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Cake day: April 5th, 2024

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  • A combination of factors made it happen. First up, you had low turnout. Only 20.5% of voters actually voted in that election, the lowest of the past 30 years.

    Aside from that, Adams had strong support amongst voters of color. For people who don’t live and/or work in these communities, it can seem like voting against their interests and be surprising, but non-white voters are not a monolithic block. Quite often, majority black or Hispanic neighborhoods in the Bronx can prove more conservative than many people might expect, for example, particularly on social issues. A lot of my older co-workers from Latin America at the time, along with my mother-in-law, didn’t view BLM protests as legitimate actions to begin with, and just thought of them as troublemakers looking to break stuff and loot. The “tough on crime to raise quality of life” message was really powerful for many of the people I know, and they took it completely uncritically. There’s also a ton of super religious folks that won’t support Democrats over things like LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and other culture war GOP talking points. I can’t really speak to the Black community, but if you learn Spanish, there’s also just a ton of casual racism, sexism and homophobia that would probably shock people.

    In addition to conservative social inclinations, lots of these folks are not what you would describe as well-informed. My elderly Ecuadorian, Dominican and Peruvian co-workers at that time were constantly buying into totally baseless conspiracies they got sent on WhatsApp. That and the 2020 presidential election cycle was super frustrating at home, as my mother-in-law would religiously watch the news on Univision, where they would trot out “scandals” and conspiracies that had been disproven weeks earlier and abandoned in the English-media, but Univision knew they could get away with airing for the significant portion of their audience with limited or no English. I even remember watching the news with her, my wife and her sister, who are both fluent in English, and the three of us getting upset that an interview in which we could hear the original English statements were being translated entirely inaccurately.


  • When I have an option not to, I don’t. Unfortunately, the way health insurance works here, I often don’t have an option. With the insurance I had through my previous job, basically as soon as I requested a second refill, the pharmacy benefits would go “Hey, we won’t cover this anymore, unless you switch to 90-day refills via CVS Caremark.” At some points last year, that could easily have been $500-$1,000/month more for me to pay for my meds in order to keep getting them at the pharmacy two blocks away, and I just didn’t have it. Instead of going there and having pretty much all my prescriptions filled in an hour or less, I got to enjoy Caremark not letting me refill until the last minute, then encountering shipping delays with medications I really shouldn’t have been abruptly missing doses of.


  • I can’t speak for everyone, but why exactly would I care about Trump’s age? It’s certainly a liability for him, but I was never going to vote Republican anyway, whereas my likelihood of voting Democrat has only risen now that Joe has stepped down. Why on earth would I want to potentially inspire Republicans to start pushing for a more competent candidate who might have a better chance of being elected, while also beingore competent and able to do more harm if they were to win?

    For media outlets reporting on this, sure, but I think you’re being overly general when talking about individual voters expressing reservations about the candidate being pushed by the party they will, in all likelihood, wind up voting for.


  • I wouldn’t deny that they may have thought it was helpful to push at the time, but there are plenty of people who used it that just wanted either a change in stance from Biden, or a different candidate. “Russian shill” has just become the go to line for anyone who wholeheartedly sticks to the Democratic party line to shut down any and all discussion. Criticize your own party’s prospective candidate at the time without first denouncing every bad take Trump has? Russian shill. Don’t agree that the statistics showing the economy is doing great reflect the actual experience of many people? KGB plant. Supermarket is out of your favorite brand of cereal? Putin’s fault. It’s ridiculous.


  • Not sure why you would expect them to be going nuts on this. This is just one more in a long line of terrible things Trump supports, but he is not going to change stance on this for a bunch of people not in his party complaining online.

    Genocide Joe has run its course, in my opinion. Biden is no longer the nominee, and despite all the hand wringing about foreign shills by people who see Russian manipulation in their own shadows, polls seem to indicate this was an overwhelmingly positive move for the Democrats. Harris is not my ideal candidate, but the Genocide Joe moniker was part of a campaign during primary season and leading up to the nomination to not have Biden as the nominee, and it accomplished this.

    This is just some weak what aboutism from sore losers. No shit Trump has worse stances on this issue than Biden, but I can’t vote in primaries other than my registered party in my state, and the GOP was never going to replace him as nominee over this issue anyway.


  • For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.

    By their own account, it’s not meant to be lucrative.

    "Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.

    Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."

    Straight from Mozilla’s About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users’ privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don’t actually want.



  • Yes, clearly everyone is in a position to just walk off their job at any point in time, with no consequences for being unemployed.

    I don’t know why you’re trying to say that the people who work these jobs, and largely live paycheck to paycheck, have the same sort of freedom as people who are financially stable. I was making my state’s minimum wage at the time, which was entirely insufficient to pay for any decent standard of living. My co-workers who were undocumented were paid even less, had no recourse if they were fired for complaining about conditions or working “too slow” according the bosses, did not qualify for unemployment insurance and had a significantly harder time finding new work than I would. Just like the majority of people out working on farms in the US today. But yeah, let’s pretend it’s as simple as walking off the job if it’s uncomfortable for everyone.

    Your comments make it apparent that you’ve never worked these sorts of jobs or been in these sorts of conditions. What, you’re going to just walk off the job because it sucks and become homeless when the weather and working conditions suck? Because that’s the sort of choice that faces millions of people in the US today. It doesn’t even need to be in agriculture, you can find similar conditions in so many non-unionized positions doing things like landscaping, manufacturing jobs, kitchen work, etc. Florida literally just passed a bill that removed employer responsibility for providing rest and water breaks based on heat stress during work being performed earlier this year.

    But sure, everyone has several months’ expenses in their bank accounts and work in a field where they can get another job from one day to the next…


  • How on earth is this enlightened conservatism to point out that these are not fatal temps for an otherwise healthy individual? I guess the whole population of the third world that lives in the tropics and doesn’t have air conditioning just have superior genes according to you? Fucking hell, literally millions of people around the world live in conditions where they see temperatures as high, or even worse, and you want to pretend like it’s saying “Well this guy should have just been stronger and worked harder,” to point out that these conditions are generally not fatal for a person without other issues.

    No, they are not good conditions, and the state has an obligation to provide decent conditions to all those who are incarcerated, but it’s asinine to act as though healthy individuals routinely drop dead from spending several hours at 96°F or higher in high humidity environments in absence of some aggravating condition.




  • How? Yes, it is absolutely abusive behavior, but these are hardly the worst conditions people work in. It’s literally been hotter and with higher humidity in New York for a couple of weeks, let alone the sort of conditions that many work in in tropical countries, or even a significant portion of the South, a great number of which are not known for extraordinary labor rights. It’s entirely possible to point out that something should not be permitted, while also recognizing it generally wouldn’t be fatal to an otherwise healthy adult.

    This does not attribute any blame to the individual, nor does it reduce the culpability of the officers that subjected them to these conditions, fwiw. Just because something should not generally be fatal does not in any way mean it’s okay to subject someone to those conditions.



  • I mean, I’ve worked in agriculture pulling weeds in those temps and setting up irrigation lines. It was literally 30° F hotter in my job where I stand in front of the kitchen door a couple weeks ago. It’s a far cry from comfortable, especially if you don’t have access to water, but I can’t imagine dying from it, absent some other health condition that was aggravated by it.

    Also, just to be clear, I absolutely think it’s abusive to leave an inmate in such conditions without access to water and shade, I’d just be surprised to hear it was fatal in an otherwise healthy young person.



  • I don’t think it’s necessarily being so concerned with integrity as to deliberately self-sabotage, but rather that this was a potentially viable strategy 40-50 years ago, and many of the eldritch horrors in party leadership, Biden included, just haven’t gotten the message that the situation has changed in the interim. Part of Biden’s campaign pitch was that he’s worked in Congress for so long and has the relations that would let him reach out to the other side to get stuff passed, and he just gets taken advantage of when trying to do so. The Republicans have long since moved on to a strategy of “Ram through whatever you can while you’re in power, and obstruct, obstruct, obstruct when you aren’t.” They generally aren’t concerned at all with what non-GOP voters think of them and their actions, which lets them just bulldoze their way through the process while racking up points with their base for being effective at advancing the agenda, regardless of how hypocritical/immoral they are in the process. Just see Mitch McConnell when Obama tried appointing a justice to the Supreme Court near the end of his term versus his response to Trump doing the same.

    I would also say there’s just a fundamentally different level of at least the appearance of integrity necessary on the Democratic side, and Democratic voters are less willing to accept that the ends justifies the means. This is clearly illustrated just by looking at the fallout for pretty much any Republican having a sex scandal, versus it happening to a Democrat. In his initial scandal, Anthony Weiner didn’t even engage in a criminal act, having sent a 21-year old woman a sexually explicit photo. In less than a month, Nancy Pelosi had called for an investigation into it and he’d resigned his seat. In contrast, Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case and has had heaps of sexual assault and harassment accusations brought against him, yet the party of family values, good, Christian morals, and law and order is still completely behind him.


  • For some of their more conservative members, they’ve certainly done so in the past, but I’m pretty sure that @SeattleRain@lemmy.world is just talking about the self-defeating obsession that Democrats have with appearing non-partisan. Yes, they do need to compromise to an extent to get something through the house at the moment, but they have essentially self-sabotaged in the past when they had the majorities to not need to do so, yet insist on negotiating with the Republicans anyway because they hope moderate Republicans will give them credit for not ramming legislation through in a one-sided fashion.

    This really only works when the other party is engaging in negotiations in good faith, which the Republicans do not. As a result, the Democrats give the GOP initiative on steering bills and policies as they like, winding up with compromised legislation that doesn’t please their actual base, while also not getting credit from the Republicans they’re hoping to sway in some sense.

    For an easy example of this, look at talks about eliminating the filibuster earlier in Biden’s presidency. Manchin and Sinema made it a dead idea, but even before that, Biden has been opposed because of his obsession with reaching across the aisle in an age where trying to do so only serves to stop his agenda dead in its tracks. Rather than get their elbows out and bully the two hold outs into falling in line (which was supposed to be what Manchin was good for, at least. I kept hearing, “He disrupts things, but he falls in line when it counts,” but pretty much never saw evidence of this), they just shrugged and collectively let the agenda die or get neutered, because to do otherwise would not be bipartisan.


  • There’s a lot of racists out there. I feel like if she’s at the top of the ticket, she’s gonna get dragged down.

    This is just preemptive cope to avoid having to reflect on whether the Democratic leadership and its preferred candidates are actually the thing that needs change, and she’s not even an actual candidate yet. Kamala’s biggest problem is not that she isn’t white. Obama was a Black man, but he had heaps of charisma. Kamala has all the charisma of a plate of lutefisk,and people flat out do not like her. She is also irrevocably tied to Biden and his legacy, likely to her detriment amongst the crowds you would most worry about not voting for her because of her not being white.


  • When it comes to the Democrats and* the left* — from the Biden campaign on down to the activists

    What’s with calling out the left on this, when the closest they get to a leftist organization they take issue with is a climate advocacy group. The left has been pretty clear that Biden is not the man for the moment since the go, and for our troubles, we’ve been called everything from stupid and naïve, to privileged white people who don’t care about insert minority group here (and ignore that not all leftists are rich, white people, there are plenty of POC active in leftist politics, though critics, often privileged white people themselves, do love to erase their existence in the same breath they claim to be looking out for them), to either useful idiots or fully cognizant agitators working on behalf of enemy states. Centrist Democrats and liberals have been the ones trying to tell anyone who will listen that the same old play will not just be good enough, but is actually our only option to win, and they’re trying to leave the left to take the fall for their mistake, yet again.

    Some of it is political calculation. If the president steps aside, the logical candidate is Vice-President Kamala Harris, but Harris has struggled in office and her poor poll ratings mirror those of Biden. If the Democratic Party tries to sideline Harris and open the door to other candidates through an open convention, they risk alienating her and her supporters and opening up further wounds in the Democratic coalition.

    What, risk all four of her supporters? Oh, darn, there go the chances of winning ever again.

    Democrats are not going to win with a staid campaign by the usual corporate boot-licking line of candidates they’ve relied on up until now. The sooner they accept that and get behind a candidate who is pushing for systemic changes on issues that actually resonate with your average Americans and the problems they face in their daily lives, as opposed what matters only to their donors, the better for them this time around. Heck, if they actually follow through and make some of those changes, even better.


  • My first OS was whatever ran on a Commodore 64. I guess the Commodore kernel and Basic?

    My first distro was whatever version of Fedora was current in the fall of 2008. I’d gone to university that year and my laptop crapped out. Couldn’t afford a legit Windows license at the time to replace it, and I’m pretty sure I just remembered that Red Hat was a thing and found Fedora that way. One thumb drive and 16 years later, still using linux, so I guess that was about the only good thing to come from my abortive first attempt at higher education.