Trump is a symptom, not the cause. Our democracy has been hacked and dismantled, if we want it back it must be rebuilt

She’s a way better writer than she is a person

She is a pretty shit writer though

Time left to live. There’s plenty of useful things that tell you more about a person, but shinigami eyes would let you save lives and know it, even if no one else does

And if it turns out the number can’t be changed through your actions, that would tell you a lot. If nothing else, you could say goodbye to loved ones and get incredibly rich by finding a CEO about to run out of time

Well, suspended except when it’s a criminal warrant. Which is how it always was

It’s good to repeat it: immigration is a civil matter. It’s a matter of paperwork. Do you know who goes after the murderers and rapists? The fucking police

Better than hard coded… Ideally we use tokens+fingerprint or something to avoid storing the creds directly (if possible), but putting them in environment variables is pretty common

It’s not the worst thing, it’s very convenient (so people won’t go around it) and usually not the weak point in security (although AI being able to easily see it is an interesting twist)

Reconstruction was ended too early, in large part because of the Lincoln assassination, and the very questionable choice to appease the South by putting Andrew Johnson a heartbeat away from the presidency

We definitely should have been draconian in punishing the south, but our greatest mistake is civility politics. The leaders were all in the same social circles, and to this day that’s a recurring problem that plagues most democracies. They didn’t want real consequences for their buddies

So all in all, we didn’t strip enough power from the leadership and stopped punishment way earlier than even the overly light-handed plan in place

Well, not quite… See they’re trying to keep daylight savings time permanently instead of staying with normal time permanently

This has been attempted before, and it didn’t last through the winter. It’s apparently pretty brutal on people when the sun doesn’t rise until 9 or 10, and experts say it’s possibly the worst option for public health

Yeah but the context clues are a hell of a lot easier there. You’re holding an object, and if someone called it a chupa-chupa or a sucker most people would be able to put that together pretty easily

Now imagine you’re going through stretches and someone walks in and is like “oh, playing football are you”. You could be preparing to go outside and play football… But you’re just stretching

I think most people would be confused by that unexpected second meaning of a familiar word

I think it’s more of a “don’t hold onto hatred” kinda thing. They’re dead, so let it go for your own sake, as well as those grieving. It doesn’t help anyone

I don’t think it applies to public figures though… At least not if their family isn’t around. Hell, I think it’s just fine to celebrate the world becoming a better place

I don’t let hatred build up in myself, but I sure as hell have felt hope when I see some monsters have gone

Everyone liked that

Taxes are one mechanism, but they don’t work if you let corporations get too big/powerful. Then you get regulatory capture, no matter how many anti corruption measures you bake in

Capitalism needs constant pruning to incentivize competition and align companies with the common good… And even that never seems to last very long

Mastodon is like Twitter, friendica is like Facebook, loops is like tik tok, etc etc

In theory they could all federate, but again that’s not something new users need to know about (and there’s only a few such links anyways)

Based on how my conversations have gone, I’d just skip explaining the federation part entirely. Most people don’t care

I’d just say it’s like Reddit, but more friendly and less addictive. Sell that they’ll get all the important news and memes, but without the ads, bots, and garbage content shoved in their faces

I’d also pick a home server for them and help them set it up, lemmy.world is probably good as a default if they’re coming from mainstream socials

Truth is, most people really don’t care how it works. They just want it to work, and their first impression shouldn’t be choice overload or a data dump

Perhaps corpocrat fuckwits should just stop insulting Tolkien’s memory?

Misinterpreting sci-fi/fantasy is their whole thing though

I understand that all too well.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why. I used to think there was something I was needed for, but now I don’t know how I would ever impact more than a handful of lives. The world is pretty fucked.

Now I’ve come to believe it’s about ourselves, about growth. We’re here to learn some kind of lesson, either something we chose in some way or as a punishment. If it were all random, why would the easy way out be blocked?

I try to help the people around me. I spend a lot of time looking inside myself, trying to speed run whatever I’m supposed to take from this experience so I won’t have to do it again. I try to understand humanity, both the good and the flaws. I try to understand the world. I try to understand myself

When I get deep enough into meditation, a handful of times I’ve had visions. Just a flash of a scene and sometimes a message partially understood, then I’m thrown back to rock solid reality. It only happens when I’m very deep in meditation, otherwise even substances don’t make me see more than colors.

I think the way out is through new experiences. To experience new sides of life

I find myself having little to tie me down, so I think I’m going to set up my car as a sleeper and go on a journey. Try to taste true freedom and go wherever the wind takes me, to search for beauty and answers, and overcome whatever inevitable challenges that brings

If that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll try to live with monks for a time, and see if a life free of distractions will bring answers or some form of joy

All I can tell you for sure is that you’re not alone, to seek joy wherever you can find it, and to take it one day at a time… Not like there’s another option

Not really. They call themselves Canadians and call us Americans. For example, they are boycotting “American” xyz

Don’t worry, we can’t bail them out this time. There’s just not enough money, each bailout is exponentially bigger than the last one and this time the bubble is bigger than the rest of the global economy

We’ll probably destroy the global economy buying them just a few more months anyways though

Stopwatches also play a large roll, so I say we call it “egg time”

Not exactly secret or illegal, they are actively selling driving data to insurance companies already. Stuff like speeding, hard breaking, etc.

It’s not widely advertised, but it’s less secret and more “hidden in the fine print”. It’s right there in the open though

Cell companies can give those out for free if they want to… What they offer to consumers is absolutely not the same as what they might offer to a car company at bulk rates. They could even have the car store data and wait for low usage times to upload, it would cost cell providers almost nothing

They might even leverage it to use up bandwidth so they don’t have to sell to secondary carriers if they wanted to one day…