vonbaronhans

@vonbaronhans@midwest.social

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State Department official resigns after Biden administration says Israel not blocking Gaza aid (www.middleeasteye.net)

A career State Department official resigned from her post on Tuesday, saying she could no longer work for the Biden administration after it released a report concluding that Israel was not preventing the flow of aid to Gaza....

vonbaronhans,

Oh they’ll blame all the demographics they can. The youths. “Progressives”. I doubt they’d go so far as to blame “wokeism” but I imagine some other made up demographic would apparate.

I mean I’m voting Biden in the fall, swing state and all. But still, The DNC needs a lot of overhaul for sure.

vonbaronhans,

I’d suggest picking other issues to discuss where the average progressive/leftie would agree with the direction of the Democrats, esp where a Trump win would likely mean a severe worsening. The right to bodily autonomy, LGBT+ rights, student loan forgiveness, progressive tax brackets (that may be a stretch for importance to the morally disaffected, but still), unions. Democrats may not be the best on those topics, but they at least move things a couple ticks in the right direction in the face of the alternative, which would be a very fast reversal of those gains (see recent supreme court rulings for evidence of that).

Just my $.02

vonbaronhans,

Genuine question. If you lived in a swing state for this election, who would you vote for?

vonbaronhans,

Cool cool cool. I also would rather vote 3rd party, but I’m in a swing state so. Yeah.

vonbaronhans,

DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.

Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.

vonbaronhans,

I used Bing by default for several months just because that’s what my work laptop’s browser had for default.

I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I’d find something useful on the first page of results.

vonbaronhans,

Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.

vonbaronhans,

It’s unfortunately still far more useful than other search engines, in my experience anyway. I haven’t yet tried the paid search engine someone pointed out to me recently, Kagi, I think.

But given the cost of Kagi’s tiers based on number of searches, it would have to be MUCH more useful to me than Google to really make it feel worth it.

vonbaronhans,

Like it or not, people are interested in celebrities. I wouldn’t call that irrelevant in the attention economy.

vonbaronhans,

The “people want to hear about celebrities” part is relevant to the fact that interests drive a big part of the audience to the site. Meaning, you and I both want celebrities to be off Twitter because if we can convince them to go elsewhere, that would be an effective way to cripple Twitter.

Complaining that people like celebrities when they’re not “relevant to your daily life” doesn’t really do anything to further your goals. It just makes you sound like an asshole who isn’t relatable to the kind of people that we want to listen to us.

vonbaronhans,

Inkscape is for vector art, yeah. Great for design, not for like, painting.

Krita is pretty great for a free digital art app. But I used it for about a year and could never quite get used to it. I recently went back to Clip Studio Paint (with my perpetual license they do still honor), and my experience just improved so much. It was like… ah, yes, an art program that clearly paid people to specifically make the UI easier to use for non-programmers, what an underrated feature.

vonbaronhans,

I know Google search has gone down the shitter… but it’s still far and away the most useful search engine I use. Every now and then I try to use bing or ddg or whatever, and they waste so much of my goddamn time I just run the same search in Google and get something usable on the first page of results, even with all the kludge.

At this point I’d rather pay for a search engine if it meant better searching and no ads.

vonbaronhans,

Kagi, you say.

vonbaronhans,

Ah, yes, a political party that spends millions and millions of dollars and countless labor hours running campaigns really wants to lose the election.

Biden et al may not do everything we want, but it’s ignorant to suggest they aren’t at least trying to change some things.

Devout Christian Mike Johnson shows up to hush money trial to defend a guy accused of cheating on his wife with a porn star (www.vanityfair.com)

House Speaker Mike Johnson describes himself as a Christian before anything else. He has said his “faith informs everything I do.” He has told people curious about his views to “pick up a Bible.” His wife reportedly runs a counseling service whose operating agreement, which he himself notarized, states, “We believe and...

vonbaronhans,

Don’t think I’ve seen “univocal” before. Interesting.

vonbaronhans,

Cash has an identifier on it, but unlike a check that identifier doesn’t identify you.

vonbaronhans,

I don’t think there really can be a long term solution for this sort of thing. I think we just have to block and such as they pop up, defederate if a threshold is crossed. I dunno.

vonbaronhans,

This reminds me of Japan. I’ve not confirmed this myself, but it jives with my understanding of the culture. Binary trans people are generally less ‘disruptive’ to society and less of a perceived ‘problem’ to the mainstream because hey we can fit you into a box and its associated social roles. They really like their boxes and roles. But if you are queer in other more visible ways, like gay people trying to get married or be accepted socially, then that gets frowned upon for upsetting the apple cart.

vonbaronhans,

Yeah, but tax can always be figured into the presented price of things if businesses are required to do so.

That’s pretty much the point of this type of legislation. Of course you need legislators who, y’know, vote to legislate in this way.

vonbaronhans,

That’s what I was thinking. Wasn’t that the point?

vonbaronhans,

The good news is, this sort of thing doesn’t reach the vast majority of Americans, since most of us aren’t hyper online, and definitely not on Twitter.

The bad news is, this rhetoric seems popular (from what I hear) on Tiktok, where the youths are. And if the youths don’t vote for Biden as much as we need, then yeah we’re boned.

vonbaronhans,

Huh. Let women into the Freemasons, I guess?

vonbaronhans,

I see a little blue trashcan next to their comment… but I can still see the comment. I do not know what to make of that.

vonbaronhans,

And that, everybody, is literally not the correct usage of “enshittification”.

Jk, but for real though, it’s not a direct synonym for “degraded” or “gets worse”. It’s more specific than that.

Plus, “literally” now literally has an alternative definition in the dictionary meaning “figuratively”. So y’know, maybe get over the needless linguistic prescriptivism.

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