How about a simple test: if you remember Kent State happening, you’re now too old for office.

I do appreciate how we heard a cybertruck exploded and caught fire and most people were like “yup, that happens.”

Stupid (and illegal) bans on using the restroom always fall apart as soon as the first person shits in a trash can.

Blackmail is the first step, to get them to comply.

Next comes the bribes and money. That’s what the Republicans are addicted to and afraid of losing. Russia spends a LOT of money on a LOT of politicians, and they step out of line, the faucet gets turned off.

After the bribes come the subtle threats and constant low-key demonstrations of power. This is where Russia notices someone is toeing the line or stepping out of control and they reign them back in with a well-placed threat delivered in a way even Boebert can understand. This is the “we picked your kids up at school and dropped them off at their grandparents house today” kind of thing.

They’re in deep and can’t get out without serious harm to themselves and probably their families. I’d feel sorry for them, but they’re all a bunch of shithead traitors who did this to themselves, and are now destroying our country.

I’m not one for conspiracy theories, and we don’t have any evidence to back up any sort of claims of rigging or election fraud. In fact, the various lawsuits Trump initiated in the last cycle and audits and recounts and so on provided a pretty damning pile of evidence for “not rigged”.

Republicans aren’t rigging elections themselves. There’s no tomfoolery going on with voting machines, or people voting twice, or similar. They’re “rigging” it with legal means – disenfranchising voters, suppressing turnout, financing third party candidates to peel votes away from the other side, gerrymandering districts, and using massive propaganda systems to influence who decides to vote and what they choose when they do vote.

All said, though, we can always make the system more robust, and increase both voters’ confidence in the system and allay any fears of actual rigging. But election reforms are often a “Democrat” issue, so almost any Republican will oppose meaningful reforms that don’t do one of the things above to suppress voters.

I’ve been around the Internet since the BBS days and I can’t think of a single time where a de-centralized platform has out competed a centralized platform with “normal” users.

I’m right there with you. I’d love to see the dream of the decentralized media return, but it’s long-dead. The “Normal” user doesn’t give a fuck about the benefits and even the moderate barrier to entry over some centralized platform is enough to keep them away.

Tech-minded people seem to often forget that even the most simplistic choices like “Choose an instance” is a big deal for people. The platform that’s the most familiar, and easiest to use is going to be the one that wins, and, right now, that looks like it’s Bluesky.

If they aren’t, then border patrol would have no grounds to detain them. ICE could not deport them…

A huge swath of Republican voters are not voting for Trump. They are voting against “Democrats”. Propaganda in the US has turned politics into a team sport, and you always root for your team, even if your team is having a rough season.

It’s cute how you think things will be alive.

I keep an eye on these types of treatments. Type 1 diabetes being autoimmune and all.

So far, I’m putting it in the bucket with all the other “cure is just 5 years away” things we hear about.

It’s promising, and neat it’s worked in these cases, but I remain skeptical. Twice over as it appears to be research from China, who doesn’t have the best track record for robust scientific integrity. We’ll see how repeatable this stuff is soon enough.

The tricky part about T1 is… We don’t know why the immune system is malfunctioning, only that it is. Without that vital piece of research, everything that presents as a cure is temporary at best.

Dr. Faustman out of Mass General has been conducting some trials into phase two or three using the BCG vaccine to treat / cure the immune response.

There’s a problem there, though. The propaganda was basically various versions of “The government (when run by Democrats) is bad, don’t trust the government.”

If they put up a notice saying, “This domain was seized, here’s the real facts!” the target of the propaganda isn’t going to buy it for a hot minute.

If they put up replacement content that doesn’t mention the government seizure, tha target of the propaganda is already primed to shout, “Fake news!” at anything that disputes their existing worldview.

It’s best to just let those domains return like a 504 Internal Server Error and die a quiet death.

A “Library of Congress” for published web content maybe. Some sort of standard that allows / requires websites that publish content on oublic-facing sites to also share a permanent copy with an archive, without having the archive have to scrape it.

Sort of like how book publishers send a copy to the LoC.

Technically,

The president and vice president are chosen by the electoral college in separate votes.

Though, for some time, it’s always been the winning candidate’s selected running mate… there is no requirement there. The electors could pick Mittens the back flipping poodle for VP if they wanted.

Usually people that are either lying about being Democrats, or people very much stuck on a single issue and have decided that “The establishment” is wrong (yet, still, identifying as a Democrat).

I am literally in the middle of swapping DynamoDB for a RDBMS.

The idea that you can abstract away such fundamentally different data stores is silly. While I hate doing it now, reworking the code to use relational models properly makes for a better product later.

My principle dev asked if we could figure out how to invoke Lambda functions from within postgres trigger functions.

I was like, “Probably. But it’s like putting a diving board at the top of the Empire State building… doable, but a bad plan all around.”

Trump can’t stay out of the spotlight long. He’s wholly incapable of not being the center of attention.

In other news, did you see his name in those Epstein records? Turns out he allegedly raped a few kids, so there’s something fun for Republicans to condone ignore.

Biden could trot out as a half-rotten corpse and I’d still vote for him over a serial liar and traitor to our nation.

Fyi: people often take out more than one loan, and leave the lowest interest federal loans for last…