SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

Posts

5

Comments

1,084

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yeah, nobody's buying this bullshit.

Good comment, but this bugs me:

*Reagan

Regan was Reagan's chief of staff for his last couple of years in office.

I like the metaphor of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam in the cold water a mile from shore. He's losing body heat, and eventually hypothermia will set in and he will drown. But if he lets go and starts to swim for shore, he'll lose body heat even faster, use up his energy, and he probably won't make it. The "harm reduction" argument says that he should reduce his heat loss, and stay clinging to the flotsam. He's safe right now, while attempting to get to shore is difficult and dangerous.

Of course, by the time that the fallacy of that strategy becomes apparent (gestures at current events), he's too cold and weak to even attempt the swim.

In my city, we have a barely-there progressive, third party with a presence in the city and county government. It's all that remains of an attempt to in the 1990's to launch a Midwestern political party based on an electoral reform called "fusion voting," which would allow a candidate to get the endorsement of multiple parties, and appear on the ballot multiple times as a candidate under each of those party banners. That way, the candidate would know where their support came from, without the "spoiler effect." I learned from the Wikipedia page that it was an important tactic in the movement to abolish slavery.

But, in this case, the Democratic Party (technically, the Democratic Farm Labor Party) went to court to shoot down that idea, arguing that it was too confusing to voters. The American left isn't just sitting here waiting for someone to start a revolution, it has two major political parties actively suppressing it.

Amusingly, one tidbit of information that I just now learned from that Wikipedia article, presented without further comment:

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the heyday of the sewer socialists, the Republican and Democratic parties would agree not to run candidates against each other in some districts, concentrating instead on defeating the socialists. These candidates were usually called non-partisan, but sometimes were termed fusion candidates instead.

Voters do have a say.

That's why I vote third party.

Not at all. Making families buy life-saving medicine, at whatever price, is in fact the opposite of left-wing policy. Universal, single-payer health care is just centrist policy in many countries.

Same deal, you're not wrong. At the same time, it has to be done. Voting Democrat to hold off the fascists was, at best, a holding action rather than a viable, long-term strategy. A slow track to fascism, as it were, as they were going to win an election eventually. Democrats weren't going to fix the problem. For example, we voted for Biden in 2020 to hold off the fascist threat, they attacked the Capitol because they lost, and Biden did next to nothing about it. Hence, the depiction of the party as the pawl in the ratchet mechanism.

Let me say again, the FPTP voting system leads to two dominant parties, but nowhere in mathematics or law does it say the those two have to be Democrats and Republicans. We've always had the choice of a different two parties. That the Blue and Red duopoly would lead to fascism via the ratchet effect been clear for nearly 30 years.

I wouldn't claim that Democrats don't see the people of Palestine as human, exactly. They may just put it out of mind. Denial is a very potent force.

In case anybody was actually wondering, the difference is sudsing agent. The manufacturers originally put a chemical in laundry detergent to make more suds. That doesn't make them clean clothes any better, it's just for psychological effect. Customers feel like it's working better when they can see suds.

But too much sudsing in front-loading machines can cause leaking from around the door seals. (Same as putting dish detergent in the dishwasher.) So the HE detergents are the same thing, but without the sudsing agent. They work just fine in top-loading machines, too.

But does anybody remember those TV ads for Biz detergent which pitted a woman using it against man using "Hiz" detergent? Hooray for casual sexism!

Similar to others, I got on Facebook when you had to have a .edu email address. I've been less than pleased with it in recent times, as my feed ignored activity by my friends and groups in favor of "suggested" content, and the Reels (which I tried in vain to disable) had degenerated into softcore porn, although/because I've never watched one.

I haven't logged in since Zuckerberg came out as mask-off fascist. I've kept the account in case I want to contact anybody, or check Marketplace. But I've found that my brother was correct: Facebook is the junk food of social connection. It tastes good, but always leaves you hungry. Getting off of it was painful, but I feel better for having done it.

Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We're a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, "It's open source."

Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.

Only if you have installed the correct license file.

Lotta boring crap about PLUs, SKUs, UPCs, TPRs, and such. Stores have dedicated pricing staff for a reason. One trick that might be interesting, but not surprising, is the way stores hide price increases by putting a product "on sale" this week, so it's cheaper than last week, but raising the regular price, so it costs more when the sale price ends.

I got degrees from both a community college and a major research university. The two don't share instructors, but on average, the quality is much better at the community college.

Community college instructors are there to teach. They go to continuing education classes to learn how to do it better. Some classes at a research university are taught by similar, dedicated instructors, but some are taught by the professor who drew the metaphorical short straw that semester, and who'd rather be focusing on her research. She will put in her best effort, don't get me wrong, but her first priority is research.

That is to say, for anyone thinking about a degree, don't overlook the value of community college.

(ETA: I work at a research university now; the research professors who also teach are some of my co-workers.)

This.

It's irrational to consider maximum monetary gain to be the only best outcome. Why? What's the goal? Money is only means to an end, not intrinsically worth anything.

Put another way, if the Argentinians cherish good wine, how are they better off with slightly more money and mediocre wine? (I guess they could use the profits to buy good wine?)

That's amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn't do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that's what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we'd switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

The Bush administration abrogated due process, but we might have been able to move past it as a shameful anomaly in our history perpetrated by one out-of-control political faction. But then instead of prosecuting the offenders, or at least disavowing their actions, the Obama administration doubled down on it! It decided that American citizens could be killed on the basis of an accusation. It cemented the destruction of due process as a bipartisan principle of American government.

The Turd Reich might be speed-running the course, but it's just using the tools that past administrations laid out for it.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. There's no statistical difference in the chances of victory between men and women when running for political office. Lots of Republican politicians are women. I don't see it as a big deal.

Also, lots of open racists voted for Obama. If you look at the polling and the interviews, it was much more about running conservative Democrats trying to get the votes of people who wanted to shake things up. That's what Obama promised, that's why Sanders would've won, by some measures, and it seems AOC is out there generating the same buzz.

I think the implication is that you're going to die in El Salvador, so better to die at home and maybe take a few ICE thugs with you.

Interestingly, those main squares were all built before zoning. If they were destroyed in a disaster, they could not be rebuilt.