You would need REALLY massive hands to touch those when your thumbs are resting on the analog sticks or the face buttons.

I think what I “love” most about this entire saga:

Every time people bring up “The epstein list” I just think: Why the hell would he keep a list of every single customer and who they raped and when? It is going to involve needing to look at the evidence and draw connections.

And then we get shit like this where it is in 100% plain text. So… there probably actually is a single PDF file that lists every single rapist and who they raped and when and the SSN/passport number of each person involved and even what the weather was on each occasion.

Not sure what drugs you are on but… gimme some.

But yeah. I am glad that the world is trying to minimize dependence on MS. Nextcloud… is very much not it. It is bloated and plugins break constantly and it is shockingly horrible for everything except file sync.

Its obviously privilege.

But if you have health insurance, get a primary care doctor. Insurance companies (and even a lot of doctors…) will try to tell you that you don’t need it because it makes the insurance companies more money for you to not receive preventative care and doctors are already overworked.

But having a PCP has three major benefits:

1. Preventative care. Get things checked out once a year. Ask questions during those appointments. Get blood tests. It is much better to identify a calcium deficiency while you can still self-medicate rather than when you start having complications from it and so forth
2. These days, many/most doctors are part of a larger practice. And those practices will often charge a lot less (and be a lot easier to schedule) for patients who are already under their care. I was fortunate enough that when I needed stitches removed 15-ish years ago that this was explained to me and it cost a LOT less. And it has been similarly useful for “is it a sprain or a fracture” style checks that would have otherwise been a trip to the urgent care and then a referral to the emergency room.
3. You get to make jokes about having (a) PCP

Which is what we see happen under parliamentary systems when the shit hits the fan.

The key is to explore that space while there is time rather than wait until it is a zero sum game with a REAL mediocre candidate

As opposed to ranked choice where no candidate gets a plurality, both progressives get eliminated, and the second choice “neolib” votes win? Because “the neolib” is also getting a fair amount of moderate and even conservative votes.

At which point “the neolib” flips everyone off and wins? As opposed to needs to convince the two progressives to support them in exchange for platform concessions?

Ranked choice would say that those 60% prefer one or the other progressive with the neolib being last. The result is theore popular progressive won, and more importantly, a progressive won.

Or we can just simplify your post to “under this system, people will vote the way I want them to” and leave it at that?

What if all American’s cancel their insurance. Why are we paying these people for a service that they don’t provide!?

Because then that annual physical goes from costing you 20 dollars out of pocket to almost 900 once the bloodwork is added.

If I’m going to be sick and broke because my insurance is too expensive to actually use,

And that is the real crux of it and why we need single payer/m4a. You, like most people, are approaching health insurance as something you need when you are sick.

The reality is that health insurance is something you have so you don’t actually get sick. You engage in preventative care whether that is vaccinations or just getting that lump checked out while it is still “you are either fat or have cancer” rather than “if we don’t cut out a large chunk of your leg, you are going to die” and so forth. Get your teeth cleaned rather than filled with epoxies and so forth.

And… that is also a big chunk of why it is so expensive. Because hospitals are generally staffed by people who give a shit (even if they often aren’t owned by folk that do…) and needing to care for people who don’t have insurance is a thing (at least in emergencies. But it isn’t like we live in a country where there are one or more mass shootings a day…). So the idea is that Mr Wilkerson, who has insurance, will pay out the nose on aspirin so that Mr Carey, who doesn’t, can get a hit of the mediocre stuff.

Which also leads to the complete fuckery of insurance companies being aware of that and more or less insisting on a system where they are billed something truly insane (10k for a tablet of aspirin!) so that they can use the power of collective bargaining to get that down to something “reasonable” (50 dollars per tablet of aspirin!) that they then have a co-pay on. Whereas people who don’t have insurance get that insane bill and need to fight for themselves and/or go bankrupt.

The primaries are the equiivalent of ranked choice voting. The idea is that each party, so each side of the political spectrum, brings out their “best” candidates and the populace votes on who best represents them. The winners of that move on to the general.

It isn’t quite the same but it also isn’t THAT far off the reality of how the votes turn out when the counting is done. And, theoretically, it encourages party platforms that incorporate the more popular parts of each popular candidate’s platforms. And that… sometimes happens.

Of course she gets a puppy and not an adult dog.

It doesn’t matter if they are “questioning” things if they are still holding guns and oppressing the populace.

I am sure plenty of the guards running the gas chambers questioned what they are doing. None of that mattered a bit to the people being murdered.

Because there is a time for questioning and a time for action. And if you really need to question “should I be the gun pointed at the people I claim to serve?”… you kind of already have your answer. Especially since the constant defense is “they would get in twouble if they don’t follow orders!”

Of course he did.

His whip was publicly swaying traitors ahead of the vote. And all the “yes” votes are people who aren’t up next year or who are actively retiring. That is how they do stuff like this. Protect the traitors who can get re-elected and make the people getting their lobbyist payouts the bogeymen.

The one year extension was a genuinely good strategy. It is a very reasonable way to discuss this when there is more time and people aren’t starving… that would have put us exactly back where we were on Tuesday for the “real” midterms.

A one month extension… would have let the democrats go home for thanksgiving, I guess? But would also be immediately abandoned because it’s xmas!

But this was getting absolutely nothing. johnson is already saying he won’t call a vote for the ACA.

Exactly.

Call your (blue) senators. Doesn’t matter if they voted for or against it. Explain that you aren’t fooled and that it was blatantly obvious that schumer had his whip get the yes votes on behalf of the republicans.

This battle is lost. But this is far from the first time a schumer led Democratic party did trump’s work for him. schumer and durbin don’t need to step down as Senators (but they really fucking should) but they DO need to step down as minority leader and whip in favor of someone who isn’t a complete and utter failure, at best.

Otherwise? You’ll assume that your senator(s) were some of the real yeses who caved.

Hear me out? Wouldn’t it be so much more effective to get rid of all those DEI hires and replace every ATC tower with a broccoli headed kid who will refer to every plane as a “buttfor”?

Something something, yeah son well I’m a secret navy seal and I’ll tell you that the marines are actually a culture that deeply values honor something something laughed at me while eating his snickers.

Still, gotta love how in your rant (I REALLY hope that is a copypasta and not something you thought up yourself…) you managed to combine “you are too soft and don’t understand what war is” with “the soldiers might get in twouble if they say anything”.

Which… about sums up America when you think about it.

When he refuses to step down from the end of his term as president and order them to crush the states that don’t ratify his third term, they can remove his ass.

Sort of like back in 2021 when he led a violent coup with the goal of murdering Congress and the VPOTUS because he didn’t want to step down?

I am so glad that the military… let me check my notes… ah, yes. Waited to see who would win.

Are you saying the National Guard should fight ICE right now?

Hmm. A heavily armed paramilitary group acting in an illegal and unconstitutional manner to attack, torment, and abduct a civilian populace? Why would I expect the US military to intervene against that?

Or just the soldiers here and there resist how they can and go to jail for refusing to pick up trash? This one leaves you with a National Guard completely not on your side instead of at least half on your side when you might need it most.

No. What we have is half gleefully oppressing people and the other half pretending they are sad while… oppressing people.

MAYBE they’ll grow a backbone down the line. All signs are that they’ll continue to refuse and people like you will continue to defend them because there might be consequences for them not forcing civilian populations to live in fear.

Look man, you don’t know the military well, so it’s easy to criticize the actions of people whose position you never have to imagine yourself in,

Got it. Let he who has flipped the switch cast the first stone at the brave men and women manning the gas chambers!

but it’s like open-and-shut, you go to jail and fail to change anything if you’re not careful.

Again. What do you think is going to happen to the people protesting and actually fighting against tyranny when ICE et al have had enough? Hell, the government is trying to send fucking Kat Abughazaleh to jail and she is a pretty white presenting politician with a large social media following.

But I get it. It is much easier for people who haven’t served to have a backbone and actually fight against tyranny. Because… they don’t know how good boot leather tastes?

There is no such thing as an “ongoing ‘clean’ data source”. Because the people paying for these models are actively using it on those platforms. Whether it is because they are too stupid to express their own thoughts and “use chatgpt for coming up with ideas” or because they are running a bot farm.

And the reality is that… it doesn’t actually matter. People are on the “dead internet theory” bandwagon again. But… think back to the past five or six years. How often have you had a meaningful conversation on ANY social media platform? It happens occasionally, but mostly you can hope for someone to key in on a single sentence you said or actively misrepresent your post because they wanted to tell a joke they clearly have been workshopping for the past few days. More often you get someone who just keys in on a single word and pastes a copypasta that they know will do well (see: Basically any topic about “AI” on the fediverse…). And that is assuming you get a reply at all.

Let alone all the people who pretend the internet used to be a wonderful place where you get the answer to everything instantly rather than worrying if chatgpt hallucinated. Those motha fuckers clearly never spent much time on stack overflow or the intel message boards…

“AI” didn’t learn how to pass the Voight-Kampff test. Humanity now does so poorly on it that we have to grade on a curve.

So as for “sloppy” models? We are probably less than a year out before influencers start bragging that they love ShitGPT 7 because “it isn’t pretentious. It talks like me”. Sorry “Others disingenuous. ShitGPT speak truth gooder. Like, comment, subscribe and use my affilly linkle”

Like… OnlyFans ostensibly isn’t a porn platform. But they know what they’re doing. The credit card companies know what they’re doing yet turn a blind eye? How does that work?

OnlyFans corporate actively downplays the porn and STILL try to pretend it is about normal vlogging and fitness. It is a big chunk of why there was that former disney channel actress who made a huge deal about posting some bikini shots to OF. She made bank and OF got themselves in the news as “actually it is all not even softcore”. Similarly, OF has shockingly strict and well defined rules for the kinds of content that can be sold (stuff like “no fisting”).

And the payment providers generally don’t care until they are legally forced to care.

Same with Reddit. Karma farming is horrible for the site’s long term health, yet they seem to structure things to encourage it as much as they can.

Long term doesn’t matter but also…

Reddit’s product isn’t people pretending they are clever for referencing an eighteen year old joke from It’s Always Sunny or having endless arguments over whether someone is morally virtuous for posting a meme about someone they don’t like being a bad pet owner.

The product is the advertisement and “authority”. Having someone respond to “what wok should I buy” with a summary of why you kind of want the cheapest carbon steel piece of crap you can find with the desired diameter, bottom, and handles isn’t helpful. Blog sites already exist. Hell, you can check the heat map on the youtube search bar for how many people just skip to the end of a Project Farm video.

But by having the top result be whatever brand won that week’s fight? Suddenly everyone talks about how much they hate google and how the real secret is to search “best wok reddit”. And then if reddit suddenly starts charging for data scraping so google can’t see it anymore or API access to automate those kinds of “grass roots” answers?

As for long term? There is no long term. They have years of training data. They’ll get bought out by whoever wants it the most and then be done with it.