A subset of America. Life isn’t all or nothing. Electoral College helped a bit, although he barely did win the popular vote this time thanks to the abstainers. By raw population numbers (including those that can’t vote) only 22.9% of the US population voted for him. (32.1% of eligible voters, less than 1/3.)

“Coming to you next Tuesday, T-Mobile Tuesdays Nazis, Magenta Edition!”

21% of the state is also of Hispanic or Latino descent and growing, but yeah, predominantly white.

Death Stranding vibes.

It goes much further back than Pres. Obama’s first term. Dems have always virtue-signaled for at least the last 30-40 years, and then blamed the repubs when something they promised doesn’t go through, even when they’re a majority. All the while insider-trading themselves to profitability. A handful of them stand up for the party’s purported ideals, which is just enough to make it seem the party might care. It’s all a sham.

That being said, Pres. Biden’s administration did an admirable job cleaning up the mess left behind by Orange Man 1.0 when entire offices were devoid of employees, paper trails, documentation, state. They took too long to appoint an FCC chair, however, and didn’t even attempt to find a way to fix the DeJoy post office problem (which arguably would have been difficult.)

But then, now, dems seemingly have been silent about the results of the election. They’re acting like the police did in 2020 after George Floyd’s death and silent-quit. One would like to hope they are attempting to do anything to ensure as little damage to the country takes place in the next 4+ years as possible, but, in a messaging vacuum, Occam’s Razor should apply, and they’re likely doing nothing.

So many states have questionable voting security, and it’d be comparatively easy for a relatively smart person to inject temporary code patches on tallying machines, provided they could get the necessary signing certs (if the companies even cryptographically sign their code). It would only take a simple binary patch to execute only on a certain day/time to flip arbitrary votes, and otherwise never. Especially if that Starlink at swing locations thing was true, it could reroute DNS requests when the machines are online for updates, send them to some other IP address to download what looks like a valid patch to inject the sleeper code. (Completely speculation here, no actual evidence, and many pieces would be needed to get through a “trusted” system like the web certs as well, but man would I want to play with one of those machines and 100 ballots for a weekend.) It’d ostensibly be a 100% hands-off process and those “secured” locked down machines would do the dirty work themselves.

If VW can figure out how to cheat emissions tests and otherwise act “normal”, flipping a vote bit is babytown frolics.

That’s probably the most disappointing thing about all of this, learning that most of those in governance really don’t want to try.

Less than 1/3 of American voters voted for the orange man. The rest were apathetic or thought virtue abstaining would “send a message”.

Edit to add actual numbers. 32.1% of eligible voters voted for him. 22.9% of the total US population. We need to stop this all-or-nothing mentality. A tiny fraction of the population voted him in, while the rest tried (31.0%), or did nothing. That 32.1% is only true if the votes were legitimate, which seeing how fragile the voting system is across the US, it may not be, and we also may never know.

Using modern tech with its associated crappy software lifecycle to save cost is a heavy gamble, however. Instead of breaking Reddit for a couple of hours, they can’t fire their RCS thrusters to avoid collision with space junk because some stupid NPE that was missed in the QA process that no longer exists because that team was replaced with AI.

Link to Windows is pretty terrible except for basic SMS. Really wish Microsoft would stop trying to make it the iTunes of Android.

Sadly, no, it takes, as I recall, about 2 minutes for oxygen starvation in the brain to make it fade out.

Got one of those LIDE scanners back in the day in college. It was USB-powered so I could go to the university library with my laptop, and scan book excerpts to PDF instead of having to pay copying fees. OCR so it was searchable too. Was so dope. Still have it, bet it still works.

WEEKEND PROJECT!

https://www.retailmenot.com/blog/walmart-layaway.html

Walmart actually just stopped layaway entirely in 2021 for BNPL.

FWIW, MailOnline is terrible at journalism. I’m sure this site referring to that is at least as bad. Thanks to you for doing the research!

But the anger/annoyance hits are plentiful!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm9sbG93ZXJz

Be careful, that didn’t work out well in X-Files.

Joking, of course.

I’ve heard claims that POS software now turns tipping on by default as part of the problem. I’d rather business owners just take care of their employees.

I have a set of uBlock Origin filters I turn on in the “my filters” tab when this garbage gets too exhausting. Unfortunately this only works on web browsers.

Example:

discuss.tchncs.de##article.post-container:has(.post-title:has-text("Trump"))

Replace with your Lemmy instance domain and keywords of your choice!

Hopefully lemmy apps start enabling keyword filtering.

A thing to maybe consider is to get a subscription at a range and check out a rental firearm to plink on the range. You lose some money in the experience like going to a movie or whatever, but you’re not out the full price of the firearm. Then you can decide how you feel. Granted, active fire is much different than object that sits on shelf. They’re quite docile when stationary. Even so, it’s just psychologically weird normalizing the thought of, “I have a device on this shelf that has only one purpose, to delete life.” Sure, hammers, nailguns, knives, etc. can be used for killing, but they have a useful primary purpose. Guns don’t.

American “freedom” protecting Nazis never made sense. It’s like the divide by zero error of freedom.

How else can the media try to find yet more ways to divide everyone? Division sells clicks. NBC is especially good at talking about economic nonsense in ways that sound like talking points or information when it’s really just “we’re broadcasting this message that the actual rich want everyone else to react to, so those actual rich can get richer.”

In this case, it’s subtle marketing, the goal, is to make “less-rich” people go stay at a hotel and order that upgrade to a king bed.

Example:

$50,000/yr person: “I’m going to stick it to the $100k rich person! You know, the one that’s living like a king, who drove to the Motel 6 across the street in a 10 year old used Prius. Yeah! See? I can live like a rich person too! Orders overpriced hotel room beer, Suck it rich person!”

Actual rich person: eyes light up like Christmas as their billions continue to grow from a troll article.

Pres. Obama actually chose Pai. Orange man just chose him as chairman.

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

I hear you there. It’s a frighteningly low bar when basic life survival stuff doesn’t seem sustainable.