SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

It's not just slightly different phrasing, it's phrasing that packs an emotional/visceral punch. The economic angle has been tried to death, and a constant refrain I hear is, "how can people vote against their own self-interests?!" It's because the other side speaks to the animal brain, not the frontal lobes. The murder of a pretty, young nursing student activates strong emotions and has a lot more cognitive stickiness than economic arguments about who gets paid how much to pick our strawberries. Guarantee that if voters picture his grubby, little fingers sliding into a vagina in a department store dressing room, they'll remember it.

The media gets high on sensationalism. If a Democratic politician came out and said that the President was "deep-throating Putin's cock," oh believe me, that'd get coverage right quick!

Saying he's a "sexual predator" and that he "finger-raped a woman" are far from the same thing. One is dry and intellectual, the other conjures up memorable mental imagery. It's the same way that "damp" and "moist" can be synonyms, but only one of them squicks a lot of people.

Same thing I've wished Democrats would do for years and years: Learn from psychology and neuroscience that language and how you use it matters, then learn how to use language to improve their messaging.

And then do it.

Politics in a big country like this is like an arena show, and Democrats treat it like a university lecture hall. Play to the cheap seats! For example, compare how I read that Harris would "address health care disparities which disproportionately affect Black men" versus "death tax." Which one is more likely to reach Joe Six-Pack? Which one has more visceral impact? Which one is more, as they say, cognitively sticky?

They kind of have a point about blocking roads being ineffective, but for entirely the wrong reason. Having been stuck in traffic caused by protests blocking streets several times myself, I know that for most of the drivers, it's utterly indistinguishable from all the other traffic jams. Unless you're right up front to see what's causing it, it could very well just be another event at the fairgrounds, or one of the regularly-scheduled crashes.

Put another way, maybe driving is actually a protest against cars? It is pretty damn effective at blocking streets.

That doesn't sound like anything like a problem. We had a similar discussion on a local winter biking group, and there were some people who had issues from washing their face three or more times a day, exfoliating regularly, and such. Yikes!

Hope the hyaluronic acid helps!

Bigger picture, what's your current facial skin care routine? If it includes a lot of cleansing, exfoliating, hot water, strong soap, multiple daily washings, et cetera, dial that all wa-a-a-ay back. All of those things strip away the natural oils quite effectively, which leads to that red, inflamed look in the cold. The best way to keep your skin moisturized is to keep the moisture it naturally has from escaping, and that's 10 times more important in cold, dry climates.

Be sure to drink enough water, too. It's deceptive, you lose a lot of water through breath in cold, dry air, so you can be dehydrated even without sweating.

To add to the other comment, saying "always-late wife" would convey the correct meaning to most English speakers.

If she's dead, I don't think it matters what you say.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

I dunno, man, it just feels like the ol' fascist/totalitarian tactic of flooding the zone with shit until people get exhausted from fighting it has worked, people are exhausted, and there's this energy of elated resignation, like, we can't swim upstream anymore, so fuck it, riding the current is kind of fun (and the inevitable waterfall is out of sight and out of mind for the moment).

I think it's probably neither allowed nor disallowed in state constitutions, but I'm just a dilettante constitutional scholar. Whether it's allowed or not under the current system, that system is broken and can't be fixed within the limitations of the system, and it needs a disruption. Disruptions tend to be unpleasant, so this is the least-disruptive disruption that I've come up with. There's even historical precedent for it, in the form of the free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire.

For all of the reasons given, secession from the United States is a bad idea. But I'm going to keep banging this drum: The metropolises need to secede from their states, while staying part of the United States. Heck, Los Angeles County alone has more people than 40 of the states. It's about time that they got fair representation.

YES! Proprietary home-automation ecosystems are a confusing mishmash of standards, and Matter is only just barely starting to change that. Home Assistant is the glue that sticks them all together. I can have expensive Hue smart bulbs, cheap HomeKit bulbs I found in the clearance bin, Magic Home RGB LED controllers, Sonoff smart switches, a garage door opener connecting via MQTT, and it easily connects to all of them and presents a uniform toggle switch for all of them. I can switch all my (smart) lights on and off from a menu on my GNOME desktop. No fighting with proprietary apps for each different ecosystem. Home Assistant is amazing in how boring and unremarkable it makes the implementation details.

The ZBMINIR2 that I ordered came in the mail today, and it seems to have the same features as the WiFi version. I'm guessing that Sonoff just increments the model number with each revision, and the ZigBee version came later.

Is the ZBMINIR2 not the ZigBee equivalent?

they were literally the first company to make a home computer that didn't require soldering experience or a kit

I've never heard that claim before. How is that the case, considering that the Apple I was just a motherboard, and the Apple ][ hit the market six months after the Commodore PET?

Indeed, and I realized in the process of writing that comment that the famous graphs showing the growth of productivity vs. the growth of real wages explain a whole lot more about people's experiences than the consensus generational divisions.

I think I used to hear that, too, but I searched when writing the comment and found the consensus is now 1981. But then, people I know who were born in 1979 have so much more in common with elder Millennials than Generation X people born in the 1960's. That's why I'm skeptical of the whole generations concept. I mean, without looking up her birth date, is Kamala Harris a Boomer, or GenX?

Some of my favorites are sailmaking tools, like the lignum vitae seam rubber, or the ebony fid. Even the rest of the ditty bag is fun—the sailor's palm, the tarred marline, the triangular-shank hand needles, et cetera.