I think it’s inherent to the fundamental ideology of conservatism, that there are in groups that the law must protect and not bind, and our groups that the law must bind but and not protect. Every single conservative out there imagines that they are the living definition of the in-group, or that they have a secret pass they can use to get the out-groupers they like into the in-group, when neither is ever true. There is no amount of deviancy from the in group that is acceptable, and if you’re not part of the in group, you’re automatically in the out group. Conservatives who are not seen (pro tip: say “not seen” five times fast for a clue about the republican special guest star) to be promoting the interests of the in group as aggressively as possible aren’t serving the dynamic, who aren’t acting as part of the in group, are therefore part of the out group (bound and not protected). What they’re threatening these people with here isn’t just death, it’s exile into the out group, being made vulnerable to the very law they want to establish. So, that’s the secret here, comply or die isn’t just a political rallying cry, it’s the threat that they’d like to level at all of us, they’re only using it explicitly on each other because it’s all they feel comfortable with for now.

My God, it’s shrexcellent.

Seriously, though, it’s 2023 and big corporates are still out here with no input validation?

I’ve never believed in horoscopes until just now, when I read the Scorpio section.

Illegal for the people doing and taking the bribe, with real teeth.

Maybe cheaper than renewables and grid scale batteries over the lifetime of the reactor. Perhaps you could correct me, but my understanding is that grid scale battery facilities don’t even exist yet. Given the current state of battery technology, you’d need to replace the batteries at that facility in, what, seven years? Ten is really pushing it, right? That’s not going to be cheap.

Then we’d be doing fission. Fossil fuels aren’t required to pay for their externalities the way nuclear is, not to mention that the fossil companies have spent decades lobbying and campaigning to keep from having to be responsible for their own bullshit, as well as campaigning to make other forms of energy seem / be less viable (either through PR messaging or regulatory capture).

They don’t believe it. It’s just a talking point to cover for genocide. Nettanyahu, like all the right-wing authoritarian fucksticks before him, is about as attached to his excuses as the Navajo nation is to water polo (spoiler: they’re not). It’s just some bullshit to spout while you fucking murder people. If the excuse runs thin, fuck it, just make a new excuse, but this is the one they’ve spent decades cultivating by literally funding hamas.

So, Yordie?

Alright, so, real talk, this is an appeal directly to the people in police work who are in it for the authority (spoiler: too many, unfortunately), as well as to the asset owning class that depends on the police to keep them from losing their investments or worse. The message being sent is: vote for me, work for me, and you’ll be free from accountability.

This is about as predictable a failure as passwordless logins. If you can’t secure your software product against it being used outside its intended use case, then stop, go back, you fucked up.

I’d like you to meet windows 11. Windows 11 bricked my Alienware computer for two weeks until I said fuck it and installed Linux. They pushed an update that triggered the Bitlocker secure boot policy, which is annoying but not a problem. Except that the Bitlocker recovery key page on Microsoft’s website has been down for over a month. There’s other users like me who’ve had their machines bricked because Microsoft fucked up a webpage and can’t be assed to do a git revert. It took me hours of navigating Microsoft’s intentionally terrible support pages to figure out how to talk to a person (over IM, phone support is not a thing anymore), another 40 minutes to get a support tech on the chat, and then they told me that basically my options are to wait or wipe the drives and re-install windows 11.

I didn’t want to wipe my drives, I liked my drives, but I’m not going to just let a machine sit there and be bricked for three months until Microsoft can be assed to un-brick it. So, I wiped the drives and installed mint. I can’t play all the games I used to (I can access probably 75% of my game library) but the performance is WAY better, like, obviously and shockingly better. Turns out that Bitlocker throttles your SSD performance significantly, and it also helps when your OS isn’t trying to both run a game and send your delicious, delicious data to ad servers or whatever.

And windows wants even more live service dependencies with 12? Fuck that. I’ve been with them since '95, but I won’t follow them there. 11’s live service dependencies have been a disaster, and I can’t see myself getting excited about even more of that.

Probably because it’s leet.

Good to know, thanks!

Okay, I guess. This isn’t really a hill I’m prepared to die on. The point is that it’s still a cost that’s real to the user, even if it’s not a direct financial one.

Well, it’s mastodon. You’ve got a little over 400 characters to say what you’re going to say in the most shocking, attention-getting way possible. Yes, it’s not a perfect analogy, but no metaphor is perfect or else it wouldn’t really be a metaphor, would it?

Anyway, it’s a time and convenience cost that becomes extremely significant as your IT proficiency decreases, and you’ve got another think coming if you think those costs don’t matter to people.

This is basically what he was saying. Open source tends to be a much less plug-and-play out-of-the-box experience, and usually requires at least some IT know-how for it to not be an infuriating experience. A lot of FOSS advocates compensate for that by kind of being that over explaining bro meme and get kinda pushy about getting people over the technical barriers because they want FOSS to be widely adopted and be a real alternative, and for good reasons. But most people don’t have the time or patience to stumblefuck their way through IT issues, they just want the shit to work.

It’s a fair criticism, accessibility is a big problem in FOSS. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go.

Basically, yes. Speaking as someone who’s voted third party before, there’s no hope of changing the system by voting third party at the federal level. Game theory on first-past-the-post elections and the absolutely insane amount of money in our elections practically ensures it. The best way to effect change there is to go to some form of transferrable vote or ranked choice vote at the state and local level. There are already some states whose electoral college splits its votes in this way, and the two main parties (and their big donors) hate it because it erodes their ability to take a state’s vote for granted and weakens their duopoly.

I don’t think the build is strange, personally. It’s really only strange if California is only made of San Francisco and LA, and it isn’t. The central valley cities would be major metros in any other state, and they currently have few to no options for travel that don’t involve a car.

My views align much more closely with Anarcho-Communism than US conservatism. I’m not an Anarcho-Communist because all evidence I’ve seen thus far suggests that truly functional Anarcho-Communism (which has existed historically) is dependent on small enough communities that there are few to no truly anonymous interactions and/or a strong social cage of norms that ends up being morality police with extra steps.

That’s a tricky one. The problem is that power is, more often than not, a one way street. Once organizations or people have it, they tend to not want to give it up. It takes a LOT of effort over long periods of time to walk that power back, and particularly when the money’s against it. The US is already practically a fascist (and I mean this in a textbook, unsensational sense) economy what with how tightly the public-private partnerships run, so you’re fighting a three way battle between getting the government, the investors, and the corporate leadership to all agree all at the same time to decrease their power. The corporates and investors have been getting some really sweetheart deals put of this arrangement, and they’re not going to want to walk away from easy money guaranteed by market coercion.

I think the path of least resistance here is going to be widespread local action, at the level of the state or below. It’s not unprecedented, this is more or less how marijuana legalization went mainstream. If we waited for the policy to change at the federal level, well… [Gestures wildly at the house of representatives] maybe your grandkids will live to see some moderate change. But the states and especially local government have a frankly shocking amount of power, and they beat the feds in legal battles a surprising amount of times when their laws come into conflict, though this is largely dependent on the views of the circuit of appeals court that presides over your area. The fifth circuit are a bunch of authoritarian whack jobs that once heard of the constitution but think it sounds like a pinko hippie, for example. But we’ll never get there if we don’t try, and effecting change at the local level is both possible and realistic. For my part, I’m working on creating the first YIMBY group in central California, and I want to work with others to pressure central valley urbans to have better urbanism, cheaper housing, more public transit, and all around be more livable and affordable.

No. The LA-SF connection was THE connection to make for a number of good reasons:

-HSR is a direct replacement for short-haul airlines. The LAX-SFO corridor is one of if not THE busiest air corridors on earth, and CAHSR is going to put a tremendous dent in it.

-There’s not really any easy way to get from California’s interior (the central valley cities like Bakersfield, Merced, Fresno, etc that everyone likes to dunk on for not being LA or San Francisco) to LA or San Francisco. Basically, your only options are a shitty drive or a shitty bus, though the Amtrak San Joaquins and ACE extension line can at least get you to the bay area if you can access them. CAHSR makes it much easier for people in California’s interior to visit the metro area’s without becoming traffic, and makes it easier for folks in the metro area’s to visit the central valley in case they uh… Um… Want to see a cow? Oh, go to Yosemite or Sequoia national parks, yeah, that.

-Brightline West is NOT real High Speed Rail. Brightline is sort of at the high end of Mid-Speed Rail, which is still not bad, we could really do with a lot more of it for longer haul passenger service and intercity service where HSR doesn’t make sense. But they operate below the official HSR speeds in order to dodge a lot of really expensive FRA regulations. CAHSR can’t do that because it has to be a true replacement for the air route, which means that cost overruns are going to happen.

-The first true HSR project in the US was always going to be insanely expensive. California took the hit on this, but hopefully the knowledge, experience, and supply chains the CAHSRA creates will get picked up by other HSR projects in the states who can leverage it to build their projects cheaper.