• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Let’s add to the list, almost four years of operatives infiltrating their way into the election certification process. Not to get too tinfoil hatty, but the addiction denial strategy almost worked last time, and while the same team that orchestrated it no longer occupied the White house, state officials open to the scheme likely won’t make the same mistakes this time.

    It’s a different election now with Harris taking the Dem nomination, but 2020 was decided by about 40k votes spread across a few key states. The same polarization that makes polling almost impossible to do accurately also means people’s opinions are equally hard to change. Don’t try. Instead, focus your efforts on mobilizing voters to turn out. Organize and make a plan to get yourself to the polls and to bring a friend. Check vote.gov and make sure you’re still registered and make sure the reasonable people in your life have too! Uncle ivermectin isn’t changing his mind about the trans panic, but there’s going to be a significant portion of the population that just doesn’t have time to vote between working the jobs to stay afloat. Get them a mail in ballot!

    I’ve checked my registration about 25 times this month after learning I had mysteriously dropped from the rolls in a swing state. Don’t let some jackass take your opportunity to vote away. It may be our last change to finally stop hearing about every single stupid thing that comes out of the mouths of the worst people in government. Winning is the only way to fix what’s broken in our system.






  • It’s science reporting and not immune to headline inflation, but it’s not a lie to say there were measured improvements to patient cognition.

    There’s a developing consensus that electric stimulation has therapeutic potential in restoring brain function (from basal ganglion to transdermal stim). But if you want the full study findings here, I course this article because it looks the DOI address at the bottom.

    Given how few (none) treatments they’re are for TBIs right now, this is pretty exciting stuff to me at least.



  • Basically, this coming election will be decided by the margins because almost everyone who follows politics–at all–knows who they’re voting for already.

    Think about the number of people who follow politics and then understand that those people are already not the demographic that will likely decide the outcome. It’s the people who are surprised they Joe Biden and Donald Trump are on the ballot that matter.

    It isn’t worth trying to pressured persuade either the right or the left. What we need is to activate and engage the non-participating section of the electorate. This is hard, but achievable. It’s people who work multiple jobs and don’t have time for politics that need to know it matters if they vote. Civil rights are not a given and 2024 will be hugely consequential.

    Take your friends with you on election day! Register for vote by mail and bug your friends too! Take about it and don’t leave easy points on the table. Yes the options are terrible. Yes one of them will make the possibility of improving it ever infinitely more difficult.

    The people saying it doesn’t matter do not understand what they stand to lose. It is so so much harder to build something than tear it down and our imperfect institutions will not save us. Politics matters and the luxury of not caring, will lead to co-optation and the loss of rights that are easy to take for granted now.











  • There really was something about the windows phone UI though. If you weren’t around to try it, it’s hard to properly explain how different and fresh the flat pane interface felt compared to iOS and Android. It really was a phenomenal design language compared to the same old thing in the market.

    I honestly believe it they had just sucked it up and subsidized the cost of doubling the ram on those last Nokia devices, it could have been good enough to break through. Microsoft had everything possible to gain from integrating the desktop-to-mobile workflow for business clients. Then they threw it out the window…

    Seriously, I doubt many people here who aren’t used to corporate environments can fully understand how big the market was, that Microsoft gave up, by not spending enough to fill the BlackBerry hole that formed. They had 98% of the solution already developed, and fumbled the ball with a single yard left to go.

    There was room for three players, if one of them actually serviced the business environment; and nobody was better positioned to do so than Microsoft at the time. Excel and PowerPoint that synced from your work machine, to the field, in a zero trust environment… Gah… they were so close.


  • Thanks for the detailed break down! One thing I really do miss about old Twitter is how easily I could get a huge variety of great news sources at the same place.

    There were always problems with the site, but nothing has come close to that level of centralized convenience (that I’ve found so far at least). It may just be the new normal since that same centralization makes any site vulnerable to the same fate twitter has met with. But man I sure underestimated how much worse twitter could get…

    I’d love to give bluesky a shot for a bit, but their invite policy has me disappointed having waited for nearly a year now without any sign of opening up for regular users like me. Mastodon is good, tildes better (but tiny) so far, but I still miss having all the journalists who cared about journalism practices in one place…

    Sigh…






  • It’s just crazy to me that Israel went from forced migration, following ghetto concentration, to concentrating others with the same dehumanizing rhetoric in the space if a generation.

    Not to excuse Hamas’ actions in the slightest, the rocket attack is unjustifiable no matter anyone’s political beliefs. But it boggles my mind that a national identity can flip so drastically that Palestine can be put into de facto concentration camps by people who remember being in camps (albeit in tiny surviving numbers nowadays).

    Propaganda works folks. Don’t be a sucker.


  • It’s not all one thing or the other. People ascribe these kind of blanket generalizations to US foreign policy frequently but it’s as short-sighted as painting German foreign policy as imperial. Certain US presidents have started wars. Others the Marshall plan, WTO, IMF, the UN, NATO, etc.

    Right now there’s a crisis in the US driven by the same fear of change that drove them into containment during the cold war. That isolationist populism certainly benefits some narratives but it’s no better than the worst elements of China-first economic coercion in the ACS that’s alienated a lot of Philippine fishermen in recent years.

    Fact is the biggest threat to the human race is the dissension these isolationists/populists are selling. No meaningful action on climate, migration, or the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine can occur in that worldview and anyone should be suspicious of politicians who promote them.

    Most US policy has been quite good when non-isolationists have occupied the white house, just like most non-reich based German leadership has strengthened European unity. The Nazis and Trump’s me-first exceptions prove the rule. Education, familiarity, and exposure should be the Rx for the US right now, along with all the countries dealing with the current wave of populist snake oil movements. In the words of a US propaganda film of the same name “don’t be a sucker”.