Politicians, and even corporate C-suite, often confuse “cheaper to buy from the incumbent” with “incumbent has impossible-to-replicate technology,” completely ignoring that it’s way easier to invent something the second time.

Technology might have been a barrier in 1960’s China, but they’re a peer nation today.

There’s a wider spectrum of “consuming audiobook” than of “reading.”

Listening to that audobook so it’s easier to take notes? Definitely as good as reading.

Audiobook on while you’re on the treadmill? I guess there’s some people who can read on the treadmill, so maybe it’s similar, but it strikes me as very different levels of attention and likely recall.

Audiobook on while you do chores, cook, or write some other project? Definitely not equivalent to reading.

I know a couple of people IRL who never seem to have a positive reaction to anything. The proverbial “every silver lining has a cloud” people: got a raise? just means more taxes. Sunny day? skin cancer. Cloudy day? cold and mud.

For the particular people I know, it seems like a self-esteem thing - like they don’t feel themselves worthy of happiness, so they have to preemptively destroy anything positive. Or maybe just be contrarian to prove they’re smarter than everyone else. It’s exhausting.

most seem to believe that voting makes them complicit in perpetuating the broken system

Maybe, if they’re in a militia training to overthrow the system. Otherwise, they’re just short of Sovereign Citizens, imagining they’ve got a cheat code to escape the moral burden of the failing system. I mean, definitely, let’s change the system, but in the meantime, let’s try for the least bad actors we can.

The oldest GenX were only 15 when Reagan got elected. Even for Clinton, X were still voting in small enough numbers to lay the blame on Silent & Boomers.

You may be thinking of the Greatest Generation.

I think most people put Boomers as 60-80 in 2026. 81+ are “Silent Generation,” and Gen X 40-60.

Sad to say, it looks like we can blame Gen X even more than Boomers for Trump.

Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Used to be that a college degree indicated people with time, money, and drive to put four years into study. It was a good measure of the “right” kind of person. Now it’s just another job requirement and doesn’t indicate anything.

What files are those? The UFO files are out, and they’re pretty blah.

My favorite character name is still Hiro Protagonist. Nominative determinism at its best. Or maybe they just forgot to update the placeholder name before going to print.

Agree. I’d love to see someone do a rigorous accounting of any degree program, especially with international comparisions. I once went through a couple of US state universities, and that generally supported the hypothesis of ‘cost of instruction hasn’t changed in 50 years, but burden of payment has shifted from state taxes to tuition,’ but that was based on whatever the schools published as ‘cost of instruction.’ I’d believe that international cost of instruction follows purchasing price pairity, and it seems more expensive in the US because it’s all tuition and no public payment.

When she first showed up, I remember one particular picture of her being all over right wing media. Not the most flattering picture, obviously. She was smiling especially broadly, showing lots of teeth, eyes wide open (“bugged out”). Sometimes associated with speculation that she might have Graves disease or some developmental disorder.

No question her appearance has made the media give her more time than they might, but she has a compelling story and she’s connected with millennial voters much better than her septuagenarian peers.

My guess is Krusty tried a cheap induction hotplate, and those do have some issues.Most notable for me is that the element is smaller than the actual cooktop/burner-indicator. If I use a 11"/25 cm skillet, with 8"/20cm base, there’s a cold ring around the edge and a cold spot in the center. You can get around that by constantly moving the pan around the burner, but that’s annoying.

Docs in the rest of the world don’t start with $200k student loans, and nurses don’t start $50k in debt. US medicare for all won’t magically give us Swedish hospital rates.

The US currently spends about $5 trillion on healthcare. About $1T of that goes through Medicare, another $0.9T through Medicaid, which leaves about $3T. Non-government spending is $1.6T through private insurance, $0.6T out of pocket, and $0.5T charities.

The “universal healthcare would be cheaper argument,” which I believe, is based on shifting that $3T of private payments into government spending and bringing the ~85% efficiency of care by private insurers up to the 98% that Medicare claims. i.e.: eliminating roughly $400 B of insurance company profit. That still requires $2.5T revenue increase, which is about 50% of current revenue.

Interestingly, the specific article cited is more making the case that all passenger cars are bad, and we’d be better off with e-bikes, transit, and walkable cities. i.e.: I don’t think hes saying 'EVs are worse than ICE," which is where the ‘lifetime emissions’ line usually goes. He’s saying “fuck cars, EVs not excepted.”

No person

Says nothing about God Empereors.

Doesn’t have to do them all. Democrats are super concentrated relative to Republicans. Here in Georgia, if ICE would shut down just Fulton county, they’d shift the state-wide margin by close to 10 percentage points, and that’s just 40 polling sites.

Does anyone know if this is a widely used app? All the stats I see on github or lemmyapps make it look very small.

LibreOffice is generally a fine alternative to MS Office. I do collaborative writing with the MS world, and rarely run into any issues - mostly related to Track Changes. It’s installed with the ‘full desktop’ version of most distros.

Python is part of every distro and a good place to start programming.