NevermindNoMind @ NevermindNoMind @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

McCarthy gets ousted by his own party, somehow manages to blame Democrats. Speaking to the press just now:

“I think today was a political decision by the Democrats. And I think I think the things they have done in the past hurt the institution,” he said.

What a piece of shit, good riddance. The 45 daystop gap funding bill he put on the floor for a vote an hour after it was introduced, leaving Dems no time to read 77 page bill to see if it had poison pills they couldn't vote for. Classy guy. Just today it was reported he was refusing to postpone votes on Thursday so membera could attend Dianne Feinstein's funeral.

The new guy doesn't seem to be any better:

As one of his first acts as the acting speaker, Rep. Patrick McHenry ordered former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to vacate her Capitol hideaway office by Wednesday, according to an email sent to her office viewed by POLITICO.

“Please vacate the space tomorrow, the room will be re-keyed,” wrote a top aide on the Republican-controlled House Administration Committee. The room was being reassigned by the acting speaker “for speaker office use,” the email said.

Only a select few House lawmakers get hideaway offices in the Capitol, compared to their commonplace presence in the Senate.

The former speaker blasted the eviction in a statement as “a sharp departure from tradition,” adding that she had given former Speaker Dennis Hastert “a significantly larger suite of offices for as long as he wished” during her tenure.

Pelosi didn't even vote today, she was in SF with Fienstein. But don't let that get in the way of partisan bullshit. And she said she won't be able to pack up by Wednesday for the same reason. Fucking gouls.

Glad you enjoyed it! I just love the contrast. The shortest speaker was respected and honored and the house votes to put him in for one day like Rudy. It's a very sweet gesture. The second shortest speaker got knifed like Caesar by the crazies he helped to elect.

Theodore Medad Pomeroy was elected as speaker on the last day of the 40th Congress on March 3, 1869. It was a gesture of respect and honor ahead of his retirement. He served one day as speaker, basically an honorary role, speaker for the day and then congres adjourned for the year. He was the shortest serving house speaker in US history. The second shortest serving house speaker is Kevin McCarthy.

Yeah that was a great joke from a guy whose party was in the process of going to historic levels of effort to prove they are incapable of governing.

For sure, I feel the same. But I think part of the disconnect is around the word "need." Because there is "need" as in "I will not survive without this thing, or my life will be more difficult and unpleasant without it" and then there is "need" in the marketing sense, the desire to buy a thing that is fun and interesting and exciting. The consumerism desire to fill the whole in your life with that new purchase that you hope will finally make you happy.

For the latter definition of "need," smartphones used to do a good job of triggering it. Every year there was something new and a flashy about the latest batch of phones, some new must have feature. If you didn't get the new phone, and your friends did, you'd feel like your missing out, like your lugging around some obsolete junk.

In the last few years (or more), new smartphones have just been modest performance upgrades, slightly better cameras, and that's about it. The new iPhone 15 has an action button, neat. You don't "need" to upgrade from your 12 because you don't feel like your missing out on anything major, and your right.

It's less about the form factor itself, and more about the lack of innovation. Apart from foldable, there hasn't been something truly new and interesting is years. I think the idea here is, what if we (they) reimagined what a smartphone is, how you interact with it, what you do with it, and do that by making AI the center of the experience. I don't know what that looks like, and I hope it's more than "talk to your phone instead of touching it" because there is very little time during my day where I'd feel comfortable talking out loud to my phone, but it's still an interesting idea, and there's some smart people and big money that suggests this isn't just a pipedream. Basically, it could be the first major innovation in how we compute on the go in a long time. And if they pull that off, you will "need" it.

Welcome! Former long time Relay user, but I left reddit in June. For what it's worth, I like Thunder and Connect. They are both open source and add free (no offense to ad supported apps). Just thought you might like to know what a fellow Relay user settles on after months of trying them all out.

She might not have had that much money. She married a rich guy, but he's dead and left her with a trust, and some kind of evil stepdaughter situation is going on, that all went public when her bio child sued the trustees on Feinstiens behalf, accusing them of stealing from the trust and elder abuse. Feinstien still should have retired, but she might not be totally loaded.

I listened to the whole thing on the Decoder podcast feed. The verge is promoting it as "wild" and "contentious", and the latter is a little true, but overall id describe it as a cringefest. It was hard to get through, and I got the same sick pit in my stomach I did watching Scott's Tots. Not that I'm particularly sympathetic to Yaccarino, she took this job so that says volumes about her judgement. But she was just so incredibly unprepared to address the most obvious questions, it seemed like she had drank the coolaid (flavor aid) and was expecting to the interviewer and audience to be so amazed with how awesome X is, and how amazing Elon is, and she was totally surprised when she got obvious questions like, how is X's user engagement since third parties are reporting it's down, why did x fire all the election integrity people, how much is X going to charge users and isn't having a free option valuable to keep advertisers on the platform, and what's the deal with suing the ADL?

At best she avoided every question with vague drawn out platitudes (elon is a genius, the employees at Twitter are brilliant, X is a transformative platform). At worst, she completely stepped in shit.

The two moments that stand out: first was when the interviewer asked about musk's statements/tweets about charging all users a fee. Yaccarino took a big pause, asked the interviewer to repeat the question, then asked the interviewer "did he say he was thinking about doing that, or that it's actually the plan?" The interviewer confirmed the latter and asked Yaccarino if Musk talked with her about that. Yaccarino says "we talk about everything." Like, big ooof. Girl, your only lieing to yourself.

The second was when she was asked about Musk being the head of product, and whether that meant she's not a real CEO. She defended musk being in charge of product because "who wouldn't want to be working with the genius musk?" The audience audibly laughs and a bunch raise their hands. Yaccarino tries to brush the audience reaction off like they were just joking or just didn't know Musk well enough. Lady, common, people hate musk, they know he's shit to work for, what reaction were you expecting? Are you in that much of a musk cocoon?

The last thing I'll say is that the former Twitter head of trust and safety, who left Twitter in protest a few weeks after musk took over and then musk called him a pedophile and he ended up having to flee his home because of the death threats, was added on as a speaker at the "last minute", and X defenders are claiming Yaccarino was "sandbagged" with him speaking a few hours before her. The reporting so far is that that's bullshit, she knew a few days in advance and was even offered the opportunity to speak before him. And he's been publicly saying the same shit for months now, there weren't any bombshells she couldn't have prepared for. Tried and true strategy, if you bomb an interview just blame the "lamestream gotcha press."

Overall, Yaccarino ate shit for 45 minutes. It's an interesting case study in bad PR. Id recommend listening, but if your a person with any amount of empathy, make sure your emotionally ready to handle a whole lot of second hand embarrassment.

Edited to add Casey Newtons succinct summary: Yaccarino fended off most of Julia’s excellent questions with GPT-2-level responses, punctuating her answers with dutiful praise for Elon Musk and the “velocity of change” he brings to the company. I’m grateful Yaccarino took a turn in the hot seat, but in the end she had little to offer — just some numbers that will never be audited, and explanations that don’t add up.

I would like to say the same, and I'm all for fighting corruption, but it's all so nakedly political as to be meaningless. What's the standard? Lying during a deposition about getting a blowjob? Impeachable. Pressuring the president of a foreign government to open an investigation into a political rival in exchange for weapons? Not impeachable. Lying about a stolen election and inciting a riot on the capital? Not impeachable. Having a fuckup as a son? Impeachable. Then there's Clarence Thomas - lying on federal disclosure forms for decades and receiving lavish gifts of travel, cash, home improvements for your mom? So not impeachable nobody even seriously considered it.

The point is, we all know Biden is getting impeached no matter what, it's all political bullshit. If he actually did receive bribes, that would just be a happy coincidence, because ultimately the evidence doesn't matter.

The first impeachment hearing is scheduled for Thursday, two days before the government shuts down. This is how House Republicans are spending their time, holding some dumbass hearings about how it still counts as a bribe even if no bribe is actually paid so long as we hate the guy. Meanwhile millions of people will lose paychecks, government assistance like fresh food for pregnant mothers and housing assistance, and the overall economy takes a kick in the teeth because of the shutdown. But don't worry America, Republicans are hot on the trail of public enemy number one Hunter Biden so it's definitely all worth it. And to think there are millions of Americans who will look at this cluster fuck and think "yup, I'm going to vote to put Republicans back in charge of Congress since they did such a good job last time".

Checks out! I know if I listen on a road trip with my wife, I put a piddlepad on her seat first.

You listen to No Dogs in Space, have several spooky/strange/macabre podcasts on your list, but not Last Podcast on the Left. Just curious if there's a reason.

Comedy Bang Bang

Hollywood Handbook

Hey Randy

Knowledge Fight

These are my "must listens" every week.

Honorable mention for another CBB Presents, Full Throttle! With Bob Ducca - extraordinarily brilliant, probably the hardest I've ever laughed at a podcast in my life. Limited run, so it's concluded. He tells a story about posing as a monkey in a traveling circus that is somehow both tragically beautiful, and snot running down your face funny.

Maybe if republicans actually passed a stop gap or something, even if it's bat shit insane. As of right now, it's all Republican infighting. The question right now is whether it's McCarthy or Matt Gaetz fault. Biden isn't even in the picture right now, it's not like Republicans can say Biden isn't giving into their demands or whatever. There are no demands, it's just Republican on Republican bickering.

It seems he's using the Trump playbook for his defence

In a defiant statement, Menendez defended himself against “baseless allegations” and theorized that he was being targeted by “the powers that be” because “they see me as an obstacle in the way of their broader political goals.”

Replace "powers that be" with "the deep state" and replace "baseless allegations" with "witchunt" and we're at a Trump truth social post.

How's that corporate boot taste?

Just want to add that this wasn't just McDonald's spinning it for their own purposes, it was part of a larger effort of tort reform - spreading the conception that people are suing for everything, even hot coffee hur dur, so that the public would support things like caps on pain and suffering damages and punitive damages. Corporations wanted more leeway to maximize profits(the reason McDonald's coffee was so hot was because they could get more coffee out of the beans that way), even if it hurt people, and the public jumped right on board. This was part of the same strategy as denigrating plaintiffs attorneys as "ambulance chasers" and the like. It got to the point that even when people were harmed, they still wouldn't sue because they didn't want to be lumped in with "those entitled people suing over everything". It became a point of pride to get fucked over by corporations and to do nothing about it. Really disgusting how easily the public was manipulated by all that.

I've used it just to access Bing Chat, which has become my go to AI chatbot for a couple of reasons: 1) you theoretically get access to gpt 4 without paying 20 dollars a month, 2) it cites it's sources, and 3) it can create images via DALLE from within the chat (which is handy, you can chat with the AI to help you think of an image prompt, the just say "ok make an image based on that description"). Other then that, i use Firefox at home. At work our choices are chrome or edge, so I use edge because of bing chat and I kind of like the layout better. It feels like choosing between buying something from Amazon or Walmart, which terrible corporation do I hate more in a given moment.

Do you think the government's primary function is to operate a laser that keeps the sun from crashing into the country? You see, a community of people come together and say they could do things more efficiently and have a better life if they all cooperate, so they form a "government" and that government does things for the benefit of those people. In a shutdown, some of those things are deemed essentially and keep happening, like law enforcement and coast guard and border patrol and food inspection and air traffic control. The people doing those jobs just don't get paid! Hooray!

Other things stop working, like FCC complaints, or social security checks, or the IRS help line, or parks, and certain people that help with criminal investigations, or the building of semiconductor plants intended to help the US compete with China, or visa applications, or school lunches for students, or the collection of statistical reports on the US economy that busiensses rely on, and so on. When these things don't happen, life for Americans gets worse. You are quite correct that the country will not immediately burst into flames. All that will happen is that millions of people will suffer! What do we even pay the government for, amiright guys?!

This whole thing is unbelievably stupid. Past shutdowns were also stupid, but the Republicans shutting down the government had something they wanted (entitlement cuts, funding for the border wall, whatever). Here there is no unified demand, it's just a dozen or so Republicans who were elected to burn it all down keeping their campaign promises. So why not just ignore them? Because McCarthy will lose his speakership if he so much as thinks about a bipartisan compromise.

There's no game plan here, no options, no strategy. For the dozen holdouts, the plan is the government shuts down until Biden and Senate Dems cave and agree to slash government spending by 10%, fund the border wall, and give the middle finger to Ukraine. That's not happening, ever. And they know that, these aren't serious demands, this is just an attempt to burn it all down but disguised as a principled position on government spending. McCarthys dumb plan was to pass a super partisan continuing resolution to keep the government funded for a month, which the Senate strip it of all the conservative junk and send it back to the house, and then ??? What conservatives would accept that??? We'd be right back in the same situation we're in now. But the holdouts won't even agree to that dumb strategy.

There's a longshot where all Dems and a handful of Republicans could sign a motion to vacate forcing a clean CR onto the floor, but 1) procedurally that takes a full month to do, and 2) you need Republicans willing to sign on bucking both McCarthy and the base. Even if this scenario saves the day, the government will still shut down for a month or more, and again it's only a continuing resolution so we're back in this same clusterfuck in another 30 days after it passes.

The only realistic way out of this is McCarthy does the right thing, works with Democrats to find a bipartisan solution, and stops listening to the derangement caucus in his party. He'll probably lose the speakership, he'll probably lose it no matter what happens anyway so maybe just do the right thing?

As I'm sitting here today, it feels like we're in for a looong shutdown, not because Republicans are dug into a demand, but because they have no demands at all. You elect people to burn it all down, and that's exactly what they are going to do.