Ok, yes, I support actions like these, and they are good for community defense against small civilian fascist groups. There are not the numbers to counter organizations like FBI, DHS, or national guard though. Things are a bit different when the fascist group you’re trying to counter is the federal or state government with the will to kill and immunity from their actions.

Harris just offered little to get voters excited. Mostly ran as a status-quo candidate. Racial minorities, for the most part, are not happy with the status-quo. By being ignored, it allowed right-wing propaganda on media (social and traditional) to do its work. One thing I’ve heard is, “well, at least Trump sent me some checks.” Many people I’ve talked to weren’t happy with Biden’s involvement with the crime bill, or Harris’ being a DA that proudly prosecuted cannabis offenders. Some people I’ve talked to liked that Trump pardoned Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, and that woman who had an extremely long sentence for cannabis. One person I’ve talked to was upset about “libtards” removing black faces from grocery store products (using Aunt Jemima as an example). Some younger men I know (some racial minorities) have started going deep into the Jordan Peterson, Fresh and Fit, Andrew Tate, etc pipeline, which I’m guessing is rooted in sexual insecurity.

The left is such a small population in the US, it’s irrelevant. If we are to believe Trump’s rhetoric, any group that becomes too much of a nuisance will be deemed “the enemy within,” and be shot.

Things are quite different. While Trump was in office, he did multiple things that were worse than what Nixon did, and was never forced to leave office. I think our institutions were stronger back then. We didn’t have a very good democracy when Hoover was president, and it took many decades for the Voting Rights Act to get passed (which has recently been weakened by SCOTUS, and will probably be weakened much more). I think we’ll regress quite a bit. Republicans obviously want more of an autocracy/oligarchy. I think it’s a very real possibility we have Russia-style “elections” in the future, and I don’t even know how you come back from that. Assuming democracy isn’t completely destroyed, it may take many decades of fighting and changing the minds of the people who aren’t disenfranchised to get back to where we were. Hell, even civil war is on the table if Trump follows through on some of his more egregious promises (i.e. if he deems Democratic state governments as the “enemy within” and tries to use the military to depose them).

NCalc+ is pretty good. I don’t use it for anything complicated though.

Another interesting question is if they vote for one of their local DA or sheriff candidates or just obtain.

Meh, startups and businesses are capitalist organizations, and I think the idea of patents is questionable outside capitalism, so these wouldn’t really be a good metrics. I’d guess the richest countries “innovate” the most because they can support more risky endeavors. The U.S. is the capitalist imperial core, so it probably innovates the most. Other capitalist nations like Haiti, probably not so much.

The best measure of innovation would probably be something like scientific publications. China wins by raw numbers, Vatican City wins per-capita (???).

Yeah, I mostly leave Harvestmen alone if they stay out of the way. I kill brown recluses though, because I’ve heard their bites can do some damage.

It’s probably a mix of things, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the politicians most heavily advocating for banning it expect to get some big payout. The first I’ve heard of the TikTok ban was from Trump who was trying to coerce them to sell it to Microsoft (I expect he would’ve got some financial benefit from this). In terms of the data-collection, potentially harmful and biased algorithms, and data exfiltration by government agencies, it’s not like the U.S. companies are much better.

I’ve always heard ingesting flouride makes developing teeth stronger, and does nothing for adults. Found a review of studies: https://www.cochrane.org/CD010856/ORAL_does-adding-fluoride-water-supplies-prevent-tooth-decay

tankie

🤨 I’ve never heard a right-winger, or even a liberal use that term.

IMO, the U.S. will become similar to Russia. It’s not some sudden societal collapse scenario; just an oligarchy with high levels of corruption and incompetence. Most people will conform or keep their heads down to avoid the consequences of stepping out of line. If you’re in a possibly targeted group, you may want a valid passport though. And it’s always been a good idea to keep at least a months worth of non-perishable food on hand in case of supply chain disruptions. Possibly stuff like emergency propane heaters and a propane tank could be useful too (they’ve been useful for me in the past already without an authoritarian government or social unrest). Knowing your neighbors and helping eachother out in little ways is probably the most powerful thing though.

Source? First I’ve heard of anything like this. I’d imagine a lot of things would have to be settled in court given the US’s strange laws giving states so much leeway in how they conduct federal elections.

He’s probably talking about the media capitalulating to the Trump campaign by agreeing not to fact check during the Vance/Walz debate. And most recently, the WSJ blocking the Harris endorsement. I.e. a lot of the very rich and powerful people seem to be acting like an authoritarian Trump administration is inevitable, and they’re trying to avoid his wrath or position themselves to be favored oligarchs.

I use LLMs for multiple things, and it’s useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you’re trying to find or learn about something, but don’t know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don’t exist). It works OK for things like “translation” tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don’t use it anymore. I’ve had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.

Governments (state and federal) can force people to fight though.

Could be the blue states refusing to comply with some crazy federal demand under a Trump administration. Trump has said he’d use the military to attack the “enemy within,” after all.

Off the top of my head, scenes in:

Poor Things

Nymphomaniac

Antichrist

Requiem for a Dream

Saltburn

It’s neither okay nor sustainable

Source?

You realize mass deportations would decimate the economy? Some cities are 10% undocumented immigrants; Florida is 5% undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants are a significant part of the U.S. economy and culture.

It would also be a horrific endeavor. Police going door-to-door demanding documentation. Probably social surveillance similar to Nazi Germany (along with all the false accusations). 4 million child U.S. citizens would have their parents hauled away. There will need to be concentration camps to hold all those people before travel (if they would actually get around to doing that).

“Law breakers,” isn’t a very good argument. Everybody breaks the law (speeding, jay-walking, etc). The system is currently working as intended, and encouraging people to break the law to acquire an easily exploitable workforce. Incidentally, undocumented immigrants commit far less crime than citizens.

Ideally, the Democrats would be unabashedly pro-immigration and advocate for solving the “problem” by making it much easier to immigrate legally and getting those currently undocumented, documented. This would make immigrants harder to exploit, address fears of immigrants under-cutting wages, and paying more taxes and social security. That addresses all the somewhat legitimate worries I can think of; the rest of the “problems” I can think of are just rooted in racism and lies. Immigration has been and is a net-positive for the U.S., and a pro-immigration stance should be an easy argument to sell to voters that’s also backed up by many studies and data; including conservative think-tanks like Cato. Pro-immigration sentiments were very popular in the U.S. until this recent bout of anti-immigration propaganda. Even now, Americans hold contradictory opinions, like being pro-mass-deportation while being in favor of expanding pathways to citizenship: https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/polling-around-mass-deportation-far-more-complicated-right-wing-media-let