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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)ST
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2 yr. ago

  • Obama had a 60 vote supermajority in the Senate before Ted Kennedy died, and after his death, Harry Reid said they'd wait for the Republican guy to get seated before voting on the ACA. SUPER. MAJORITY. When is a Democratic supermajority going to happen in the Senate again?

    Yeah, they passed the HEROES Act in 2020 when there was no chance of it defeating a guaranteed Trump veto. Why didn't they pass it again when they had a trifecta 2021-2022? They'll pass doomed-to-fail symbolic legislation all day long, but when there's a chance at doing some real good, they always delay too long, deliver a gutted husk of what they promised, or apparently just forget to get around to it.

    On student loans, Biden didn't promise full student loan forgiveness. In fact, he campaigned promising not to do any substantial student loan forgiveness. When his staff and influential people on the Hill finally convinced him to do something on federal student loans, it was not blanket forgiveness. It wasn't even the $50k that they thought they could realistically justify in court. It was $10-20k, and means-tested at that (because Dems can't do anything without their precious means testing to prove that they're financially conservative).

    Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, with a 55/45 GOP majority in the Senate, and something like a 20-vote GOP majority in the House. He could have vetoed it if he wanted to, if he thought it wouldn't get overridden. This means either:

    1. Clinton supported the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and/or
    2. Thought that at least 11 Dems in the Seate AND 60-ish Dems in the House would join the GOP majorities to muster a dual 2/3rds supermajority to override his veto.

    I'm not sure which option is more damning, but frankly I think both are true. The Clinton Administration explicitly pushed to the right (which they called "triangulation") after they got whooped in the '94 midterms, and the party has continued pushing right ever since.

    On your argument that not voting for the Dems won't do any good: The only way to make a party listen to you is to withhold your votes; until you do so, they'll take you for granted. In the 80s, the radical right demonstrated that they'd sit out elections if they didn't have sufficiently fascist and/or stupid candidates to vote for - now they're running the show.

    The problem is that the Democratic party establishment does not care if they are the majority. In fact, they'd prefer it if they weren't. They are first and foremost a fundraising operation. If they win, then they actually have to do something good for us, which generally runs contrary to the interests of the party's largest donors. They could have made PR and DC states in the first half of Biden's term - that would have been a lay-up, guaranteeing them some hope of competitiveness in the Senate in the coming decades. So why didn't they?

    The result of what you're arguing for is a continuing leisurely descent into fascism, at which point we'd hopefully get a major correction. I'm saying let's cut out the slow leisurely descent part and get a new left-wing party that is actually left-wing. Because with two right-wing parties in power, there's no hope of turning left until they're gone.

  • If the Dems are so economically liberal, where's nationalized healthcare? They wouldn't allow it.

    Where's the wealth tax?

    Why aren't they calling for blanket federal student loan forgiveness?

    Why didn't we get a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall after any of the recent economic crises?

    Why haven't they broken up the banks?

    Why were the GOP the ones who upped the amount of the first covid check? It ended up being $1,200, the Dems only asked for $800 or $850 or something.

    Why was the final covid check cut from $2,000 to $1,400, after promising that if we gave them the two Georgia Senate seats, we'd get $2,000 checks?

    The Dems - at best - only serve to lightly depress the brake pedal on the disasterous changes that the GOP make when the GOP have the reins.

    And, never forget: Biden rammed Clarence Thomas through his Supreme Court appointment, and treated Anita Hill terribly at the hearings in order to do so.

  • It uses Chromium as its base, so is essentially Chrome with fancy things attached to it. It uses Blink, Chrome/Chromium's rendering engine.

    We need fewer Chromium-based browsers out there. The greater marketshare they have, the easier it will be for Google to push W3C and everyone else around to conform to their desired business model.

    For example, when Google inevitably pushes WEI into Chrome, WebKit and Gecko (Safari-based and Firefox-based browsers) won't be affected at all.

    If, however, 90% of all users end up on Blink (whether it's Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Brave, or whatever) then Google can do whatever they want to the web.

  • Reaper can go toe-to-toe with any DAW, including Pro Tools.

    I work in audio for film and television, and we would all drop Pro Tools and switch to Logic/Nuendo/Studio One/Reaper if Avid didn't have a legacy stranglehold on the Audio Post industry.

  • I think the only cure for gear acquisition syndrome is experience. After a few years of buying everything in sight, I noticed that I really only used my FabFilter and Universal Audio plugins, with occasional instances of Soothe2 and MH Thump. When I changed computers, I didn't reinstall 70% of my plugins.

    After a few years of composing, I noticed I only really used my samples from East-West, ProjectSAM, and Cinesamples.

    But it took me a while to get to that point.

  • Eureka is quite nice.

    CA north of SAC is definitely not "blue-ish" in the slightest. Towns like Yreka are basically de-industrialized, the locals blame "environmentalists" for that, and now Siskiyou County goes like 70% Trump.

    Also, Redding is an absolute shithole.

  • If you've never experienced upper Midwest winters, you'll be in for an interesting experience.

    Also, not much in the way of topology, contrasting with SoCal.

    I grew up in Chicago and got out of the entire area as soon as possible, due to (in no particular order) allergies, weather, and seasonal affective disorder.

    I live in SoCal now and love it here, but climate change will probably force us elsewhere within 20 years. We already spend most of the summer somewhere else to escape the heat.