wouldn’t Israel simply partner with Russia or China instead?

Why would either of those countries pick up such a pointless financial burden, though? The US has spent $17.9 billion in military aid just since October 2023. I’m not sure Russia could afford to sustain that sort of spending long-term, and even if they could, what do they get from it? They get another piece of baggage to further isolate them on the international stage, while also conveniently pissing off local Muslim populations they’ve been cultivating influence with, and potentially stirring things up back home with Muslim separatist groups that have been known to pop off the odd attack or civil war from time to time.

Likewise, China can get all the natural resources Israel could offer them on better terms and at lower cost elsewhere, without any of the drawbacks that backing Israel in the absence of the US would bring them. China already has a presence in the region in relationships with Gulf states, they don’t need Israel. What, Israel is going to win them over with some cheaper citrus, or something?

People keep saying, “But what if Russia or China backed Israel instead?” without any reason for either to do so.

It’s a bit of a win-win situation for these nuts. If the election officials force their way in, they’ll get to shriek about how corrupt Biden-Harris officials are trying to force their way into polling sites to steal the election. If it goes to court, they’ll declare victory before the lawsuit is decided, and then Trump-loving muppets will start spamming lawfare, psy-op, or whatever the new word of the day is for trying to dismiss everything that would prevent them from illegitimately seizing power as the result of an insidious Democratic plot all over social media again once the lawsuits turn out in favor of the feds. Wild what you can get away with when you’ve got this rabid a death cult going for you.

Part of this seems like it’s attributable to changes in lifestyle and material conditions of younger people, relative to their parents. Different aesthetics might mean their parents’ stuff looks incredibly gaudy to them, and doesn’t go with anything else in their apartment. My parents’ home is larger than any place I can reasonably expect to be able to afford, so I also don’t want their big dining room table that I’d have to pay for storage on for years before I can afford a space that it will immediately fill all of. Even if it’s a nice piece of furniture, that’s just a pain in the neck to go through, all for something I might never get to use.

On the topic of collections, boomers just fundamentally ignore key parts of collectibility. First, old collectables only became so valuable precisely because people weren’t obsessively hording and caring for everything with the intent of selling it down the line. Old Superman comics are rare and valuable due to people who bought them at the time they first came out largely treating them as disposable. They didn’t assume they were anything special that merited being held on to and cared for, so they didn’t. When everyone and their dog buys up commemorative plate sets, or Beanie Babies, or whatever other collectable grift boomers fell for, and they take great care of them, they don’t generally see their value do anything but decrease. The supply doesn’t get significantly reduced, and everyone else can see that they didn’t pan out as the collectable investments they were billed as, so who would want them?

That said, even for collections of items of genuine worth, you mostly need to hope that whoever you’re looking to give it to is as into whatever hobby as you are. If I were planning on having kids, I think it would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to know what to do with my fountain pen collection, unless they were into them as well. Otherwise, it’s just a ton of fussy pens that seem to have a fair number of duplicates that are really only distinguished by knowledge I couldn’t expect them to take the time to go gathering. Then, it’s still a big pain to actually identify things, make sales listings and sell them off. Hell, I have the knowledge, and even I find it annoying to do so.

Maybe we could address this, in part, by normalizing expanding options a bit for inheritance. If my hypothetical kids aren’t going to know how to make heads or tails of my pen collection, but I’ve got a younger friend who is just as into the hobby as I am, it would be nice if I could just leave them that specific collection, without having to worry it’ll kick off some acrimonious squabbling. Failing that, have parents indicate who they trust to sell an item for a fair price if nobody wants it. You can take it and think about it, but if it’s just not for you, you’ve got a trusted source to sell it off for you, so you (hopefully) don’t have to go through an ordeal trying to find someone to sell it for you that will give you a fair shake.

Parks and libraries, sure, but the rest pretty much all cost money around me. Art spaces are largely monetized, outside of maybe a free night a week, for a limited amount of time before closing that doesn’t include access to all exhibits. Community/rec centers host events and charge money for most of them now, since I guess younger generations aren’t becoming members in large enough numbers to make things self-sustaining otherwise. Churches have the disadvantage of being churches. Sure, you can technically hang out in them for free, so long as you don’t mind constant religious services, which kind of comes with the territory on that one.

I can’t remember another recent candidate in the US that not only wasn’t super pro-Taiwan, but said the US should just hang them out to dry if the PRC were to invade the island. They probably like that side of him.

Plus, an incredibly vain, greedy and self-confident idiot is not the hardest of targets to get to do what you want.

Americans have to learn to live with each other, one way or another.

Honestly, I often think Americans need to learn to live apart from each other these days. I’m very skeptical of the notion that the US can ever function as a coherent political unit again, and it might be better for all to just cut bait and move to an EU-esque free movement regime. Let New England, the South, the Midwest, the West Coast and whatever Alaska and Hawaii want to be each be their own independent countries, but any citizen of one has the right to move to any if the others and work immediately. If Republicans want to enact their own little Handmaid’s Tales in the deep South, they can go for it, but no moaning when women and POC decide to move elsewhere. The non-GOP hellscape regions can implement social safety net programs to allow anyone who wants to leave the conservative regions to do so, regardless of financial means, knowing they will have housing, food and healthcare when they get to a civilized country.

It really feels like some backwards regions are holding the whole country hostage at this point.

They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.

Eh, non-voters in some states could help Trump win, but it’s hardly a universal thing. My bigger issue with this sort of rhetoric is that criticizing absolutely reprehensible policies advanced by the Democrats does not equal endorsing Trump, as many Zionist shills here like to claim. I want to be able to unreservedly back Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections, but “enables and supports genocide and the massacre of civilian men, women and children,” is one hell of a reservation to make your voters have.

Outdoors, where you can put some distance between yourself and them?

Sure, if it’s one person. Where I used to live, the nearest park would have multiple groups engaged in loudness wars, each upping their volume in response to the others, so nobody could enjoy the park. Public spaces shouldn’t be held hostage by assholes who don’t understand how to behave in public, to the detriment of everyone else.

As far as what to do, it would be nice if the existing rules would be enforced that prohibit this behavior, but people cry racism for being told off for bringing a massive speaker to blast merengue and dembow in the park and somehow find support, rather than people asking why they’re blasting any type of music in the park to begin with.

The democrats are currently pressuring Israel and pushing back politically

Saying “Hey, bud, don’t do x, is I’ll be real mad at you,” and then going “Gee, you did what I told you not to. Well, here’s a few billion dollars more weapons for you, so you can keep doing what I publicly asked you not to do.” is not pressuring them, it’s attempting to give plausible deniability to people who feel bad about supporting a blatantly genocidal state, and to fool the folks who take soundbites in the news at face value.

Current Democratic pressure amounts to fuck all outside of a handful of legislators who are demonized by the centrist and right wing factions of the party. To say otherwise is to either deny reality, or else willfully misrepresent it.

A combination of factors made it happen. First up, you had low turnout. Only 20.5% of voters actually voted in that election, the lowest of the past 30 years.

Aside from that, Adams had strong support amongst voters of color. For people who don’t live and/or work in these communities, it can seem like voting against their interests and be surprising, but non-white voters are not a monolithic block. Quite often, majority black or Hispanic neighborhoods in the Bronx can prove more conservative than many people might expect, for example, particularly on social issues. A lot of my older co-workers from Latin America at the time, along with my mother-in-law, didn’t view BLM protests as legitimate actions to begin with, and just thought of them as troublemakers looking to break stuff and loot. The “tough on crime to raise quality of life” message was really powerful for many of the people I know, and they took it completely uncritically. There’s also a ton of super religious folks that won’t support Democrats over things like LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and other culture war GOP talking points. I can’t really speak to the Black community, but if you learn Spanish, there’s also just a ton of casual racism, sexism and homophobia that would probably shock people.

In addition to conservative social inclinations, lots of these folks are not what you would describe as well-informed. My elderly Ecuadorian, Dominican and Peruvian co-workers at that time were constantly buying into totally baseless conspiracies they got sent on WhatsApp. That and the 2020 presidential election cycle was super frustrating at home, as my mother-in-law would religiously watch the news on Univision, where they would trot out “scandals” and conspiracies that had been disproven weeks earlier and abandoned in the English-media, but Univision knew they could get away with airing for the significant portion of their audience with limited or no English. I even remember watching the news with her, my wife and her sister, who are both fluent in English, and the three of us getting upset that an interview in which we could hear the original English statements were being translated entirely inaccurately.

When I have an option not to, I don’t. Unfortunately, the way health insurance works here, I often don’t have an option. With the insurance I had through my previous job, basically as soon as I requested a second refill, the pharmacy benefits would go “Hey, we won’t cover this anymore, unless you switch to 90-day refills via CVS Caremark.” At some points last year, that could easily have been $500-$1,000/month more for me to pay for my meds in order to keep getting them at the pharmacy two blocks away, and I just didn’t have it. Instead of going there and having pretty much all my prescriptions filled in an hour or less, I got to enjoy Caremark not letting me refill until the last minute, then encountering shipping delays with medications I really shouldn’t have been abruptly missing doses of.

It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.

Both the Catholic school I attended Kindergarten through 2nd grade at and the public middle school I attended in suburban NY had blacktop as the main rec area during lunches and other such breaks, so it’s not just a CA thing, I guess. Neither school was in a very build up area, either. The Catholic school in particular had plenty of land they could have had us play on that wasn’t the parking lot. Had I stayed there for all my schooling, they were even known for sending students into the marsh out behind the school to catch their own frogs for the full experience of preserving something in formaldehyde and dissecting it during high school biology labs.

I can’t speak for everyone, but why exactly would I care about Trump’s age? It’s certainly a liability for him, but I was never going to vote Republican anyway, whereas my likelihood of voting Democrat has only risen now that Joe has stepped down. Why on earth would I want to potentially inspire Republicans to start pushing for a more competent candidate who might have a better chance of being elected, while also beingore competent and able to do more harm if they were to win?

For media outlets reporting on this, sure, but I think you’re being overly general when talking about individual voters expressing reservations about the candidate being pushed by the party they will, in all likelihood, wind up voting for.

X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.

I wouldn’t deny that they may have thought it was helpful to push at the time, but there are plenty of people who used it that just wanted either a change in stance from Biden, or a different candidate. “Russian shill” has just become the go to line for anyone who wholeheartedly sticks to the Democratic party line to shut down any and all discussion. Criticize your own party’s prospective candidate at the time without first denouncing every bad take Trump has? Russian shill. Don’t agree that the statistics showing the economy is doing great reflect the actual experience of many people? KGB plant. Supermarket is out of your favorite brand of cereal? Putin’s fault. It’s ridiculous.

Not sure why you would expect them to be going nuts on this. This is just one more in a long line of terrible things Trump supports, but he is not going to change stance on this for a bunch of people not in his party complaining online.

Genocide Joe has run its course, in my opinion. Biden is no longer the nominee, and despite all the hand wringing about foreign shills by people who see Russian manipulation in their own shadows, polls seem to indicate this was an overwhelmingly positive move for the Democrats. Harris is not my ideal candidate, but the Genocide Joe moniker was part of a campaign during primary season and leading up to the nomination to not have Biden as the nominee, and it accomplished this.

This is just some weak what aboutism from sore losers. No shit Trump has worse stances on this issue than Biden, but I can’t vote in primaries other than my registered party in my state, and the GOP was never going to replace him as nominee over this issue anyway.

There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.

If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.

For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.

For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.

By their own account, it’s not meant to be lucrative.

"Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.

Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."

Straight from Mozilla’s About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users’ privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don’t actually want.