skuzz

Hang in there. I'm hopeful that the numbers seem to be trending back down towards small cult status. But a lot has to change, rapidly, if we get through this next election time stop this slide into hell.

I always hoped we'd have a Star Trek type future minus World War 3, not Hunger Games being historically accurate.

Over the years I've found, in the grand scheme, unless the CEO murdered your family, who cares? I didn't buy Sony products for a couple of decades, right now I don't even remember why I stopped. I think it was around shit warranty handling. Meanwhile, I was removing viable options from my purchase pool.

More recently, I'm just trying to make my purchase decisions like I'm a business. Does the item at a given price fill the needs of the role? Does buying the year-old model at heavy discount fit the need? Avoid the top-tier release-day buzz, buy at a discount, use the tool as long as possible. These techniques collectively will stifle all the "economy" they're trying to make a profit from.

Vendors that are truly terrible will lose customers. One person's soapbox won't affect them, however, despite best efforts.

But they choose to not. One of those cake and eat it too scenarios.

A territory like them is eligible for Federal money from various programs, while not having to pay Federal income tax. If they became a state, they'd then have to pay income tax, lose benefit of the free program money, but be allowed to vote.

If you don't want to fully commit to the whole package and are milking the advantages of being a territory, should you really get a right to choose how the package that is being taxed and giving you free money is steered?

(Oversimplification, of course.)

If I were a member of a territory, I don't really know where my thoughts would land.

However, as one that is taxed, it seems that allowing the untaxed to choose our taxed destiny would be disingenuous.

I mean, Bezos doesn't run that either. Might as well just stop using every stock in his portfolio by that logic.

Get Amazon employees to unionize and take back the ship is the answer there. Amazon is annoyingly too big to be affected by even a large grassroots protest.

Sorry, that's not how it works with people stuck in a loop. It's a very American problem, if you aren't American. Not sure if it was the leaded gas, or what, but some people are just broken. The person you want to change needs to want to, and be able to change for your idealism to work. Otherwise you're just building a delusion around a fixed point to fit your viewpoint while that person remains unchanged.

It's terribly sad, really.

One can feel how one feels, however, the boomer generation's brains are locked in a time loop. They can't be changed. It's like visiting someone with alzheimers. It's quite sad and frustrating.

Oddly, the silent generation peeps are more adaptable.

It is always projection. There have been previous Republican voters fraud cases in the last election(s).

At least it's an easy alert for what problems to look for. If they're declaring "the other guys" are doing something, they're already doing it themselves.

They will likely revamp the process. The problem is, once the ballot is counted, the vote is separated from the voter, so there's no link to who the person was and who they voted for.

It's a process meant for privacy. That someone was able to accurately forge signatures enough to pass verification (which is handled by trained humans) is a bit on the "this was creepy/planned" side, which is likely how the outlier event happened.

America isn't there yet, but cryptographic hashes anonymizing but connecting a vote to a voter, so the vote could be anonymously recalled for an attack like this would likely be the best privacy-preserving process.

Also Ford's CEO: kills sedans in the US several years ago.

https://fordauthority.com/2024/06/ford-ceo-jim-farley-says-company-lost-billions-on-sedans/

I now know what that actually is, and would also like to watch it. Games are so terribly slow with never-ending commercial breaks.

The time of reckless software really has to end. They will bemoan that it "stifles" innovation, but so much damage has resulted from irresponsible software just in the last couple of decades.

We humans used to be technologically limited by how fast we could innovate. Not enough RAM or CPU or a sensor didnt exist. There is no technological throttle anymore, we need to govern one.

Everything mobile manufacturers have done since smartphones finally became popular in 2007 seemed like temporary solutions due to moving so fast. It's clear now that it was all an attempt to paradigm-shift compute into leased property.

It really needs to end, along with the terrible disposable hardware designs. Even if we were not in a climate crisis, it is about as bad as the US was in the 1950s throwing trash everywhere.

On some level, especially now, want to find an alarm clock or an mp3 player or even a camera? It's getting harder and harder. Old phones with their battery removed or replaced are perfect for those roles.