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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Same reason people are pissed at Biden for every handling of <insert problem here> that 100% falls within the domain of another governmental branch. Currently the executive branch is sorta Atlasing our entire government which requires them to severely overreach their powers opening them up to checks and balances by the other highly sabotaged branches that both seemingly wish to force our entire government to accomplish nothing. The most publicized example of this is three student loan forgiveness package that Biden’s administration tried to pass that got blocked, though there are lots of other examples.

    The reality is that the executive branch as a whole has very little long term reach and we need to be pressuring Congress to do literally anything at all. The only time I’m going to look at Biden and say “this is his fault” is when I see Congress pass a bill doing something like sending an aid package to Gaza and/or Ukraine, only to have him refuse to sign. Which I suspect he’d actually just sign something like that through. We’ll never know for sure because two of our federal branches are too busy playing something vaguely resembling a game of football where the ball is a 50 lb boulder and everyone’s screaming that they keep subbing their toes on on it.



  • Mostly out of curiosity, what exactly makes Biden an evil in your mind? If it’s the middle east what, exactly do you want him to do? The President doesn’t possess the power to unilaterally declare war, all be can really do us shout at Israel to stop and strongly encourage Congress to do… Well anything at all.

    What would make Biden a real evil, at least in my mind is if we had a functional legislative branch and he was vetoing every piece of aid they passed to those countries, or if he was overreaching with his executive orders to do things that blatantly belong to another branch of our government. Guess what Trump would do.

    The only time the President really has much power is if they have a Congress that’s aligned with their goals, and in the current cycle everything Biden has tried to do has been shot down by one of the other two braches. I suspect though, that if Congress passed an aid package to Ukraine or Palestine, Biden would not obstruct.

    If it’s because Bernie got shafted by the DNC and now we have Biden, I personally think given how our government works, Bernie can do way more good in the Senate than he could ever do as a president, and we need to load Congress up with as many people who idealistically align with him or at least, don’t conflict and are willing to actually run our government.


  • Still has a lot of the same underlying issues discord has. It’s not indexable being the biggest. The reality is that services like stack overflow or an issue tracker like bugzilla, or your local git services issues section or discussion section, hell even something like discourse or even mailing lists, just work better. If someone made an im service that could be indexed by search engines and the like, now we’d be talking. Opensorce design and discussion doesn’t really benefit that much from closed ecosystems and end to end encryption in most cases.

    I guess though at least with matrix someone could make a service that acts as a client and indexes content from a list of channels or something…

    Discord, matrix, slack and telegram are where documentation goes to die in the current state of things though.




  • Holy crap no. I’m saying Biden has been actively good (to my surprise, but I digress) and to not want to vote for him “being the lesser of two evils” shows a disconnect from reality on par with the current state of the Republican everything.

    A huge chunk of that ‘good’ never coming to light is a combination of media just never talking about it, and conservatives and regressives in Congress actively blocking his efforts (the most well known instance of this being the student loan debt forgiveness)

    This thread is about people who refuse to vote for biden because he is the lesser of two scrolls, my original point was that giving people retoric like “a vote not for Biden is a vote for Trump” is a bad faith argument, and using more grounded statements like “voting for Biden is the best way to ensure we don’t get another term of Trump.”

    Meanwhile it’s also with pointing out to the third party people who refuse to vote for Biden as the lesser of two evils that Biden is in fact not even an evil, and that he actively tried to do a lot of good. If we can stack congress with same congress people who have better things to given than people’s genitals age bedrooms and some decent bills make their way across his desk, he’s probably not going to veto them.

    Some of the people using this argument are probably Bernie bros who are butthurt over Bernie stepping down in 2020 and the DNCs antics back in 2016. It’s probably worth mentioning that right now Bernie can do a lot more good in the Senate than he can in the oval office, since we have a president who wouldn’t block his policies. If Trump or Haley get into office that’s not going to be the case and refusing to vote for Biden over that hurts their favorite politicians agenda a lot.


  • Sorry for the double post, but I forgot to mention that the above statement is a much better argument AND is mathematically provable using the same method I used above (any vote not for candidate A becomes a -1 or a -2.)

    It’s a much better statement to use when trying to sway voter opinion.

    Also definitely the more important point I’m making above is that Biden is NOT the lesser of two evils. The moves he’s made have not been the biggest or the best but a lot of that’s in part because he needs a solid base of good Congress people working alongside him to accomplish any real progress on any of the initiatives he’s been pushing. The President does not make laws, though having the correct President in office does lower the bar at getting good laws passed. If a good law never crosses his desk because we have a bunch of regressives in office like we currently do, not a lot it’s going to happen.




  • Oh good, it’s this argument again. I’ve really never heard a statement that is more damaging to a conversation with an intent to sway votership than this one.

    A vote for candidate C is not a vote for candidate B, but for the sake of the argument let’s assume it is. It’s possible to model an election using game theory, and it can be done in a few different ways. First I’m going to try is a 1 dimensional approach from the perspective of candidate A. A vote for candidate A is worth 1 point. A vote for candidate B is worth -1 point. A vote for any other candidate is worth 0 points. This is actually a fairly accurate model of how a winner takes all election system works. I’ll also play it from candidate B’s perspective to illustrate something.

    There are 300 votes for candidate A There are 340 votes for candidate B There are 20 votes for candidate C from constituents who claim to be from party A There are 60 votes for candidate C from constituents who claim to be from party b

    Candidate A: -40 Candidate B: 40

    Interestingly, people who voted for candidate C do not show up in the final results at all and they hurt/helped each candidate equally. The only people whose votes actually had any real bearing on the election in this model were the people who turned out to vote for candidates A and B. I’ll let people draw their own conclusions from this thought experiment.

    The real argument to make here however is that Biden is not the lesser of two evils and has in fact done a lot of good for the country in his term, or at least attempted to. The more important thing then voting for Biden is that people show up with an intent to put as many good senators and representatives in office as possible each election until we can get enough people in office to allow them presidential agenda to actually be able to do anything. Also to vote in your local elections for similar reasons.



  • They also introduce their own share of issues like increased road wear due to weight and environmental costs from the mining of rare metals like cobalt and lithium.

    With the fact that vehicle size is generally trending towards larger, at least stateside; we’re looking at a situation where those shiny electric pick up trucks that need a battery that’s four to eight times larger than a compacts or sedans battery are going to require further scaling of rare metal mining and are going to result in vehicles that blow way past the weight of anything our roads were designed to handle. Public transit is just far more sustainable. Trains can be hooked directly to a grid so no ridiculously heavy battery, buses carry the same number of people on a road that it would take… Let’s be generous… 30 cars, so even if they were using a cell larger than a pick up truck, their wear would be far lower than the 30 or so cars they could replace.

    Of course the issue with America is we’ve got bigger fish to fry like boys who kiss boys and people who want to fuck without having kids.