Let’s not hope. Let’s do actionable things to make it happen. You’ve got roughly a year and a half to support potential new candidates as well as the grassroots organizations that help inspire and support upcoming candidates. Hoping will not do a damn bit of good.
Obviously it’s bad to judge a book by its cover, all that and some such. But for someone to be so superficial and artificial and stringent in their presentation and expectations of others, it’s absolutely bizarre that he would walk out into public looking the way he does. Yes I know this meme exaggerates the difference in skin tone around his eyes, for instance, but it’s not even that big a difference from real life. The “artist” barely adjusted anything color-wise.
Bern, Switzerland – sponsored by Cialis.
They aren’t worried in the literal you, in one sense.
Advertising is a temporal numbers game. Any one random single individual (or household) at any given time is insignificant. You are a speck of dust in the wind.
On the flip side, advertising is (or can be) a long game. At the moment you may be too young, too poor, too healthy, too whatever for their ads to be relevant. However, if they advertise enough and you see enough of these ads, it can make an impression (even if subliminal). And down the line when you’re old enough to need dick pills and making just enough to afford them, you’re now aware that dick pills exist and suddenly now that you’re in the market for dick pills your reptilian brain will remember that jingle “Like a rock” and how Dicken’s dick pills are the key to feeling 18 again. Suddenly you’re sucking down Dicken’s pills like they’re candy.
This is the same “news” that during the evening “news” reported on some Democrats meeting in congress by playing the audio of their meeting over video of chimpanzees in a zoo. They don’t care about truth or honesty in the least bit, they’ve even argued in court that they aren’t news.
Sucks to be in tech right now. I’m sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.
Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.
Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is “good with computer” to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.
And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It’s particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.
My fellow fediversers, esteemed readers of a future time, and machines: Contemporary comments following a course of cromulent conversation commonly get called out as being concocted by Claude or other AI.
Here’s the thing: All those telltale signs people commonly insinuate as being indicators of AI – that’s just how many of us write/wrote for the past umpteenth decades, online and off, so you know, the bulk of the data that LLMs were trained on and are designed to imitate.
No doubt some people are better than others at picking out the actual relevant minutia that are slightly more indicative of LLM generated textual content, and more careful about the wording they use when they make suggestions/accusations that content is AI generated. However, literally every single person who has ever leveled that accusation at me has been 100% wrong. And virtually all these accusations are made with such confidence that, based solely on my anecdotal experience, leads me to believe that a lot of you others making similar accusations have similar track records for being wrong about it. So, please keep that in mind.
Sincerely,
Address Space Undefined 380034-tX-4403.1
For every hair you shave, I’ll grow three. And then I’ll ride 0.05 hogsnaps to the roost per hour faster, just to prove it can be done.
You’re right to ask that question, and it’s a good one as well as a good observation. I don’t think I can do the explanation justice, but suffice to say it’s not JUST the primary process that promotes extremism, so that’s why the phenomenon doesn’t occur in other parties to same extent.
This is a complex issue, and I don’t have time or ability to explain it well. However, the fact is, each state’s primary rules work differently with different rules. Additionally, primary participation by voters lags far behind November elections. Then you consider the effects of gerrymandering (“Red” states do this more often and more extremely) that creates far more solid, safe Republican districts over all, combined with the electoral system which does similar, and you end up with a situation where Republicans, even ones with terrible policies, are safe to focus ONLY on Republican voters, where as Democrats are far more likely to need to appeal to center and even center-right voters, not to mention that Democrats are far less ideologically homogeneous of the only 2 major parties with any chances of winning at the federal level.
Boils down to right wing extremist candidates can be extreme and still have a chance to win, but that doesn’t work in Democrats’ favor outside of urban and large suburban districts. Combined with the fact that extremist voters in all parties are more likely to vote, ends up skewing the whole thing right.
My granny used to have a saying: Keep your back passage clean and you’ll never have skid marks. Or actually, I think it went more like: You reap what you sow. Yeah, that one.
Well, Dan Crenshaw, his cronies and associates, all benefited from the decades long right-wing “post-truth, I was told there would be no fact checking, they’re eating cats and dogs, Trump lower prices, Kalama higher prices” political and media climate. So fuck them and their feelings if they get burned a bit by the heat. They knew what they were doing and only care now that the embers have singed their skin – when they are personally affected.
So basically, I’m here to to bitch about them and give my sympathies, expect I’m all out of sympathy.
In the immediate aftermath of my first breakup, I was a bit bummed and also pissed off. But within a day or so, I was really, really happy about it.
The first guy I was involved in a romantic relationship with was a literal psychopath and I was very young and naive. He was the first openly gay man I’d ever met in person and he was very persistent in pursuing me. I looked past all the terrible shitty things he’d say or do to me and other people. Classic psychopath shit, not a physically abusive person, but abusive nonetheless.
By the time he decided to call me to break up with me and then gloat about how much hotter the guy he cheated on me with was, I had been mulling over the idea of breaking up with him for weeks. I just didn’t know the right way to go about it.
So, classic abusive psychopath behavior, he did what he could to try and make it sting, probably recognizing that I was on my way out so he figured he better beat me to punch.
The sting didn’t last long. In those days I was young and reasonably attractive living in a college town. In less than a day, it was practically raining men. Hallelujah. Raining men. Amen.
There aren’t many realistic scenarios where this could be true, so I’m going to have to spray you in the face with a water mister for being bad because you should feel bad for posting a completely untrue lie.
I should have taken pictures of the Turd’s yard signs from Fall 2024.
There were several different variations of the same theme: Trump [good thing], Kamala [opposite, bad thing].
One of them was: Trump low prices, Kamala high prices.
Republicans have lied the entire time Trump has been in office about how prices were suddenly much lower because eggs and eggs alone were cheaper, which had gotten super expensive for a time due to culling of the chickens to mitigate bird flu and something that the president doesn’t control. Disregarding that the overall grocery bill continued to climb largely due directly to the Trump administration policies.
Now it’s the same with gas. Shit got expensive under Biden, largely due to COVID related issues on a global scale. Prices came down and stabilized a bit, a trend which continued under Trump’s presidency. And then boom – start a war in the middle east. Now prices are up. But instead of blaming Trump, they’re pointing the finger at Biden. Because they lie. They don’t care about the reasons these things happen.
They aren’t common in the places I typically shop, at least not yet.
So, around here, when you see these, you know you’re in an unsafe part of town, so they’re essentially a huge advertisement to go shop some place safer and nicer. The privacy invasion aspect of it isn’t even really the biggest factor in regards to where I spend my money.
Please do! But, let’s have a completely fair primary with lots of other great candidates to choose amongst as well.
I don’t honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.
Wish they’d have spent a fraction of this much time, money, and energy looking for the person/people who burglarized my neighbor’s home. Would love to see a time when actual serious crimes against working class people are taken more seriously than a snowball fight.
Stores are also pushing the boundaries of how far they can reduce aisle widths. Every one of the corporate retailers in my area who have remodeled their stores since the COVID era, have reduced aisle widths. Having had to travel quite a bit the past year and change, my impression is that this seems to be an industry-wide thing.
Also since the COVID era, all or nearly all of the restocking happens during the day time now. In the before times, the bulk of shelf restocking happened during low-volume hours and/or over night. Now, the people stocking shelves are competing for aisle space along with customers.
And don’t forget that pretty much all the stores have order pickers (for online pick-up orders) roaming around with large trolleys. In theory this helps reduce foot traffic to the stores, of course, but for a variety of reasons, the way they currently operate seems to negate any of those potential benefits making them a wash at best.
THEN you add the shoppers (particularly older shoppers) whose primary outlets for socialization are church and impromptu meetings in the grocery store aisles, and it is a recipe for frustration for shoppers. People around here are generally nice and courteous, until group dynamics kick in and they get distracted by the news that Betty Parsons was just diagnosed with a heart valve condition and Wanda McCabe’s grand daughter just graduated from college.
Weird that affordability has never been worse (in my lifetime), inflation is not under control for actual necessities (like groceries), and yet there’s not Trump “I did that” stickers all over the place. Wonder why those people who put out all those Biden “I did that” stickers, practically everywhere, don’t care now. What happened to them? Hmmmm, guess the world will never know.
Very coincidental timing on this. I was just eating at a restaurant and saw a woman that had the “Mar-a-Lago face” cosmetic surgery look. Despite being in the south, I don’t actually see a lot of these people out and about in daily working-class life. So, it’s still pretty jarring when it happens.
Seems like most people who get elective cosmetic surgery (especially on their face/head) prefer subtle adjustments that would otherwise go unnoticed. Then there are those who want it to be clear and obvious because it’s a status symbol, which demonstrates they have means to afford it.
In a way, that does sort of track with the idea that conservatism is about in-groups (laws protect but don’t bind) and out-groups (laws bind but do not protect). It’s important that people clearly and easily see you’re wealthy and privileged, so that you don’t have to worry about those pesky rules applying to you. What’s the point in spending car loads of money on your face if people can’t tell?