To return to the main menu, press all of the buttons on your keypad simultaneously.

It’s funny, I love chili and I love mac and cheese, but I find ChiliMac to be somehow worse than the sum of it’s parts.

Inflation was on the rise before Trump left office. It continued under Biden for the first two years of his term, but he managed to get key legislation passed in that span of time that has measurably reduced inflation. It’s still not back down to what it was pre-pandemic, but we are leading almost every other western democracy in that metric. It really is incredible that people are giving Biden shit for the economy when he is actively fixing the problem, and it shows that the Democrats have a tremendous failure in their ability to do effective messaging.

If it doesn’t feel like inflation has been improved under Biden, that’s because the price you pay at the gas pump or the grocery store has more to do with what they chose to set their prices at than what the current rate of inflation is. The “vibe economy” is real, but they aren’t casting the blame for it at the right people. For once, government did it’s job. Who knows if the current trend will continue under Trump, but given that he set off the massive inflationary spending spree by injecting a ton of cash into a booming economy with stimulus checks, I imagine he’s not going to care much about the fundamentals of a healthy economy and will instead do whatever makes his donors happy.

Good. I hope he does it. Don’t let any of his yes-men or cronies tell him what a horrible idea it is. Let the whole fucking country burn.

Immigration is such a horseshit issue. Why are people dumb enough to fall for this shit?

Immigration will be “solved” come January, but not because Trump will actually do anything about it, but he’ll just say the problem is solved and then stop talking about it.

Too late for that.

Small acts of rebellion. Take extra long breaks. Automate parts of my job and then don’t tell anybody that I did it. Break some shit on purpose and act like it was an accident. Steal as much stuff that isn’t nailed down as possible. The list would go on, but I’d honestly have no idea what I would actually do in that situation.

I’m certainly not giving it 100% at whatever job I’m working at. I would say form a union, but that’s hard to do when you are working for 56 hour workweeks plus commute, not including overtime. That’s assuming the 7 day workweek remains 8 hour shifts rather than moving down to something like 6 hour shifts with an unpaid lunch break.

I’d like to believe that the only reason 2020 got so ratfucked in the first place was that Trump was intentionally not putting the screws on anybody to do their jobs.

A second Jan 6th won’t happen, at least not this year. A MAGA mob will show up at the capitol and be met by a fully prepared and well armed national guard, because Biden is the commander in chief and he’s going to take threats like that seriously.

If the house declines to elect a speaker, Biden could in theory put pressure on them to pick one. The constitutional crisis can swing both directions - yes the Republicans will likely try to avoid certification, but then Biden could threaten to not step down unless the certification happens, or hand over the reigns to VP Harris anyway by resigning. I don’t see it working in their favor to try something like not certifying or not electing a speaker, because they don’t have the luxury of Trump in the white house to look the other way at their bad behavior.

At my company, they used to be a lot more tolerant of it, but we had exactly one person complain about excessive use of coarse language and then HR cracked the whip. They still don’t really care that much about using swear words when just interacting in person with other people, as long as it’s not bothering anybody else, but they heavily police our work chat to make sure that all of our messages are above the board in terms of professional conduct. Which makes sense, I can’t really argue against the logic that the work chat should be a professional setting where you can communicate your thoughts and feelings without having to resort to using profanity. Sometimes people have to be reminded to not use profane language, but they never call anybody out specifically, they just send out “reminder” messages whenever they see it and usually the person who is responsible knows not to keep it up or else there will be a more direct reprimand.

It would be hard for me to not sometimes utter “fuck” under my breath while I’m at work, but if my bosses were concerned about it, I would just start channeling that into more work-appropriate language.

This emoji has two meanings:

1. the “original” meaning is based on the “shaka sign” from Hawai’ian culture. It’s often paired with the phrase “hang loose”, which generally just means to relax, have a good time, etc.

2. When mobile telephones first started to become mainstream, they would have an antenna that extended up and out of the phone chassis a speaker and a receiver that you would speak directly into, so people picked up this gesture that mimicked the shape of a cell phone. Pressing it against your cheek with the pinky finger in front of your mouth and the thumb covering the opening of your ear would be accompanied by saying or mouthing “call me” was pretty universally understood and was one way to communicate the desire to speak on the phone from a distance where you could still visually see someone but shouting was ineffective or impractical.

edit: some people have clarified that the gesture predates cell phones, which makes sense.

Unfortunately, a lot of smart people are under his spell too. I had to listen to the CEO of a medium sized company wax poetic about how he’s a super genius and the greatest boon to human ingenuity in a century, desperately trying to hold my tongue as I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.

I think he’s an okay businessman. That’s about as much praise as I’m willing to afford him. He’s definitely charismatic enough to convince a room full of investors that the ideas he’s pitching are worthwhile. Part of that is that his passion for these projects are genuine, and when you put somebody in a room with a passionate guy, the enthusiasm tends to rub off on them just a little.

Most of his investments that garnered him his wealth are just him being at the right place at the right time. Getting in on PayPal when Ecommerce was in it’s infancy and partnering with Ebay to take advantage of shopaholics who just couldn’t help themselves. Buying his way into Tesla right when EVs were primed to take off and pushing hard for an economy class variant that could be mass produced rapidly (in an already-made factory that Toyota closed down, no less!). Founding SpaceX and pouring a shit ton of his own money into rocket and aeronautics R&D right around the time the U.S. Government was looking for cheap contractors to take over the space program. I think the only project he miscalculated on was buying Twitter for way too much money when social media was really starting to stagnate.

His politics are fucking weird, though. Him being a Trump nutter is really not helping his “I’m a genius” image. I find his personality to be pretty repugnant. I already didn’t like him because back in the early days of Tesla he pushed all the management to essentially become slavedrivers for the line workers. I live in California near the plant and I had friends who worked there in production that got nearly worked to death, extreme overtime and weekend shifts, few breaks, the only saving grace was the above average pay that kind of kept them trapped in that hell of a job for way too long. Then the whole Thai soccer team incident happened and I was so over him. Haven’t heard anything about him since that has made me feel like he deserves to be the richest cunt in the fucking universe.

I suppose he could dismiss them, but considering he just had two recent attempts on his life, that would probably be unwise to say the least.

The minimum sentence is a hefty fine, but the judge in that very trial already determined that fines do not discourage Trump’s behavior, given the contempt punishment that he ignored, so I don’t think it’s going to be a slap on the wrist for him unless the judge truly is a hypocrite or a coward.

That being said, even if he gets prison for each of his felony counts, he can serve them all concurrently, a maximum of 3 years per count. So he could theoretically be out of prison right before the next election cycle with a year left to campaign for 2028, that is assuming he truly is sentenced immediately after the election in November and it’s not just pushed back indefinitely due to recount horseshit or Trump crazies doing another insurrection.

But there are other trials that are far more likely to result in additional prison time, the most important two being the classified documents case and the Jan 6th case. I have faith that the justice system will eventually follow through with punishing Trump, but the system is set up to slow-walk the rich and powerful to accountability.

USSS won’t just let him get on a plane and fly off to Russia. His security is their top priority, so allowing him to secrete himself somewhere without first verifying his itinerary and securing both the mode of transportation and the destination, would be unthinkable. That means they are reporting all of his movements to local law enforcement. Can’t exactly flee the country in secret when every cop in the state will know his exact position and have eyes on him at all times. If the courts think he is a flight risk, someone involved in the process will know what he’s trying to do and prevent him from going anywhere where it will be hard to get him back again.

The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it’s just only in the last decade or so that it’s been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it’s being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights… the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.

The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is “Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade” it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don’t really care about. It doesn’t help that very few people understand the relationship between “the economy” as outlined by experts and “the economy” as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn’t matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that’s what they will remember when voting next time.

Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.

I want someone to drink mead out of my skull after I die and absorb my power. This is my fondest wish.

Social media is probably a very poorly or very narrowly defined term. Either they called out Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, etc by name or they gave some broad description of social media that could apply to everything from Facebook all the way down to somebody’s Vbulletin forum and this will be unenforceable for the vast majority of websites. Compliance is likely voluntary for the little fish in social media. I imagine that they aren’t even aware that Lemmy exists.

I liked the quote from Dr. Hibbert on the Simpsons:

“You know what they say, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”

“Oh ho ho ho, no… It’s made you weak as a kitten!”

When I first signed up for reddit, the upvotes and downvotes were not only separately tallied, but also showed the usernames of the most recent people who did them if you hovered over the button. Then very shortly after that they changed it so that it made votes private by default, and you could override it in the settings, but almost nobody went to check that box back on. Eventually, they completely removed that feature around the time upvotes and downvotes were combined into one. which along with vote fuzzing was one of the worst changes to reddit comments, imo.

Lemmy feels like old reddit right now, which is a great spot to be in. I don’t think you necessarily need public vote info, but maybe it could be enabled on a per-community basis? I can see some communities like politics not wanting to add additional drama to the equation while other more content driven communities might enjoy knowing who was giving the feedback.

Whenever I think of the answer to this question, I always lament at how many film trilogies or games could have been absolutely immaculate duologies but were, for various reasons, sort of forced into a third installment through fan expectations, studio pressure, or just plain Hollywood/corporate greed.

It usually begins with a film or a video game that is an unexpected success, something that was written off by the execs that turned out to be not just a work of art, but a pop culture sensation. Star Wars, The Matrix, The Terminator, Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, etc were probably never intended to have a sequel. Their original plotlines all tied up the loose ends nicely and made for a perfectly adequate self-contained story. Then the second film/game in the series comes out and it’s another well received installment. Maybe it’s because the second rides a bit on the coattails of the first, or maybe because the first walked so the second could run, it’s hard to say, but in every case the second always sets the bar too high. The third installment is typically the one that sours the soup, so to speak. I’d wager that even a really well written story can’t really live up to the expectations that fans have for the third installment of a well-beloved series. Having the perfect three-peat is a feat rarely seen accomplished, but nobody ever seems satisfied with just two good pieces of media with no plans for a third.