orclev @ orclev @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I don't think it actually "exploded", just caught fire. So you know, standard behavior for a Tesla.

Not unless they're a minority or they kill or threaten someone rich and conservative. The rich part there is really important, they won't care if a poor conservative gets killed. They might care a little if a rich progressive gets killed, but only if they think there might be a chance it would lead to attacks on rich people in general.

Nah, the bots are way better at answering these captchas than people are.

Steve Bannon is obviously a giant racist douchebag, but I do have to say H-1B isn't great. It basically lets companies rent foreign workers for cheap. What I would like to see instead is a program to grant citizenship to skilled workers and fast track their immigration status. Companies would hate that of course because then skilled people would be less willing to accept low-ball offers.

What the fuck do they mean privatization, it's already fucking private! Did we suddenly get a socialized healthcare system when I wasn't looking?

Could have saved a lot of time by just saying Trump plans to make one of the worlds worst healthcare systems even worse in whatever way he can. We're well on track for a healthcare system collapse in the US if Trump actually implements the things he's said he will. It will make a matched set with the economic collapse he's also working on.

That's a great idea, although I still think the drones should be programmed that in the event they lose RX for more than a second or so or if they detect a collision to immediately cut all power to the motors.

The bit that confuses me is how anyone got hit. Drones have this neat ability that if you just stop the propellers they drop like rocks. It's pretty standard practice to not fly drones directly over people. In a drone show they shouldn't have really been moving fast enough where horizontal momentum would account for much and in the event of a collision they should have just cut power to the drones. The only way I can figure for this to happen is either a) they didn't follow basic safety precautions and were flying over the crowd, b) rather than cut power they tried to save the damaged and uncontrollable drones, or c) there was major radio interference and the drones aren't setup to cut power when they lose signal and/or crash.

Last one is possible if unlikely. Probably won't know much more till the blackbox analysis is done. I am somewhat reminded of a rather famous crash that was caused by a pilot inviting his buddy who had some flight experience but not in that model of plane into the cockpit and had him do the landing. The buddy screwed up a couple of critical settings and the actual pilot didn't notice until it was way too late to prevent the crash. Not that I'm suggesting anything similar happened in this case, it was just a very similar style of crash.

Did Jesus exist? I think he probably did

So there's that, and you also seem really angry that athiests exist, plus this whole thing started because you got mad that someone said Jesus was a made up story. That certainly seems like something a Christian would do, although I suppose muslim is also a possibility. As far as I know they also believe in Jesus, they just also believe in a second guy as well.

While some guy named Jesus might have existed, and might even have tried to start a religion, it's rather trivially demonstrable that the overwhelming majority of acts attributed to him are at best gross exaggerations if not outright fabrications, so in that sense yes he's just a story. It still wasn't really relevant to the original topic though.

And people need to know nobody likes their shitty obnoxious christian redirections. Be mad about it I guess.

No I wouldn't have, it still would have been entirely off topic (and off topic for like 99% of the content on here). Just because one guy is being a moron doesn't mean you have to act like a moron as well. I didn't downvote your last comment because you weren't entirely wrong, but this one definitely is. A simple "Not the point" to the original guy would have been a far more appropriate response.

What an insufferable way to be.

Well, it's more just not the appropriate place and kind of missed the point entirely.

No one honestly cares either way

Unfortunately this is very much not the case and that's a big chunk of the problem. There's groups out there that really really care (one way or another) and are more than happy to murder you and anyone else who doesn't all while telling themselves what great people they are.

Honestly I don't think they could have anything that would do any lasting damage to Trump. He has already shown that he's above the law and his supporters literally don't care. What they could threaten him with though is cutting off funding or exposing his actual net worth. Either one of those could really hurt him. All that said I don't think they even need to go that far, it's obvious Putin controls Trump and gives him his marching orders, so all it would take is a call from Putin.

People don't care if it takes 1 term or 10 terms, what they want to hear is that Democrats are working on both short and long term goals to address the problems they care about. They want to hear meaningful changes. What they got is a message that Democrats are hard at work rearranging the deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking. There are many systemic issues in the US right now. The Democrats just needed to fucking pick one, start working on fixing it, and explain to people how they're working on fixing it.

How about working to get Citizens United overturned? How about actually working on proper socialized healthcare instead of the bandaid that the insurance marketplace was? Working on getting rid of first past the post? Working on creating a federal right to abortion? Coming up with some way to keep the GOP from packing the supreme court with corrupt "judges" who treat the constitution like toilet paper? How about fixing our IP laws to be something sane like cutting copyright to 15 years? Just taxes in general, the 1% tax bracket should be paying 90% in taxes. Make capital gains taxes higher than income tax. These are just the things I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure there's dozens more people could come up with.

No, the party doesn't get to decide that, the voters do. If the DNC could decide that yes it would be a winning strategy, but they can't.

There are essentially three groups of voters roughly representing a third of the US each.

The first group are the conservatives, they primarily want to prevent things from changing further from their rose tinted vision of the past, and if possible undo "recent" changes. They often have an overly simplistic idealized vision of how things were when they were children they want to recreate. This is of course utterly impossible. They are the core of the Republican party and reliably vote Republican because they believe the lies they've been fed their entire life that the Republicans are the only ones holding back Democrats from making the US a communist dictatorship where everyone is required to have a sex change and all the white people will be rounded up and put in concentration camps so illegal immigrants can take their homes and jobs. They are so utterly terrified of this entirely fictional bogeyman that their entire voting decision boils down to "always pick the one with an R next to the name".

The second group are the progressives, they primarily want to improve social and economic issues. These are the core Democrat supporters, but Democrats have always been the least bad option. They know that our first past the post election system means only the two largest parties are truly viable and right now that means the Republicans and Democrats. These are the main group preventing Democrats from winning because as Democrats have consistently shifted right on social and economic policies they've lost more and more of the increasingly disenfranchised voters who look at their options and see literally nobody who represents them.

The third group is basically everybody else. Some of these people are hard core 3rd party supporters like fans of the green party, some are just the entirely apolitical who don't pay any attention at all to politics or current events outside of the occasional flashy headline or overheard water cooler conversation. Yet others are those that don't really fall into either the conservative or progressive camps, neither harboring a rose tinted view of the past, nor particularly caring about social or economic issues. Sometimes these people are very dedicated single issue voters. It's this third group that Trump was able to tap into with his lies and who Harris completely failed to motivate.

Any successful campaign must attract a sizable group from among any combination of these three. Obama for instance won all the progressives and a good chunk of that 3rd group. Trump likewise got all the conservatives and a good chunk of that 3rd group. Harris not only failed to get many of the progressives, but also most of that 3rd group as well.

Republicans have both an advantage and disadvantage in this situation. While each of those groups represents about one third of the nation, conservatives are the smallest of the three by a significant margin. This is offset though by them being very reliable voters (fear is an incredible motivator even when it's entirely imaginary), and progressives being very fickle in their support. This means without taking that 3rd group into account out of the gate Republicans tend to start with a solid lead. Democrats meanwhile need to rally progressives and a chunk of that 3rd group in order to win.

No they still need Democrat voters. Republicans won because their supporters vote for anyone with an R next to their name no matter what policies they have, so their lies are to convince the gullible morons that don't really care about the party affiliation, they just want things to be better (and are too stupid to realize Republican policies will do the opposite). Neither parties core supporters are enough to win an election on their own, they need all of them plus some of the independents.

That's what Trump did, he got all the Republicans plus a chunk of independents. If Democrats tried the same playbook and then didn't deliver on their promises they would lose the votes of the core Democrat voters and without them the independents aren't enough to win the election. Republicans are a party of loyalty. The party goes above everything else. Democrats are a party of ideals. If you fail to demonstrate the ideals you lose the votes. That's why it would ultimately be a losing strategy for the DNC. They'd win a few elections but when it became apparent they're full of shit the Democrat voters would stop showing up.

I mean you're not wrong but that doesn't make them better than the DNC, at least in terms of policy. The GOP enacts policies they know will hurt their voters but lie and tell them they'll help them. Then when those policies inevitably make things worse they lie again and claim they would have worked, but Democrats/minorities fucked it up. That has been their go to move since Reagan and it's worked amazingly well. Reaganomics/trickle down economics has never once in history worked to do anything but make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Likewise cutting taxes doesn't do anything but hurt the poor and middle class. But the GOP time and time again puts forward this myth that both of those policies will help the working class and their room temperature IQ supporters gobble it up despite it never once in over 40 years actually working.

You seem to be assuming that people who were going to vote for Harris decided to vote for Trump. That's not even remotely true. What happened is a lot of people who would have voted for Harris stayed home, while a lot of people that normally don't vote at all decided to vote for Trump.

Democrats could actually win an election or two by running the Republican playbook of lying through their teeth. It more or less worked for Obama who talked a big game then delivered on very little of it. But ultimately that would be a losing strategy. Democrats are not like Republicans, they not only want to hear policies they agree with, they expect to see them implemented.

That's rather the point isn't it? Republicans lie constantly about everything but those lies are about things their voters want. Democrats meanwhile tell their voters that they'll get what Democrats are gracious enough to give them and be happy they're not as bad as the Republicans. In either case neither party is delivering what progressive voters are asking for. Then Democrats wonder why they have voter turnout problems.

People are sick and tired of showing up to vote for the lesser evil and the result being either things only get very slightly worse or much worse depending on who wins. It's particularly hard for people to justify investing that time and effort when they're struggling to just survive day to day and keep a roof over their head and food in their stomachs.

I and many others tried our best this last election to keep Trump out of office but we can all only do so much when the Democrats are working against us every step of the way. We need an actual progressive running on progressive policies out of the Democrats if they want to win an election, because running as diet conservative isn't cutting it anymore.

People gave Bernie a lot of shit for being a populist but you know what? He motivated people. His supporters were excited to get out and vote for him. Unfortunately he was never given the chance and instead we got the same tired "we'll run on Republican policies from two decades ago" Democrats.

Even Obama, the most "progressive" Democrat in at least fifty years, promised socialized healthcare like the rest of the first world countries have but ended up delivering a watered down half assed Republican healthcare plan instead.

So yeah, people are sick and tired of Democrats that only ever seem to be able to successfully deliver things wealthy corporate donors are asking for.

I'm sure one of a great many statements that aged like milk. The sheer contempt that Democrat politicians have for voters is breathtaking. Maybe some day they'll care about voters the way they very obviously care about corporate donors.