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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • The SCOTUS is a distraction, as they’ve got no real power to enforce their decisions.

    This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more.

    With our three branches of government, it’s up to the executive to enforce the laws, and by extension, the rulings of the judiciary.

    What’s the failsafe mechanism for when the executive doesn’t like a ruling and has no respect of law, or for the system?

    What happens after the supreme court says, “Hey President! What you’re doing is unconstitutional and you must stop immediately.”…and the president just goes, “Actually I don’t care what you say. I’m still doing it. Have a wonderful day and go fuck all nine of yourselves.”





  • It’s as simple as the people making the decisions (executives, directors, etc.) and the people driving their decisions (shareholders) have something that the employees and the customers don’t:

    The ability to cash in their chips and move on quickly when the time is right.

    Employees can certainly leave and find another job, customers can certainly catch on to lower quality and change buying habits…but both of these tend to be slower processes than the ones that put money in the accounts of the first two groups.



  • It’s worth keeping in mind that:

    A) The only poll that matters is the one on Nov. 5th

    and

    B) Before that, the only people that you can poll are people who are fired up enough about their candidate to agree to participate.

    A resigned, grudging, or “meh” vote for Biden would count just as much as a red hat wearing, sign displaying, rally attending Trump vote…but only one of those two cares enough about polling to participate in one before election day.

    With Harris, I’m not so sure she will get that many more votes than Biden would have…but more of those voters are of the more motivated kind who will voluntarily participate in these polls.




  • I mean…lots of kids have had to deal with worse…my main frustration is that we could have given them so much better with relative ease.

    My grandparents were born in the 30s, growing up in the Great Depression (all but one, who had the awful luck to be born in the Philippines, and instead of the depression, got to experience brutal Japanese occupation). That’s far worse than what American kids as a demographic are growing up with now, but that was entirely out of the hands of their parents to avoid.

    I feel like for today’s teens, it’s not that bad, but it’s bad because of selfishness and greed rather than huge national or global tragedy.




  • Well said.

    It’s also worth remembering that literally any poll conducted is only displaying data based on people who voluntarily respond to polls.

    Even when Biden was still running, the results were always going to be flawed based on the simple fact that far more Trump voters are the sort of rabid, loud people with nothing better to do than to let someone know what they think about politics, vs Biden voters who were motivated in large part by nothing more significant than “I just don’t want trump”.

    The first person is going to be happy to spend 15 minutes on the phone with anyone willing to listen to their political thoughts. The second person is hanging up.



  • It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.

    When I first heard about what was going on, I assumed that “CrowdStrike” was not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack where they used systems they’d previously hacked and had them all do the same thing at once to another target.


  • You mean the insurgency that eventually achieved all of its goals and reclaimed it’s power and control after the most powerful military in the world gave up and went home?

    Or did you mean it’s not the 1970s where that insurgency also did it to the second most powerful military…while a different insurgency did it to the one from the first example?

    You’re absolutely right that in a straight up fight no individual stands a chance against the US military (and I also tend to agree that the military would be the best friend of the people in that awful scenario) but there’s two or three points that muddy the waters here a bit: it’s not going to be just one, it’s not going to be a straight up fight, and if the population were somehow disarmed, there wouldn’t even be any struggle at all.

    I’m not saying I’d fight off a battalion from my front porch wearing my Crocs, but a) anything is preferable to being herded to my fate, and b) it’s not about one armed individual, it’s more about the unappetizing proposition of subduing an armed populace.



  • Well said.

    And with the hex/Allen, it’s the small contact points as well as the smaller volume of material that needs to be deformed or removed before slippage can occur, as well as the angle of force on the contact point.

    With a hex, the contact point and direction are such that the tool is effectively trying to scrape off material at an angle, and if/when it succeeds even a little bit, it’s now much more prone to fail.

    With a Torx, the contact area might still be small, but it’s being applied to the lobe in a more perpendicular direction, so rather than a scraping failure, it’s more of a force that is pushing directly against steel instead of scraping. Not that it can’t fail, but the route to failure is significantly less likely.