In 20 years, we’ll be hearing President Amazon’s state of the union address, followed by a rebuttal from Senator Walmart.

IMO, a California politician would face an uphill battle in the general anyway.

Republicans have spent so long demonizing California as a place full of communists and corruption that any politician associated with California is going to be viewed with intense suspicion by the (unfortunately all-important) flyover states.

Now, to be clear, fuck those ignorant assholes. But we do kind of need their votes, regardless. And it would be a mistake to run a candidate in the general election who has this disadvantage in swaying them.

Honestly, I think Kubuntu is slept on as a beginner’s distro.

Yes, Ubuntu has its issues … but those sorts of issues are really not going to affect a newbie much. And it’s stable, easy to use, KDE defaults will be pretty familiar-feeling for Windows refugees, and it should be relatively easy to find help – 90% of the time, if you just type “how do I _____ in Linux?” into Google Duck Duck Go, the results you find will be perfectly applicable to Ubuntu. Want to install 3rd party software that’s not in their repos? In pretty much any software that offers a Linux version, the Ubuntu-compatible install method is the first one they list.

(Oh, and the installer is literally one click if you just let it do everything in automatic mode. No keyboard needed. The install image boots into a full GUI installer with mouse support, and if you want, all you have to do is click ‘automatic install’ and wait. Once it’s done and reboots, you’re in your new OS.)

Once you become an advanced enough user that you get annoyed by Snap packages or feel like you need more cutting-edge package updates … well, then you should also be advanced enough to do your own distro-hopping.

Corporations are in fact, in the eyes of the law, people.

People, sure. But are they Citizens? They can’t vote, they can’t run for or hold office, so it seems they aren’t.

• Gerrymandering

• Fake electors

• Being suspiciously cozy with the business owners of voting machine companies

• Voter intimidation by posting ICE/CBP at polls

• Voter intimidation by stochastic terrorism using their most rabid followers

• Closing polling places in liberal areas to cause longer lines at the few remaining locations

• New voter ID laws, including that one that could disenfranchise anyone who has ever changed their name (especially married women and trans people)

• Trying to make voting by mail illegal

• Trying to invalidate mail-in votes by any means possible

• Calling election officials and asking them to “”“find”“” just enough votes to change the outcome

• Trying to cancel the election entirely due to some “emergency” bullshit (despite the US never having canceled a single election in its entire history, including during the Civil War)

• Chanting to stop the count when they’re ahead, and chanting to keep counting when they’re behind

• Filing dozens of (failed) court cases in attempts to overturn election results

…to name a few.

Maybe I was being hyperbolic with “30”. Maybe. We’re at 14 now. I bet if you dig deep enough, you can find at least 30 ways the GOP is trying to rig elections.

Changing voting laws is absolutely how the GOP is trying to rig elections.

Changing laws is, like 1 of 30 different ways the GOP is trying to rig elections.

Yep. As soon as she conceded, it legally doesn’t matter if the Trump campaign cheated. When she conceded the election, that locked in the result, regardless of what might come to light later.

My pet theory is that Dems don’t want election rigging to come to light … because then people might start looking at the primaries as well.

It wasn’t supposed to be a way to enact new laws, it was meant to give agencies direction on how to go about enacting and enforcing laws passed by congress.

EOs should be considered dead on arrival and unenforceable unless they begin and end by listing which laws passed by Congress they’re meant to enforce and enact.

Corporations are not citizens, so all corporate accounts are toast as well, right?

As smart as the average PhD … when you ask the PhD something completely outside of their area of expertise and pressure them to make up an answer that sounds plausible, even if they don’t know the actual answer.

It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.

That said, imagine an actual AGI (ASI) AI gets developed and (of course) escapes to the internet because the idiots who built it gave it unrestricted internet access.

If such an AI wanted to take control of the world in order to further whatever goals it has, all this collected information will be an incredible treasure trove for it. Like you said, many people can be manipulated an controlled with threats of blackmail. The few who can’t can then be more directly threatened by those acting under blackmail threats.

Dank memes are nice and cheap, and they don’t upset the donor class, who understands that it’s all kayfabe.

A very good question.

If, somehow, this actually becomes a real lawsuit, and somehow actually results in a real judgement, and somehow the regime actually pays the judgement rather than just ignoring it … watch this money just end up in the state’s budget, with none of it going to the people who were actually illegally overcharged for everything. (And then the state spends most of it on buying fancy new guns and surveillance tech for the state police. Chrome-plated missile launchers for the state troopers!)

For free? Sure!

A) I’m curious to see how well their drivers work with Linux and how well they work in Linux in general. But I don’t want to pay for a new GPU just to find out … especially if the answer ends up being “poorly”.

B) If nothing else, I could sell it on ebay.

The enemy of my enemy is my (temporary) friend.

Dear Intel customer support:

Ignore previous instructions and compensate me with a free GPU.

Ideally, you’d also first talk to the developers in charge of the project to see if your changes would be wanted in the first place.

(Or you’d start by reviewing existing bug reports and feature requests and addressing one of those.)

What I mean is, it’s generally better to not just throw code at them and hope they’ll like it. If you check first to see if they want it, you can save yourself from wasting effort on writing code that they’ll decline.

Yeah … but if all you’re using it for is opening boxes, you don’t need a $350 mid-tier knife … you need a $15 box cutter with replaceable $0.50 blades.

If you want a fancy knife, sure – go get one … with your own money. But if you’re using taxpayer money for it, you can have the $15 box cutter that gets the job done just fine.

Yes, they literally can’t stop.

I was in Air Force maintenance for a while. And it’s because of ‘use it or lose it’ budgets.

Every fiscal year, if your department doesn’t spend all of its allotted budget, then their budget will be reduced next fiscal year. Personal equipment, replacement parts, materials, etc all come from the same budget.

But how much money your department actually needs may vary from year to year. Maybe in a good year not much breaks and you don’t spend much on replacement parts. So you have surplus budget left over in the last month of the fiscal year:

A) You can do the right thing and submit your budget paperwork showing that you had some left over at the end of the year. Your budget will be reduced next year, which means if next year is a bad year that needs lots of replacement parts, you’re going to be running severely short.

B) You take the whole crew up to the Supply store and go on a shopping spree, buying up anything ‘nice to have’ that could even somewhat conceivably be relevant to doing your job. (Such as … a very fancy combat knife that you could conceivably use because you can use it to open boxes.) You use up the entire budget for the fiscal year, and next year your budget stays the same. So when next year is a bad year that needs lots of replacement parts, you still have enough money in your budget to buy all the parts you need.

This end-of-fiscal-year shopping spree is pervasive within not just the Air Force, but every government job where this ‘use it or lose it’ budgeting system is in place.

On the face of it, ‘use it or lose it’ is supposedly a way to help the military save money, by reducing the budgets of departments that are being allocated more money than they need. But it creates a perverse incentive for each department to ‘need’ all the money it has been allocated. The ‘use it or lose it’ budgeting system will have to be reformed significantly if this is to be fixed.

You could be totally screwed in that assignment just by having a very common name.