CursedByTheVoid

The Trump or Biden decision is not democracy

You're 100% correct there, unfortunately. It's become the choice between a firing squad, or death by a thousand cuts.

I'm one of those people "privileged enough to not already be suffering", as you put it; unfortunately I'm also terribly empathetic. Four years of Trump did a lot of damage to the social fabric here; emboldening the worst our society has to offer, appointing three conservative SC justices to overturn Roe, tax breaks for the owning class, and so forth. The country is becoming increasingly hostile to women, queer folks, and other minorities... Hell the MAGA crowd has even convinced a good chunk of the working class to hurt itself in it's confusion.

I suppose I see any means of staving that progression off, even if I'm repulsed by the choice, as a net neutral. Perhaps I'm naive, maybe another Trump term is exactly what we need for people to wake the fuck up and take it to the streets; but I have a feeling it's going to be a much more violent struggle fighting against bloodthirsty fascists over milquetoast liberals.

I'm rambling too now lol. Sorry for dragging the conversation out, I think I just enjoy talking about this stuff in a non-combative environment for once 😅

Yeah, kinda beating a dead horse here, but it's giving "2024, Year of the Linux Desktop, inadvertently sponsored by Microsoft."

Sure.

Then you get the occasional fun experience of a maintainer fucking up a package definition or two, and all of a sudden you can't update your system or run a program because there's a tangled mess of dependency conflicts and you get to spend the afternoon force reinstalling system libraries. Love ya' Void :')

Been trying NixOS which is great for avoiding that kind of thing, but it comes with it's own set of annoyances. I really ought to just settle on a more stable distro like Debian lol.

From the MS website:

Recall utilizes Windows Copilot Runtime to help you find anything you’ve seen on your PC. Search using any clues you remember or use the timeline to scroll through your past activity, including apps, documents, and websites.

A "feature" coming to Windows 11. Essentially a keylogger on steroids... Powered by AI of course, because what isn't these days.

Cute bait, little guy. Keep it up :)

Apologies for the America-centric response, I know these ideas aren't limited to the states, it's just what I'm most familiar with.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of neo-liberals and I think they get a lot of justified flak for not doing enough, or what's right, and I absolutely understand not "voting for people who are able to shrug off my very existence". If I were in your shoes, I'd be in the "burn it all down" camp too.

In 2016, I wrote in Bernie Sanders out of principle, because he felt like the only candidate who genuinely cared about what was best for regular folks. I also thought the rhetoric around Trump was overstated, particularly, I thought the whole Antifa crowd was super cringe. I grew up in a conservative environment and none of the people I knew were actually fascists after all... Well, 8 years later... I have the hindsight to know that I was wrong. Fascism is alive and well, and it's thriving in my backyard.

I don't want to vote for Biden, his administration's handling of Israel and it's genocide is an affront to humanity and one more thing to add to the list of shit that makes me ashamed of this country; it's just that, in my eyes, the only other viable option is so much worse...

I wish I had the answers, any policies that could bring meaningful change to a two-party system are in the hands of people who have everything to gain from keeping things the same. I'd like to think that enough overt acts of civil disobedience could change things, but I don't think it's bad enough for most people to gather the numbers necessary to bring it about. We've been given just enough luxury to keep us placid, but not enough to allow us the time, money, or energy to air our grievances. It's a sorry state of affairs.

Anyway...

TL;DR, I respectfully dissent, but your experience is valid and I don't blame ya, hopefully things start looking up in our lifetime :P

Edit: I ~~missed~~ a word

I get where you're coming from... but when the alternative is mask-off clerical fascism, it ain't a hard fuckin' choice.

Voting democrat is just plain harm reduction at this point, as laughable as that feels to say given present circumstances... But this shit show is what we're stuck with unless we can somehow convince the feckless bastards to implement a better system than first-past-the-post, so other parties actually stand a chance.

It won't happen, but neither will convincing over half of the population to vote third-party; and abstaining, while principled, only yields more voting power to Y'all Qaeda.

True.

I could maybe see an argument being made in favor of having these kinds of security measures for the first month after release to protect sales, since it's usually the period in which most sales are secured; devs do need a sustainable income after all. But that would also necessitate ignoring the potential performance degradation resulting in a poor first experience for players, and many publishers just leave it in for the lifetime of a game, which is a disaster waiting to happen (as seen here).

Overall, I think piracy is mostly a pricing issue above all else. With AAA titles getting increasingly more expensive and being released in broken states, it's not surprising that people don't want to spend $70 on a game that they might end up hating and opt to "demo" the game first. Refund policies can help alleviate the issue, but are hardly a silver bullet, with games inserting tons of fluff at the beginning to ensure you exceed the playtime threshold.

Either deliver the games you promise, or price them according to what's actually there, and I'm sure the majority of gamers would be content in paying full price. DRM only serves to increase friction for the honest people paying for your games.

I mean the premise already feels a bit absurd, but I'll play...

I'm not a vegan myself, and I don't really hang out in vegan spaces that much, so my answers may differ from your typical vegan, or not... who knows. But I suppose if the general goal is to preserve life where possible, then you should absolutely try to find some place for the animals to live out their days in peace. If we can manage to stuff them all in neat little boxes on the land we have now, I doubt it's some intractable problem. You don't have to let 'em run free and "out of control" per se, repurpose the land of the now defunct factory farms and slaughterhouses, build a number of sanctuaries all over the place, and plop 'em there. Of course, no one can possibly know all of the variables involved, so I'm not saying this is a well thought out solution, I'm just spitballing... but we're not exactly hurting for land, to my knowledge.

However, suppose I granted you:

Realistically the amount of livestock is not sustainable and they’d need to be culled in gargantuan numbers

Why would that necessitate this outcome?

And then you get the slaughter without the benefit of feeding billions of hungry people.

Veganism isn't some virus that physically prevents you from eating meat, and plenty of vegans have been meat eaters at some point in their lives. If it came down to it, I imagine there would be a steady supply of folks who would opt to revert temporarily instead of letting it go to waste. Vegans may disagree with me here, but I think it's certainly a more ethical choice if the animals are already dead, can't let the sacrifice be for nothing.

The vegan viewpoint on animals really just boils down to eliminating unnecessary suffering and death. Many are fine with the prospect of hunting, fishing, or raising livestock for food when there aren't other options (eg. environments with insufficient crop yields to feed everyone or infrastructure to get other food), the problem arises from the fact that those of us privileged enough to live in a land of abundance continue to needlessly slaughter. Do we need to eat? Of course. Do we need to kill things to do it? Fuck no.

All that said, I think a more realistic transition scenario would be something like the meat industry halting slaughter operations, exhausting their existing supply until either there are no animals left to kill, or there are a small enough quantity to where we can just yeet the rest onto some farms somewhere. Not that vegans would be entirely on board with that, being anti-slaughter and all, but it's at least a reduction in harm and a more believable way for things to play out... I think.

Not spacey at all, totally coherent. I appreciate you taking the time to write all of that out and share it with some stranger on the internet.

I don't find myself disagreeing with any of what you said. Confirmation bias is a bitch, and regrettably something that most of us are guilty of at some point. Instilling fear, hatred, or self-loathing in your children based solely on your own anecdotal evidence isn't right, and it's a shame that it's as prevalent as it is.

I guess where I might diverge in the context of the overarching post, and I'm not suggesting this is your position, but I don't believe the argument being posited is that men/boys in their entirety, or on the basis of them being men, are definitively dangerous and ought to be feared. I think that's how a lot of men end up taking it, myself included once upon a time. But as you put it, "most people don’t have the ability to access that world view as a normal part of thought", I think that's also true of men, and a big part of why this discussion is so contentious. It's hard for many of us to truly comprehend the scope of what being a woman in day to day life entails. The majority of us don't have to go through life worrying about being cat-called, followed home, sexually assaulted, having friends of the opposite sex constantly trying to turn it into "something more", and a plethora of other things. These things can and do happen to men too, of course, along with some unique problems of our own, but those men have as much a right to be angry and speak out about their abuse as women do.

For me, it's the disproportionality of it that's concerning, along with the regressive trend of either outright denying we have a problem on our hands, or attempting to silence and/or shame the people (men and women both) who speak out, because it's more comfortable not to look at it. Many seem to be content with throwing their hands up and saying "well, X, Y, and Z are already illegal, what more do you want us to do?", and that's simply not a viable path forward.

With that said, I certainly don't want anyone degrading themselves over traits that are entirely out of their hands... To any young men who may be reading this, or men who find themselves torn on the conversation because they feel perhaps the conversation has veered into outright bigotry:

There's nothing inherently wrong with you, you can be a tremendous force for good in the world, like so many other men before you, and anyone who claims otherwise can get fucked. And I'll admit I could be wrong here, but I'd wager that the majority of folks saying they'd "pick the bear" feel the same way... they're just tired, pissed off, and done mincing words with an uncaring world.

Be proud to be a man, own it, just bear in mind that there is a minority of us inflicting a tremendous amount of hurt and suffering in the world, on men and women alike. If we truly wish to be a force for good, then we have to be willing to rally against wrongdoing in any form, by any perpetrator, and not allow these things to proliferate out of complacency. I can understand if you're put off by the present discourse... don't get behind it for the sake of feminism, or some political ideology, do it because it's the right thing to do.

~~Never made the comparison. As I've stated in two other comment threads already, two sets of stats, two distinct conclusions. That third sentence has been there since the inception of this post, the edit was added after two people blatantly ignored it.~~

~~Me saying they aren't comparable isn't "hiding behind" anything. It's an acknowledgement that there are far too many variables involved be able to draw anything conclusive between the two. To not acknowledge that would be a disservice to anyone reading and would ultimately feed into confirmation bias in both directions.~~

~~Moreover, I could completely nix the info on bears and my point would still stand, the point of the hypothetical isn't about the god damn bears.~~

Y'know... I thought more about this comment, and my response to it. I went back and re-read my post, and yeah, I can see how it was interpreted that way... It certainly wasn't my intention to mislead or come off as dishonest, but admittedly it could have been composed more carefully. I went back and edited the main post to, I hope, be a more objective and accurate representation of what I meant overall, and why I decided to leave both of those things in, even with the acknowledgement that they were not analogous.