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Or worse yet, they split the vote and a solid blue seat sends a Republican to Congress with 35-40% of the vote. I just love FPTP!

Yup, this was one of the central debates with gay marriage vs. civil unions, so many LGBT+ couples were absolutely screwed pre-Obergefell by one of the partners getting sick or dying, and the surviving partner either having no say in medical decisions or getting screwed out of inheritance because the sick/dead partner’s family was anti-gay and froze the surviving partner out of everything.

God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.

They did use them as best they could. They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators (Sinema and Manchin) who refused to support getting rid of it, making killing the proposition of killing the filibuster DOA. As a result, their only choice to pass legislation was budget reconciliation, which aren’t subject to filibuster. The issue is that reconciliation has several big limits:

1. The bill has to be related to government spending, revenue, and the debt ceiling. You can’t toss in things like minimum wage increases or voting rights legislation.

2. You can only pass one of these bills per year (theoretically you can do more, but additional reconciliation bills have to go through the budgrt committee and with a 50/50 senate the GOP can just skip those meetings to deny quorum and keep it stuck)

3. Whatever passes still has to get at least 50 votes, which means either appeasing Manchin/Sinema or getting Republican votes (which ain’t gonna happen)

And despite that, we still got the CHIPS act, an infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which–even with Manchinema throwing as many grenades in the process as they could get away with–was the biggest climate change bill in our country’s history. Not perfect, no, but a sizable step in the right direction, for once.

I’m utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the “I have XX decades of experience” types come from. They’re also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I’m talking to them it’s fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they’re at risk of losing all their data, and that’s usually enough to get them to shut up.

But god, some of the tickets I’ve seen from other employees…

In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:

• Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT

• Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.

In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and “please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren’t debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there’s a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won’t call you to handhold you through this, I’d literally just be reading the steps in the article” is pure suffering.

God, the unrelenting misery is killing me in this platform. I think the thing I’m most sick and tired of more than anything else is the constant stream of The Usual Suspects butting in with “But what about Gaza?!” on Every. Single. Post.

Post an article about Biden proposing a ceasefire agreement in the war? Complain about Biden giving support to Israel!

Post an article about Biden celebrating pride month? Complain about Biden funding Israel!

Article about Biden forgiving another batch of student loans? “BUt Biden supports israel!”

Article about Trump getting convicted of felonies? “But Biden! Gaza! Israel!”

Article about a small town library fighting LGBTQ+ book bans? “GAZA! ISRAEL! BIDEN! BAD”

Article about a goddamn random topic completely unrelated to Biden, Trump, Israel, politics, or the US at all? “GENOCIIIIIIIIIIDE!”

It’s at the point where I’ve cut back on Lemmy usage entirely because every comment thread I click on is like navigating a fucking minefield of misery. Nothing good can ever happen, no policy changes can ever be celebrated, no events can be remarked upon, without someone butting in with a reminder that Genocide Mother-Fucking Joe is personally shoveling coal into the palestinian child incinerator. No post can ever leave you with any emotion other than the thin veil of doomerism settling upon your shoulders, a pall of depression casting itself over the tragedy of the world, and a sense that modern society is an Aristocrats joke that has long since crossed the line from “horrifying” to “funny,” then back to “horrifying,” then back to “funny,” before settling itself so firmly in “horrifying” that the audience is casting nervous glances and hoping that someone else is the first to call the police.

Don’t bother, he’s one of the many trolls whose entire purpose on Lemmy is to shit on biden

I think it’s because Spotify frequently includes the same song as being on multiple albums separately–for example, if a band has a greatest hits album, Spotify considers the greatest hits album as a different song, even though it’s identical to the song on the original album.

Yeah, and without Pence, it would’ve been Lindsay Graham acting as president pro tempare, and he would have gone along with the fake elector scheme as pretext to refuse to acknowledge electors from states Biden won, leaving him with less than 270 electors. Election stalemates, it goes to Congress in a one-vote-per-state contest, and Trump wins. That was the entire plan behind the coup–find a pretext to deny Biden 270 electors to throw it to the backup mechanism where Republicans outnumber Democrats.

I don’t, because IIRC the plan was to take Pence out of the picture, have Graham assume the role of Senate president pro tempare in his place, and then Graham would use the fake electors as a justification to refuse to certify Biden’s election. From there, it would get thrown to Congress, where each state’s congressional delegation get a single collective vote to decide who becomes president. Republicans outnumber Democrats in enough state delegations to throw the election to Trump.

In other words, the timeline Pence dies is the one where the coup succeeds.

You seem to have mistaken my post as defending or supporting Garland’s appointment. Please rest assured that is not the case.

He doesn’t need to be a fighter. The only reason J6 got so bad is because Trump’s administration actively and directly prevented any security measures from being prepared ahead of time, and then stalled and refused to call for help when the skeletal security guards were overrun.

The default posture of everyone who handles security for these institutions and would be in charge of fighting off another J6 attempt is that they want to protect the Capital and prevent something like this from happening again by preparing adequate measures in advance and having backup ready and available. All Biden has to do is not actively block the national guard, capital security, and D.C. police.

At the time, picking Garland as AG was a giant fuck you to republicans to get revenge on them denying Obama the supreme court nomination in 2016, a way of saying “ha, ha, you denied him a seat and now we gave him one that’s almost as good.”

Unfortunately, in hindsight it turns out that when you put a very moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican in the cabinet, they will run their department like a moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican, and that resulted in the DOJ focusing on the mooks more than the masterminds out of fear of being seen as a political hatchet man.

The second contempt hearing was over statements that were made between the first contempt hearing and the judge’s initial ruling–i.e. they were statements made before he was initially sanctioned. The judge hasn’t backed down, he’s just not jailing him until he makes a statement made after his warning.

They can’t delay it that long, they have to issue a decision by the end of their current term, which ends when they go into summer recess in late June/early July. Granted, they could theoretically say “screw the rules” and not issue a decision until after the election, but that’s literally never been done, and if it did everyone would start ringing the alarm bells because it’s a crystal clear sign they’re corruptly abusing their power for Trump’s benefit. (Yes, I know they’re already doing this, but what they’re doing right now is blowing hard enough on a dog whistle to draw side-eye glances from passers by, while delaying a decision past the end of term would be like blowing a train whistle right next to your face.)

If they do decide to help Trump, the most likely path will be waiting until the last minute to issue a decision and then punting it back to the lower court for further review.

That goes against his long and storied history of being in the tank for the Republican party. He convinced Bush Sr to pardon the few people who were convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal to execute a cover-up, he slow-walked and misrepresented the findings of Mueller’s report on Russian interference, and he’s always ascribed to the unitary executive theory. If his history and career is any indication, I suspect he talked about it because he legitimately thinks the president should be able to execute his political rivals (as long as they have an elephant pin on their lapel, naturally).

This is why I open the restroom door at work by nudging the wheelchair accessible door button with my side.

my company announced today that they were going to start a phased rollout where AI would provide first responses to support tickets submitted by users, with it initially being “reviewed” by humans with the eventual goal being it just sending responses unsupervised. The strength of my "OH HELL NO" derailed the entire meeting for a solid 15 minutes lmao