Carl

Yeah, and this is why being an informed voter is so difficult. There was one initiative on my ballot that was worded like “create funding for programs to reduce homelessness.” Sounds nice, right? Sounds progressive? Sounds like something I’d want, for sure!

After googling it, it was basically just giving tons of money to cops… So that the cops can buy new tactical gear, to march into homeless camps like jackboots and beat the shit out of homeless people while torching all of their stuff. But sure, it’s “reducing homelessness.” I guess if we tear down the homeless camps and violently chase all of the homeless people out of town, there are no more homeless people? That’s how it works, right?

It would require capturing a zygote.

Did you mean capturing a gamete? As in, a viable sperm cell or egg? Which proves that the individual is biologically capable of producing those gametes, which means they are capable of producing viable offspring?

Because capturing a zygote (a viable egg that has been successfully fertilized by a viable sperm cell, but hasn’t yet implanted itself on the uterine wall to become an embryo) would require a woman to have a fertilized egg. And I feel like requiring impregnation just to confirm sex is a little… Impractical?

It would mean positively identifying males would be impossible, because they’re not capable of carrying a zygote at all. That that’s before we even get into the whole “in order to confirm an elementary school girl is biologically female so she can compete, the doctor would first need to impregnate her to create a zygote” thing.

Probably the same way Unity feels about their game engine being associated with awful low budget shovelware games. The game engine was popular with low budget games because you can use the engine for free… But you have to display the “Made with Unity” splash screen for a few seconds as your game boots up. And notably, you can pay a licensing fee to remove that splash screen requirement. Basically the drug dealer special: Get the newbie game devs familiar with the engine for free, then charge the publishers to use the engine that their employees all already know.

The issue (which Unity didn’t initially foresee when they wrote their licensing terms) is that all of the shovelware games used Unity for free, and all of them had the big “Made with Unity” splash. So Unity very quickly became associated with super low effort shovelware games.

9 year old me (casually scrolling on 4chan) would agree. I still remember accidentally stumbling across my first beheading video. The early (largely unmoderated) internet was like the Wild West.

Sure, but OP was asking for curated collections, and the above commenter pointed at MAM as an example. And MAM is specifically purging their curated collections, so I thought it was funny that MAM was the go-to response.

Texas has been red for over three decades. The state was a key part of the Southern Strategy, because packing the 5th circuit court of appeals with conservative judges was a big part in overthrowing longstanding liberal legislation.

Texas provides a direct pipeline to the 5th circuit, and they also needed to pack a local district court too. So all of the legislation they hate can get litigated in that district court, seen by a batshit crazy conservative judge, and get a batshit crazy conservative ruling. And then any appeals will go to the 5th circuit court of appeals, where it will land in front of another batshit crazy federal judge. And when that batshit crazy federal judge makes a batshit crazy ruling, it goes into effect nationwide unless the SCOTUS overturns it.

Seriously, basically every time you see some kind of “federal judge overturns the every person gets a free puppy and our farts all magically smell like cotton candy law, and reinstates the livestream puppies getting fed into the Puppy Masher 9000 and we all have uncontrollable diarrhea law instead” type of news story, it’s coming out of the 5th circuit court of appeals.

Texas got hit hard by conservative propaganda as a result, because it has been instrumental as a weapon for conservatives to overturn liberal legislation. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of progress.

But I don’t need to share those credentials with anyone.

Yeah, I like BitWarden because it makes sharing passwords very easy. My wife and I have a few shared accounts, and have a family vault set up. So anything we want to share just gets transferred into the family vault, and we can both easily access it. And since it even supports TOTP, we can have those directly on the shared accounts without needing to bug each other with the “hey I’m trying to log into {x}, send me your Google Authenticator code” song and dance.

MAM has had multiple announcements about it posted on their home page.

Isn’t MAM specifically purging their collections soon? I just thought it was funny that you used MAM as the example, because they’re planning on removing their collections.

This is the real crux of the issue. Blanket pardons shouldn’t be a thing. If you want to pardon someone, it should be specific. Which crimes? Where? When? Who was victimized? Who else was involved? What was the outcome of the crime?

The SCOTUS has already ruled in Burdick v. US that accepting a pardon requires admitting guilt of the crime you’re being pardoned of. The wording of the ruling was that a pardon carries “an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.” The SCOTUS has consistently held that a pardon does not overturn a guilty conviction. Instead, it removes the punishment for the crime. You’re still unequivocally guilty after a pardon.

It shouldn’t be some sort of “I pardon you for waves arms in air vaguely” power, because that turns the whole “needing to admit guilt” part into a sly wink wink elbow nudge situation. It puts the person’s crimes in a quantum Schrödinger state. The person accepting a vague pardon is inarguably guilty of something, because they admitted guilt when they accepted the pardon. But the court doesn’t know what they’ve admitted to until a prosecutor tries to indict them, and they go “oh no you can’t prosecute me, I was pardoned.”

Exactly. It already reached the conservative eyes that it needed to reach, to stoke conservative fear and anger. They don’t care if liberals get upset about their posting, because the posts weren’t meant for liberal audiences.

Exactly this. It’s amazing how we start seeing the “both parties” rhetoric right around election seasons. But then they vanish afterwards, when they help get the vile fucks elected. It’s honestly astounding how people see clear evidence of the orange slimeball hurting children, and go “oh but the other side is just better at hiding it, so I might as well keep voting for the orange slimeball instead.” It’s the most asinine, cretinous, sophomoric line of reasoning imaginable.

While I agree, Libertarians are a very specific breed of conservative.

Grabbing them by the pussy doesn’t mean restricting yourself to adult pussy.

Same vibe as the dudes who make a huge deal about girls turning 18. They’re really just saying “I would definitely go younger if I wasn’t afraid of getting shanked in prison.”

Honestly? Make him do it. Take him up on the offer, and make him be the president who vetoed some of the most popular legislation in history. Don’t stop putting popular bills on his desk. Make it extremely clear that republicans are the reason nothing is getting done. Fucking weaponize their obstructionist BS, instead of simply rolling over and claiming there’s nothing to do about it.

They initially claimed it was to poison AI scrapers. That was quickly disproven though, and shown to be ineffective. Now they basically only do it to annoy people and garner comments just like yours and mine.

Yup, this current administration would 100% take a page out of Nixon’s playbook and plant listening devices everywhere.

Yeah, as long as your firewall is properly hardened and up to date.

But also, 4 of those 6 won’t bother to fucking vote.

The “try to hack us to see if we’re vulnerable” part is 100% standard practice for security audits. It’s called penetration testing, and there is an entire industry set up around the idea of legally breaking into secure facilities, just to see if their security is working. It is healthy, because it can be a valuable tool for finding major security flaws.

The massive glaring issue is the fact that they asked the penetration testers to hide their results, and not alert the agencies involved. The entire point of a penetration test is to see if attackers can get in so that you can fix the issues they used to breach your facility. If the penetration testers aren’t sharing their results, it’s just fucking breaking and entering to tamper with voting machines. Asking the penetration testers to hide their results is like asking a surgeon to pull out a perfectly healthy organ.

At least the security company noticed this, and had the ethics to actually come forward about it.