christian

We have seen exactly zero indications that the republicans might start nominating better candidates anytime soon. The next candidate will probably be "Trump, but less incompetent at implementing his agenda". It makes sense to want to stall as long as possible, but needing a democrat victory every single election from here out is not going to be a winning strategy longterm. If Trump winning is guaranteed global chaos, then there aren't votes we can cast that will do anything other than slightly delay that.

She looks adorable. What was her name?

Non-voters are idiots but ultimately they will not vote. You can’t lead a donkey to water

I don't understand what you're trying to suggest here. Taking it at face value doesn't make any sense at all - in spite of massively outnumbering third-party voters, the potential impact of non-voters should be dismissed because they are all somehow incapable of being convinced that voting is worth their time? Casting a ballot is a difficult mental hurdle to clear, so it's reasonable to write off anyone who has not yet shown that they're capable of doing so as a hopeless case?

If the argument is that third party voters are throwing their votes away, why should we consider a protest vote to be different in any meaningful way from a protest non-vote?

I only discovered encabulation is a thing like a month or two ago and it's been life-changing, I've seen the original paper but finding videos on youtube is like a treasure trove. The Chrysler version is probably my favorite I've seen, entirely because of the tech guy that the video switches over to for the second half.

The SANS ICS HyperEncabulator video is also really special. The throwback "I don't understand you" scene at 1:53, I can't even make out most of what he's saying but somehow the delivery and the grin get me every time I watch it.

I don't understand why people make such a big deal out of these voters. Maybe I'm just consuming the wrong media, but it feels like third-party voters get 50x the blame nonvoters get for ruining elections with probably something like a thousandth of the population. I basically never see this discussion call out both third-party voters and nonvoters equally.

I keep seeing third-party voters maligned for thinking a candidate has hope to win a national election, I see so many arguments to address why third-party candidates can't win. In spite of that, I have never come across any community anywhere where people collectively believe these candidates actually have a chance. People who consume crazy media can believe crazy things, that's why MAGA is a thing, but there's a whole Fox News etc media machine feeding those people. Is there a forum somewhere with more than ten people where there's a consensus that a third-party candidate might actually win? None of the third party voters I have known or met irl believed this, and I would be shocked if they're all weird exceptions.

Like, please, where are these people congregating to spread the ludicrous idea that a third-party candidate can win a national election? Looking on the recent green party posts on their subreddits, the only thing I see even close is a thread with a headline about "candidates are electable if people vote for them", where the furthest they go in the comments is a few people talking about how big a deal it would be for the party if they got 5% nationally, and a couple other people replying to say the greens won't even get 1% this year but the election is still very important because of some nonsense about incremental gains.

It feels like we've imagined a brainwashing machine that does not exist in reality, rather than admit to the existence of protest votes. Condemning protest votes means condemning protest nonvotes equally, and we'll never have sufficient information about protest nonvoters to reasonably make a claim about how they would have voted. That would severely muddy any attempts to assign blame for election results.

If you're trying to convince these voters to act differently, the way to do that would be to address the arguments they're actually making, like the incremental gains nonsense. If you're addressing arguments they haven't been making at all, then it's worth asking whether you're trying to convince someone other than them.

There's a lot of variability. We got Roto-Borola after our old cat Buddy passed. Buddy was the best pet I've ever had and I miss him with all my heart, but he was dumb as rocks, which produced some good stories.

Roto-Borola immediately showed he was a quick learner and it was immediately infuriating. He realized very quickly that if he chews on my electrical wires I'll tell him not to do that, so in a situation where he comes up to me for attention and I try to calmly explain that I'm working on something urgent for work right now and he should wait half an hour, straight to chewing on the wires so that he will have my attention. He almost never does this when he's not actively interested in redirecting my behavior. One time, he was probably a little less than a year old, I tried giving him twenty minutes of cage time to discourage the chewing and as soon as I let him out he sprinted back to chew on them again, like now it's not about making me play with him it's about punishing me for the injustice I have committed.

Currently have a makeshift setup where all the wires behind my desk are blocked off by large cardboard pieces with a tiny hole cut underneath so they can run along the floor. I've done an extremely poor engineering job on this - it works perfectly for its intended purpose of not having my wires eaten, but anytime I need to change a cable a one minute task now takes like fifteen unless I'm willing to cede ground in our battle over eating wires.

Live look at Millennials' response to Gen Z mocking their cringe memes about being better than the younger generation.

Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I'm assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I'd try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.

Older millennials absolutely terrified of the dianogas in Anoat City.

I agree with the sentiment that it's very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I'm not sure I really agree with much else you've written here. In particular:

And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.

The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn't have a place on a private tracker, that's not a problem because they're not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won't stay for long if they neglect seeding.

I'm sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won't say I endorse that, but I'm cool with it, and even if I wasn't I still don't think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.

I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I'm invested. I don't care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it's morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.

As a very stable genius, I completely agree with this.

I have one personal email (posteo, 1 euro per month) that I use for personal correspondences, and one shitty personal email I signed up for in high school that I use for anything where there's any chance it might make it to some corporate mailing list. I have the posteo address set up alongside work email to notify me when new mails come in, and the junk address I'll login through firefox like every few days (unless I'm expecting something specific) to skim and mark the most recent mail as read so I know where to start skimming next time.

For work, anything I actually need to deal with I'll mark as unread until I get around to it, because it's annoying seeing the icon show I have unread messages. Sometimes "getting around to it" does just mean putting it in a calendar or some other way of making sure I don't lose track.