Under the lenses of a duopoly, American politics seems like a well oiled machine, oiled by the tears of the constituency, but they are working together. The orange tumor seems to be a new thing that for some reason smells like fundamentalist state.
There are a lot of similarities when it comes to their tendency towards Corporatocracy and military spending, but it largely ends there.
When it comes to taxes, fiscal priorities, rights for individuals, foreign policy, crime and punishment, and of course social issues they are very different and in most cases take the opposite approach.
For example, Republicans want lower taxes for the wealthy while Democrats want lower taxes for the lower and middle classes. Republicans want to restrict individuals rights - especially for non-christian white males, Democrats don't. Republicans favor heavy handed punishment including capital punishment, Democrats favor rehabilitation and a ban on capital punishment. Republicans want to blow up the national debt through tax breaks and pork, Democrats want to control the debt through responsible spending and investments. Republicans want to stop investment in education and science while Democrats want to increase investment in these areas. These are all very real and not just aesthetics.
This is a curious comment. HackerNews has always told me it was in fact the opposite - it's easy enough to source quotes from over the years. Could this forum have been wrong all this time?
Democratic voters want those things. It's not at all obvious the party establishment does.
The tell is that when Republicans push through their policies, Democratic opposition is weak and ineffectual. Instead of ferocious opposition the Dems send one of their famous sternly worded letters.
Since at least 2000 the party establishment has absolutely refused to do any of the things it could do to change this - including packing the Supreme Court, supporting and promoting grass roots activism between elections, using the filibuster, and so on.
Biden couldn't even get any of Trump's prosecutions over the line - including televised evidence of insurrection, and treasonous mishandling of official state secrets (!)
However it's spun, there is a very obvious reluctance to challenge the extremes of Republicanism.
The party is far more likely to censure one of its non-centrists than its centrists, while the opposite is true of the Republicans.
The Democrats operate as if they're controlled opposition. It's like their donors pay them to blunt their base. They haven't accomplished anything legislatively this century beyond pass the 1993 Republican healthcare plan under Obama's name. They couldn't even raise the minimum wage.
In my experience this is dead on. People have short attention spans but this has been happning the whole 21st century. In 2008 Obama won the primary despite the best efforts of leadership to nominate clinton. They even scrambled the "super delegates" (delegates who vote for the candidate chosen by senior leadership) hoping that even if Obama won more delegates, they could override the voters choice.
Of course, they failed, and democrats won 2 elections in a row running a candidate labeled a radical socialist. Obama became the only 21st century president to win the poplar vote twice, and the DNC has been trying to drag the party back in the 20th century ever since, blaming their own voters when it doesn't work.
It boggles my mind that they refused to even engage with the "undecided movement", which created a grass-roots get out to vote movement out of thin air. In swing states no less.
The starkest contrast between the two parties is womens rights and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. Although I'm not even sure how true this is anymore with so many politicians backing Cuomo, who resigned because an investigation found overwhelming evidence he sexually harrassed and assaulted female employees. And I'm pretty sure people like Chuck Schumer and other centrists view the LGBTQ community as a liability.
itsanaccount says "An oak tree's vote adds more to our democracy than your comment does to this conversation."
Now you're calling for the trees to vote! Have you no shame, sir? I assure those reading not to panic: no unregistered trees shall be allowed to vote, even in California, as long as Donald Trump is President! Simultaneously we extend our grief to all of those in CA whose registered and unregistered trees were slaughtered by the recent fires in CA.
"I've seen thing you people wouldn't believe... forests on fire off the hills of Redmond.... I watched fire retardants glitter in the dark streaming in the skies over San Bernadino. All those votes will be lost in time, like tears in the rain...Time to go."
- parting words of homeless anarchist who started the blaze.
The healthcare issue doesn't even make sense. Democrats passes the ACA and were going to create a public option but couldn't gather enough Republican support to ensure it could pass. It was an earnest attempt to provide healthcare for all Americans. The Republicans have done nothing even remotely similar and have only attempted to take healthcare away.
One item over the course of 12 years is uh lip service at best.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil.
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Somebody will certainly bring up the filibuster at some point. Thats not in the constitution and can be removed at any point by 51 senators. As a whole democrats are not united on what to do hence why they never remove it. Which then lets them point to it as a scape-goat as to why they can't fix any problems.
If you're not part of a group that will suffer under a white-supremecist theocracy they look very similar.
If you're part of a group that will, there is a visible difference.
Picking the lesser evil is actually a good thing if you can reduce harm. It doesn't solve the problem of it being a lesser evil, but it may make space to change that.
I agree with what you're saying, but it strikes me (& this is particularly poignant on THIS site), that this discussion is somewhat equivalent to the "blub" paradox (aka, how do you explain the power of lisp macro's to someone who grew up only with c & Java).
Americans are THAT brainwashed into thinking they really have a real choice at the ballot box, when in reality all choices that matter were weeded out long long before in the backroom selection process...
Counterpoint: folks not from America create a 2d projection of our government where on the whole Americans are very aligned and where (usually Europeans) are not and conclude that US parties are the same while their parties are very different.
Meanwhile I can't tell the difference between any of the (just picking one) UK parties. From an outsider perspective their government seems exactly the same no matter who is elected. But I don't conclude that the Brits are brainwashed and instead that I would have to be there to actually understand just how different they are.
We're at a point in the US where your political party is a dating dealbreaker for 60% of Americans and 85% of Americans only date within their own party. This isn't a small group of heavily politically involved with strong opinions, this is everyday people recognizing what are extremely different and fundamentally incompatible world views.
We're only 6 months in and I would hope the world can really feel the difference when a conservative government took power. I would be shocked if anyone couldn't tell the difference between our government pre and post january.
Rebuttal to your counterpoint: I've lived in the US for 25 years, so I'm not unaware of the "supposed differences".
What were saying is that these "supposed differences" are mostly over inconsequential things, designed to mobilise the masses into 1 camp or another, all while LEAVING THE MAJOR ISSUES untouched.
It doesn't matter if team red or team blue is in charge, immigrants get scapegoated and caged (happened under Obama & Biden).Just that team red takes greater visceral delight.
It doesn't matter if team red/blue is in power, the HOLOCAUST is armed, funded & covered for.
It doesn't matter if it's team red or blue, the military budget keeps going up, and the almost pyschopathic need to keep dumping military bases into other peoples backyards, the need to freeze conflicts into eternal points of instability (to then be exploited in the future), the need to keep poking at other people's pressure points to instigate war, the need to continuously "regime change" any sovereign country you like (all the while bemoaning "foreign interference" in your own elections... irony wants its ball back)
And failing all of that, the need to create/arm/fund terrorist groups of any stripe or persuasion to get what you want done. Be they right-wing death squads in Central America, to neo Nazis in Europe, to Daeesh in Syria/Iraq (and we can all drop the pretence now that CNN & the state dept all rushed in to validate the Daesh head honcho in Syria)
Etc, etc, boringly etc.
All of these things did happen, are happening, and will continue to happen - irrespective of team red or blue.
And irrespective of whether the bulk of the American population actually wants these things or not.
But yes, I'll grant you, voting team red or blue will impact the eternal question of who gets to urinate in which public bathroom.
Yeah, no. The Overton window is so incredibly small in America that normal, run of the mill political positions - either left or right - in the rest of the world are deemed extremist and radical in America.
Things have been far more polarised since the rise of social media. You can blame fox news and cnn or whatever all you want, but given how far the US is from the days of Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy etc I don't see how you can simply blame "corporate media".
Corporate media used to have regulations on how much local media any single company could own. I think the consolidation of media ownership made it easier to have a single corporate vision.
Both are true. The end of the Fairness Doctrine normalised the psychotic distortions and lies pumped out by Fox. But the same machine that uses Fox also runs bot farms, astroturfing operations, and curated social media algorithms to normalise even more extreme RW POVs.
The problem is not the people taking advantage of a vulnerability, but the vulnerability itself. That such a significant portion of the US population is so gullible and so ready to believe misinformation that aligns with their desires is the real issue.
The problem is not media, at least not primarily. The problem is an ancient and not-democratic first past the post system, preventing emergence of any alternative, good or bad.
I agree with your sentiment, but Canada uses FPTP and as much as I would love to move to a proportional system, our politics is significantly less limiting than yours. Both of your major parties, and all of your corporate media are so captured by billionaires you don't even know how bad things are in your country without an external frame of reference.
Really? Is your speech freer than mine in Canada? Are your human Rights protected better than mine? I wonder what the rioters in LA would have to say about that?
The US is notably "freer" for some types of speech. Quite a few countries ban Nazi flags, hate speech, etc. to some extent. The EU bans direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. The UK banned political parties from advertising on TV in 1955.
In my opinion, doing so to some extent is important to preserve the rights of other parts of society, but that's not a universally held opinion by any means.
This was helpful in clarifying to me how dangerous Yarvin and those who follow his beliefs are to normal people. As stated in the AMA, he believes everything he says. We have substantial documentation of extreme proposals, including turning the lower class into biodiesel or simply locking them in prisons where they can live out virtual lives. How did we get to the point where a cyberpunk dystopia is our definition of an optimal society? How do you counter a movement funded by the most wealthy and powerful people in the world who solely want to use their influence to exact control without empathy? How to we get to a post-ironic world where we have sincere discussions about improvement and not just troll to create chaos to centralize control?
If you then delete from the Recently Deleted album it says that the photo “will deleted the selected photos from iCloud and all connected devices”.
Additionally, at least in iOS 17.5, the Recently Deleted album itself has a disclaimer at the bottom that says that “items will be permanently deleted. This may take up to 40 days.”
iCloud is a pile of crap with eventual consistency everywhere, including some really extreme interpretations of "eventual": I've had deleted "favorite places" on Maps persist for years. Deleting them would hide them from the local device, yet restoring a brand new device would bring them back.
The whole thing feels like it's running on duct tape, wishful thinking and a large chunk of non-technical users that would blame themselves rather than the shitty tech when weird things like this happen.
I actually did the exact same thing. Went with the ProArt B550 and didn’t consider that the LG 5k requires two video connections to the graphics card. This[0] eventually helped me realize my mistake. Currently running in 4k and it’s fine. At least camera, speakers, and hub work.
Good to know even the ProArt B550 has the same issue (I have the B550 Vision D-P) because I was half-considering swapping for the ProArt B550 (which would ruin the white aesthetic I'm going for, but fine), but if it doesn’t have two DP inputs, that’s a no go. It’s possible the DP 1.4 on the Studio Display would be enough to provide bandwidth on the TB4 connector, but I'll have to wait for others to try it first in the hackintosh forums or elsewhere.
A quick look through Newegg shows 4 AMD AM4 motherboards (B550 and X570) with Thunderbolt (2 TB3, 2 TB4). None have two DP inputs. I didn't see any Intel (LG1200) with two inputs either.
Would you use a Maple Ridge (TB4) card instead of Titan Ridge?
I am impressed with Apple's ability to seamlessly handle all of these scenarios. Their product integration really does create a great experience within their ecosystem. I didn't expect my setup to work perfectly but I'm happy it gets most of the way there. I'm not pulling the trigger on Apple Studio Display but I'll be watching progress to see if it works.
My use case is an outlier, I guess: I'm in the Apple ecosystem for all personal stuff but use a Dell Latitude for work (TB3, GPU chokes on 5k but technically works) and have a beefy Windows desktop for gaming and personal development work in WSL. I love the idea of just plugging a single cable into whatever system I'm using at that moment.
The Hey onboarding today is tied to a website-driven invite and signup process. While that _could_ be a bad customer experience through some lens, what percentage of users following this flow are or will be downloading this app prior to signing up?
In a larger sense, Apple seems to be saying that, at least for consumer apps, they have an expected user flow from launch/beta through purchase. That flow makes Apple the primary channel and pipeline. If you have a multi-channel app (web + app, in this case), they want the main experience through the app regardless of business model or context. This makes the customer experience argument seem like misdirection.
In a previous life I worked with the Department of Education for a certain state. Their head graphic designer, Fred if I remember correctly, was about 70-something and had Parkinson's. He was able to churn out amazing work using the mouse and Wacom tablet. His wife, who also worked at the DoE, would touch up his work and clean up anything caused by the tremors. Quite an amazing team.
He was also a jazz piano player in private. He created a setup where he used his electric organ as a midi controller in GarageBand. He would record himself playing and, once through, would clean up the extra notes using the note view.
I'm very happy to see technology moving forward to help those whose conditions otherwise prevent or obscure the great things they're capable of!
