’d have been charged restocking fees so I kept it.

I guess my point is…I wouldn’t necessarily bank on that. They can easily just make the TV not fucking work without the account, just like some of the other brands I’ve interacted with that will not even let you bypass the initial screen when you power it on for the first time without entering an email address or else it gets locked in it’s demo mode.

Even if 50% of them get returned they’ll likely still be making money.

It truly blows my mind that people need to use AI to write coherent sentences with proper punctuation at all. The shit that I receive in my inbox from people making far more money than me, that have multiple advanced degrees no less…it makes me weep for a future where no one is able to function without a computer holding their hand through the entire interaction.

We’re going to get to the point where its all AIs talking to each other and humans are merely pressing the send button.

Im sure a fair number of reps would do it for the promise of a board position once theyre done slumming it in public service.

It’s the same thing really, but without the “negative” connotations usually attributed to atheism or atheists. “See, I’m not really an atheist but agnostic. It means I’m not to be expelled from this community as a heretic”

This, basically. At least that’s how I used it. As a kid living in the bible belt, admitting you were an atheist was, in their eyes, literally no different than being a cannibalistic devil worshipper. Agnostic was easier for them to swallow (albeit because odds are high that most of them didn’t even know what it meant, and figured it was some sect of Christianity they were unfamiliar with).

When I got older, and escaped the institutional bigotry woven into nearly every facet of society down in the bible belt…the lovely place where our biology teacher also headed the bible club and refused to teach evolution yet somehow still had a job as a biology teacher in the public school system, as a small example…that was when I finally gained the confidence to self-describe as an atheist.

Had to learn that lesson in 2000 when I voted for Nader. It wouldnt have made a difference since the Supreme Court got bought off to throw the election to Bush, but that was the last time I dared play the foolish game of voting my conscience in the failed democracy we call the United (lol) States.

The unwritten part is where Trump gets a free gold plated golf cart or some other stupid shit to sweeten the deal.

Its grift allllll the way down.

Theres a reason there are DoD contractors in all US states and territories. That way any congressperson that comes out against the war machine gets primaried due to being a “job killer” in their home district/state.