A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

In 2012 I voted against Obama because I thought he was too conservative. I didn’t think his healthcare program went far enough, I didn’t like his foreign policy of continuing the Bush wars, and I thought he turned out to be far more establishment than he had indicated as a candidate in 2008.

I voted for Jill Stein. I said it wasn’t a protest vote and that I was voting my conscience, but it was totally a protest vote. Stein would have been the worst president in US history, and I even knew that at the time. I did it because Obama had a predicted 99% chance of winning my state, so I figured it was safe and would communicate to the democrats that there was a preference for more left leaning candidates.

What I did not do was try to campaign for Stein to try to get swing state voters to vote for her. I didn’t try to get swing state voters to not vote.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

First “democrats” is doing a lot of work here. I’m assuming the voters that you’re talking about turning out were democrats. I’m assuming the politicians they voted for were democrats. So what you mean is some subset (eg Third Way types, which have already been mentioned).

Use numbers. What was the turnout for the previous years? What was the turnout for Obama? For Bill Clinton? Was it bigger when Dennis Kucinich was in the race? Other than Bernie, he was the leftmost candidate that I can recall - at least in the top 5 in recent years. State the point you are trying to prove clearly, then demonstrate it.

I’m a Bernie supporter - he actually helped secure a research grant I worked on, I’ve met him in person, and I donated to each of his campaigns since I started to be able to do that kind of thing. I’m a member of the DSA. I’m also a scientist, and I deal with this kind of thing all the time.

What you’re basically coming off as, to be honest, is that family member in the maga hat who keeps yelling that 2020 was rigged.

You gave no competing hypothesis. I offered several.

This is a hot take.

Here’s the problem with your hypothesis:

You’re mixing together people who don’t vote with people publicly advocating not voting. That’s completely unsupported. Let’s see some stats on why people don’t vote. Is it because they don’t have time because they’re working, because they’re uncomfortable with the process, because they’re being lazy? On the other hand, what are the predictors of voting? We know age is a factor, so that would encourage us to think about the time availability question.

The second part is that the disengagement approach you’re advocating has driven the Democratic Party to the right. The Third Way movement came entirely from seeing Reagan’s engagement numbers. Not voting casts a zero information signal. First, the numbers only move mildly from year to year, and even when they do it tends to come down to the charisma of the candidate, not the policy positions.

A surprising number of Americans want universal healthcare, support LGBT rights and are against racism, yet vote for Donald Trump or DeSantis because they can get the crowds riled up in the way that policy wonks just don’t.

I mean, when the republicans did that huge study that found that economic and demographic changes in the US meant they needed to adopt more progressive policies (eg not being openly racist) if they wanted to have a future, the gop said “screw that, we will just depress the vote.”

So, no, your policy is not evidence-based, and it’s unreasonable. It forces the country to the right. If that’s what you want, go for it.

Yes. CA is looking to get single payer, but that has a longer runway because America.

California comes pretty close.

To little fanfare, as the new year has gotten underway, California has closed one of the largest remaining gaps in its healthcare coverage system. As of January 1, all low-income Californians, no matter their immigration status, no matter their age, qualify for healthcare coverage.

This may be the most poorly written article I’ve ever read. It’s completely unintelligible.

It must have been written by a really poorly trained LLM and just posted without anyone having looked at it. Forget artificial intelligence - this is artificial stupidity.

I like their trackpads a lot, but if you use the MacBook with an external monitor like so many of us do, it’s simply not an option. I stick with Logitech for mice though. Even their crappy mice are good, and their high end mice are great.

I also have to disagree with the author’s take on the evolution of the mouse. I like having buttons to navigate forward and back when browsing the web, I like the multifunction scroll wheels, and I even like the sideways scroll wheels when looking through large charts or tables of data. When I used to game more on services like WoW, I had a mouse with a ton of buttons mapped to all kinds of macros and skills.

The only people I don’t see using mice or external trackpads are PM types who don’t use external monitors and spend 80% of their days moving from meeting to meeting.

The Apple trackpad has remained in my opinion the best one ever developed and continues to improve generation to generation. They lost the script on keyboards for a hot minute there, and their mice have always been horrible to the point of deliberate non-functionality, but those trackpads are amazing. Their external trackpad has also come a long way in the past few years.

90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.

I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.

Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.

I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).

The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).

I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.

I have read about individuals doing this, but to my knowledge it has never happened in any sufficient numbers to tilt a primary in any state.

Some states run open primaries, so that any person can vote in any (but only one) primary. Other states run closed primaries, such that any voter who has registered as a member of that party can vote in that particular party’s primary. Yet others (eg, California last time I checked) have mixed modes. I believe the CA GOP primary is closed by the Democratic primary is open.

You can tell relatively easily by the number of votes in any given primary election whether they’re consistent in terms of turnout with previous years. As far as I’ve ever read, they tend to be year over year consistent. The one trend that has been noted in recent years is a small but as far as I know steady increase in independent voters (who as stated may or may not be able to vote in primaries depending on their state, but based on number of votes cast do not seem to have been a deciding factor in primary votes).

I generally have suspected that the idea of people switching parties to act as primary spoilers is largely just projection, as we tend to expect malfeasance of the Other, but the hard truth is that you can barely get large numbers of people to vote in actual elections, much less in something like a primary.

Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado has both of those covered.

From their q&a:

gitspamdum is a bot, I just created a fake account and bid for 999 trillions, no verification were requested in the whole process and 1 nanosecond later gitspamdum bid after me, I tried this twice, my only purpose was to expose the absurdity of the whole thing, if Proton really take this thing seriously please just cancel all auctions and place them in a serious website

You can just immediately resell it to Elon for $44B.

Excellent analysis!

I did read the books on the original series. I have but haven’t yet read some of the others (I have at least one audiobook that was free at the time). I absolutely loved them, after sitting in shock as one “main character” after another was killed in a horrible and tragic way. I had gone in cold, and did not realize that GRRM took the authorial advice to “kill your darlings” quite so literally.”

I didn’t get into them until the pentology was finished, and I remember wondering to myself “Who the hell does he finish this? He’s introduced a major new plot line on the third book (maybe it was the Dorne subplot) and new, major characters kept popping up. I had no idea how he was going to start tying everything together, because even the last book had not started winding things down quite - the tensions were still building. It felt like he was painting himself into a corner while doing the floor like the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Given the pace of subsequent development, I think I may have been just a bit right on that. I’ve done it to myself and recognize the symptoms.

I appreciate House of the Dragon being good. The problem is that S1 was also good. The problem is in the prequel-ness itself. I know that it all ends with Dany going inexplicably insane and Jamie’s arc goes from scoundrel to hero to … whatever the hell that was. I know the complex plot lines they’re setting up will never be closed. If GRRM ever finishes the book (I’m certainly not expecting two) and winds things down properly, I might again feel invested enough in the universe to try the other stories set in it, but right now it might have just ended with “and then Ned woke up and realized it was all a dream.”

Lastly, you raise a good point and that would have at least maybe delivered some interest. I can’t see anything but civil war with Bran as the bored and incapable god-emperor facing a Stark-Lannister alliance or something. The problem is that the most central and intriguing plot lines were left hanging or ended in the fastest and worst way possible.

“Dany forgot about the Black Fleet?” A queen capable of bringing her people from the literal point of extinction to conquering the known world, with a team of advisors and tacticians forgetting about a major armed force whose betrayal and push for conquest was well known? That’s like “The President of the United States forgot they were at war with China who had dispatched their fleet to attack Washington.” And then to have a ballista, fired from the pitching deck of a sailing ship, and hitting not only a moving target but a flying one? No one in history has ever shot a ballista at a moving flying target, to my knowledge, then pull in the wind and the waves.

I really only picked on Bran in particular because that was the ending-ending. From top to bottom it was absolutely terrible with every authorial decision worse than the last.

Like I said, I think GRRM painted himself into a corner. I think he gets some of the blame, because the show runners are obviously nowhere in the league of GRRM when it comes to story creation, and I don’t know how involved he was at that point. I don’t know if he skimmed a paragraph and signed off or what. Honestly, I don’t think even George knows how to finish his story because he kept adding one more thing. He’s a mature writer and gifted author, but I don’t have a competing hypothesis right now.

I do blame the showrunners for deliberately turning out an absolute piece of crap just to finish the thing even after being offered additional seasons by HBO. It was the worst example of deus ex machina I’ve ever seen.

“Who has a better story than Bran the Broken? Let’s make him king!”

Okay, not happy in the moment, but it was supposed to be. I’m still mad about it. Of all the shows I’ve re-marathoned, I’ve never even been tempted to redo GoT. It was like S8 was so bad it went back in time and ruined the entire rest of the show. I can’t even entertain watching any spinoffs.

I may buy the rest of the series as novels (ha) but even then it will be with trepidation.

This is not going anyplace good.

Also, the hand movements look completely unnatural. It’s like that scene from 30 Rock where Jack Donaghy is shooting that spot and winds up holding two coffee cups.

Also, the woman suppressing a grin while talking about the war in Gaza was beyond disturbing.

And this is their most curated footage. This is their best stuff used to show off their work.

They haven’t climbed out of the uncanny valley yet.

I think that you are under informed and miseducated as to both the dynamics of complex adaptive social systems - particularly human ones but also as a theoretical concept. You’re also under formed about the diversity of actual human societies.

David Graeber was arguably the most gifted anthropologist of our generation, and both explicitly and repeatedly disproved your assertions as being native to humanity through rigorous investigation of actual human cultures spanning the globe and the past 10,000 years. I strongly encourage you to look into some of his books.