Four or five a day and not getting drunk? Holy shit, that’s a tolerance! If this isn’t tongue-in-cheek, I say examine the list a little more closely.

TIL that this architectural style came from Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of this neologism, which seems to have originated with Scottish writer James Duff Law in 1865. And, that people have been trying to make this change happen for over 150 years. (Seems to me a review of the tale of King Canute and the tide is in order.)

I would just like to point out that this is an example of the tried-and-true rhetorical technique of shrugging off issues with a dismissive “that’s not new.” We see politicians and spokespersons do it all the time, because, maddeningly, it works.

But, it doesn’t actually matter whether it’s new, does it? Couple things: The Heritage Foundation has put out a similar document every election cycle for decades, but the contents have changed; this iteration could be (is!) much, much worse. Even if Heritage had been putting out the same plan all along, and we didn’t object then, well, we can still object now. We don’t have to keep making the same mistakes in the future just because we made them in the past.

Lots of people do want a king, or at least, a king in the sense of an embodiment and personification of the nation. Abstract thinking is hard, most of us do it as little as possible, and some people can’t do it at all, so they can’t conceptualize a thing like “the state.” They need a figurehead to relate to, like the king in a monarchical system. When you look at the debate through that lens, it makes sense why they’d not want Biden/their nation to appear weak and disjointed.

As an aside, I think that combining the head of government and head of state in the office of President is the worst mistake in the Constitution.

I’ll say it again, if you don’t like the demonym of “American,” feel free to refer to us by our state and territorial demonyms instead.

I think that there’s something to that, at least in the case of large universities which are divided into many, many organizational units. They also offer student jobs, which allow good opportunities for learning.

I’ll jump in here, though I know that everybody is dug in, and this is akin to poking the hornets’ nest. Anyway, it’s a matter of differing ethical calculations. On one side is utilitarianism, which says that if your choice is between Nazis who will murder 5,000,000 Jews, and worse-Nazis who will kill 5,000,001 Jews, then it’s a moral imperative to support Hitler for the sake of that one person.

And that’s… not wrong. I can imagine that many people would make that call, if it were some sort of send-a-time-traveler-to-kill-Hitler-or-not scenario, when the outcomes are fixed. But imagine deciding to support Hitler and personally aiding the systematic murder of 5,000,000 humans when the alternative is speculative, still in the future, when it’s not assured. I think a lot fewer people would be willing to do it. How many more people would the hypothetical worse-Nazis have to kill to make that an appealing choice?

Everybody has got a moral line after which we can’t abide cold, utilitarian calculations. Maybe some people would help produce the Zyklon B on the prospect of saving one life. Maybe some would only do it if it was required to save humanity from extinction. Probably a lot of people would do it to save themselves. (Hello, 1930’s Germans!) That’s getting off-topic, the point is that everybody has a line, and some of us would just refuse to aid the Holocaust.

Furthermore, the reality is not nearly so black and white as it is usually framed here on Lemmy. We don’t actually know what a future dementia-addled President would do. He has the attention span of a toddler. He’s not a strong manager and has a lot of power-hungry underlings (like Vance); his administration might resemble a bucket of rats each scrambling for the top. We don’t know how the world would react to anything he’d do. Bottom line, it’s speculative at this point.

And on the other side, the usual framing casts Democrats as fixed in their positions and imperturbable as the faces on Mount Rushmore, or at least boxed-in politically. They’re not. President Biden has already felt the heat and slightly altered his position on Israel in a couple of instances. In fact, while we could change and abide their support of genocide, they too could change at any time to just simply not support genocide. They could even frame it (accurately, as I see it) as tough love, protecting Israel from itself and assuring its survival long-term.

That’s why we pressure the people actually in power now, who are the ones supporting genocide right now, because that’s democracy in action. Yes, to be fair, it might result in a worse outcome later, but that’s far from assured, and in the mean time, you’re telling people not to even try to stop evil.

I started a job at a university department. A previous admin had a habit of re-purposing desktop machines as servers. There were at least a dozen of them. The authentication server for the whole department was on an old Dell desktop. All of the partitions were LVM volumes, and the volume group consisted of 3 physical volumes: The internal SATA drive, a bare SATA drive in an external USB cradle, and an external USB SSD.

This is why we drink.

If only there were some way to avoid a thrown pot of water, like, I dunno, maybe by teleporting out the door? Calling the eagles to get carried 6 feet, and out of range? Using the freeze-breath super-power? Sprouting housefly wings and flitting away? Sadly, there’s absolutely nothing realistically that a buff, 6’3", 220lbs. cop could possibly have done to move himself out of danger of flung hot water, 72 long inches away, so shooting her in the face (after she put it down) was of course the only proportionate response. /s

If you’re talking about the automobile-based transportation system, yes, I agree that it does not work, but I disagree that it is not a hard concept. It doesn’t seem like it should be, but it is. It should be gobsmackingly obvious that it doesn’t work based on simple observations through the windshield, yet so many people just can’t grasp it. As for disruptive protest, the case is not so straightforward, and many people will argue that it’s the only form of protest that actually works.

I’ve been stuck in exactly one protest-caused traffic backup in my entire life. But I’ve been stuck in backups for: crashes, rush hour, road construction, trains, sportsball matches, concerts, sausage festivals, triathlons, university dorm move-in, and even crews painting the lane lines, more times than I could even begin to count.

Why no tears for the poor wage slaves being stuck with the shittiest of transportation systems when it’s experiencing its usual failures?

There is at least one other, but he was born in South Africa, so he’s not eligible to run for President.

Great, now I’ve forgotten my keys!

(I don’t need them until I get to work.)

On the original topic, shoes last a lot longer if you don’t wear the same pair day after day. The continual dampness from foot perspiration breaks down the materials much more quickly. Giving each pair of shoes a couple of days to dry out between wearings will greatly extend their lives.

This effect may not be visible to many people, but if you have a physical job, it can save you a lot of money.

The Constitution is so vague on the point, it doesn’t even require that states hold elections. It just says that the legislature decides how the state’s presidential electors are appointed. That didn’t stop the Originalists on the Best Supreme Court Money Can Buy™ from ruling in the Colorado ballot case that, well, akshually, legislatures aren’t allowed to decide how to run their state’s elections.

Now, you’d think that a ruling that federal law supersedes state control of elections means that federal law supersedes state control of elections, but that principle may only apply to who appears on the ballot. It may only apply to whether their guy appears on the ballot. Don’t pin down the Best Supreme Court Money Can Buy™, man! They need to know who’s going to benefit from ranked-choice voting before they know what the Constitution actually says. Hell, the Constitution may actually contain a list of which states are allowed to have ranked-choice voting, and which are not. We just don’t know yet!

I read it. It was not garbage, it contains useful insights. I recommend that people read it to understand politics. BUT, NOTE, CAVEAT: Approach it with your critical thinking cap on. The author is an unreliable narrator, which is unorthodox in a work of non-fiction.

So I just wrote a comment which could be taken as justifying vigilante violence, so here’s the flip side:

Does anybody still believe that this kind of switch results from careful, rational contemplation of the issues? Nah fam, this change by Vance makes sense when you realize that right-wing populism is a kind of mind-virus which attacks our figurative lizard hind-brain and overrides our rational faculties. It’s powerful and highly treatment-resistant because it weaponizes the fight-or-flight threat response against facts and reality.

Still, you’d think that with the advancing state of our psychological and pharmaceutical sciences, we’d be better equipped to take it on than during the last “pandemic” in the 1930’s. A global paroxysm of violence was required to stamp it out last time, and we’d all be so much better off with a direct treatment. I guess that that kind of response would require understanding and recognizing that it is a mind-virus, a.k.a. a meme in the OG, Dawkins sense of the word.

(Also, does anybody else feel like this guy is only on the ticket because his name is a single, strong syllable?)

Something that I noticed years ago when working in law: There are pro forma people who care mostly about the process. Was it orderly, were all of the steps followed, the i’s dotted, the t’s crossed? Speaking colorfully, they would fully support a well-oiled orphan crushing machine, often even if they’re the orphans. It does make sense, given that monstrous and unjust rules and procedures are still rules and procedures, with a soothing order to them. Unknown, unpredictable things are deeply frightening to most living creatures, after all.

On the other side, there are the people who care mostly about the outcome, about whether it was just. They’ve resisted the world’s attempts to beat the child’s fixation on fairness out of them. There will always be a dynamic tension between the two groups.

So, yes, letting individuals make vigilante decisions about what is just and fair leads to chaos, but justice and fairness are still important. The crux of the matter is that the orderly court system has to deliver actual fairness and justice more often than the chaos does. If it doesn’t, then the people who care more about justice and fairness will do the cost-benefit analysis and abandon the system. If you’re in the first group, you may feel that an established, orderly court system is good, per se, no matter its outcome. But understand that lots of people also live in the second group, so it does matter if the court system is rotten to the core. It matters a great deal, because those folks will jettison the system the moment the chaos looks like a better option.

There are “longtail” T shirts that are as your describe, slightly longer.

100% chance that many people would interpret that as saying you can only get benefits for everybody together. The cannier folks would at least ask: “So can I apply for benefits for only my children, or only for all of us together?”

Better phrasing: “You can apply for benefits for any or all of the following people: You, your spouse, and your children.”

Source: Years of customer service experience.