1·
45 minutes agoSwitching to Free Software is kind of like planting a tree: the best time was years ago (because you’d be over the learning curve). The second-best time is now.
- 50 Posts
- 4.93K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
71·3 hours agoI get what you’re saying, but I also can’t fault a political campaign for defaulting to the most “basic-bitch” MMO they can find for this sort of stunt. A VP who’s opinionated enough about Blizzard v. BNETD to eschew WoW is, frankly, too much to hope for.
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
It’s not /supposed/ to favor red states. However the formula for counting number of electors relies on the number of representatives in the house. That is fixed at 435 by law. To fix the electoral college, we’d have to remove that cap and it would work the way the founders intended.
We’d also have to end the popular vote and have all the states go back to having Electors appointed by the state legislatures. That’s what the founders really intended: something more akin to how prime ministers are chosen within a parliamentary system, but with added Federalism by delegating it to the states rather than Congress.
That whole Federalism part of it, which comes from the initial concept of the US being a confederation of sovereign States (kinda like the EU is now) rather than the single sovereign entity it’s mostly become, really was designed to balance power between large-population states and small ones at least a little bit, though. As such, I can’t entirely agree with your first sentence.
1·8 hours agoYou’re not wrong, but they’re gonna have to ditch their iPhone for an Android first, LOL
The check out is the part where the actual sales transaction occurs. It really is materially different from those other services you mentioned.
Also,
I don’t really care since the part I like, getting finished at the store, happens faster.
That was true until they realized they could enshittify by closing all the regular check-outs and force everyone into it. Now it’s just as slow as full-service used to be.
Pro tip: the checkbox at the top of the column only selects the first page worth (100 messages). You have to click that and then also click the “select all N messages?” link that appears.
2·10 hours agoSure they shouldn’t be let off the hook (they probably will be, have been though)
"Sure, we can also listen to:
Because we weren’t talking about signing up actual Trump supporters; we were talking about gaming the system by signing up fake ones.
30·18 hours agoPaid proprietary software will too; the likes of Adobe and VMWare prove that.
But what other consequences might there be? I would do that (I’m in a swing state), but I worry the people I name would end up spammed to within an inch of their lives or harassed or something. (And on top of that, I wouldn’t put it past Musk to find some excuse to renege on the deal.)
Okay but what you need to understand is that the EPA’s allowable level of lead for municipal water supplies is 15 parts per billion (PPB) (which is very low), and the standard doesn’t change based on what materials were used for the pipes. Getting below that threshold is not only achievable but expected even with lead pipes, if you treat the water properly. Flint’s problem was that it didn’t, because the Governor kicked out the people who knew what the fuck they were doing!
As for your 20/20 hindsight, it’s just that: hindsight. A lot of these pipes date back to the early 1900s or earlier, when not only had plastic not yet been invented, even copper pipe barely existed because they hadn’t figured out how to efficiently manufacture it water-tight yet (source). That means the alternatives to lead pipes were really shitty, such as terracotta or wood, and even if they did manage to use early copper pipes or some other metal, guess what: the joints would all be soldered with lead anyway. Moreover, this was also back when they were so ignorant about the cumulative effects of exposure to lead that they still thought it was a good idea to put it in things like gasoline and paint, so why would they have concerned themselves with the relatively small risk from using it in plumbing?
If Flint were a sunbelt city built mostly after 1950, then sure, using lead for the pipes would’ve been inexcusable. But Flint was already in decline by then, so most of it is older than that!
People forget that the proximate cause of the lead contamination in Flint wasn’t the pipes themselves (which had been in use, relatively safely, for decades), but instead that locals in charge of the water system got forcibly replaced with an emergency manager appointed by the (Republican) governor, who ordered the system to be switched from sourcing water from Detroit (Lake Huron) to the Flint River to save money and failed to treat it with the usual corrosion-control additives that Detroit had been using.
To blame the pipes is to let the Republicans off the hook for their miserliness, incompetence and systemic racism.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know
https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2016/01/epa_official_says_he_was.html
They decided to repair the sidewalks last year, just out of nowhere, and tacked the amount on to your property tax as a special assessment if you didn’t make arrangements of your own to have someone come out and fix it when they wanted it fixed by.
I’d like to highlight for a moment just how fucking outrageous and unacceptable this actually is. The sidewalks are part of the street. It is ass-backwards to be treating pedestrians as second-class compared to drivers!
And like, I know sidewalks are sort of a gray area
Absolutely fucking not. They are 1000000000000000% just as much the responsibility of the government as the rest of the street is. You should be fucking pissed that the city is shirking its responsibility for them and saddling you with it instead!
3·1 day agoRail doesn’t get congested the same way highways do
This is a point worth emphasizing. In fact, Oh The Urbanity! made an entire video explaining it, which everyone ought to watch.
(Note: @Showroom7561@lemmy.ca is OP; I just cross-posted.)
This is just yet another “fuck you” to the Chagossians, for whom it could have been the next best thing to reparations if they were given control of it.
6·2 days agoNow pipe it through
lolcat
Eh, the US military, of all organizations, is probably among the best-prepared in the world for this sort of thing because of all the personnel who specialize in things like logistics, damage control, rapid construction, etc. They’re just going to have a fun time doing their job for real instead of in a training exercise for once.
Obviously having to rebuild the base is an extra cost and therefore less than ideal in a “parable of the broken window” sort of sense, but it’s not as if the taxpayers are gonna have a choice about shelling out to fix it, so who cares?