Developer and refugee from Reddit

  • 2 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Ethically, if not legally, this is terrible, as are all other steps Microsoft has taken to force ads onto your computer.

    Seriously, think about it. You own the hardware, right? And the OS is present to run the hardware, right? To do that, it needs to be able to perform various tasks without your specific approval, and that’s fine, but using your bandwidth to download advertisements in the background, then using your computing cycles to force them in front of your eyes regardless of what you’re using the computer for, is awfully questionable. I would go so far as to say it’s a form of theft.

    And no, ads on websites aren’t comparable. You, the user, are actively opting to view a web page that carries ads. You are choosing to grant them access to your eyeballs and the resources used by your browser. But nobody is actively seeking to view ads through their operating systems, and they don’t get anything in return (such as the content you went to that website for).





  • Yeah yeah I’ve heard it all before - but by this logic, every dollar you don’t donate to Biden is a dollar donated to Trump. Every hour you don’t spend volunteering for Biden is an hour you volunteer for Trump. There’s no difference. Either you do everything you can to help Biden beat Trump or you are the reason Trump gets elected. This “if you’re not with us you’re with the enemy” cult shit is logically inconsistent and isn’t going to work on me anymore.

    Bullshit. What the actual fuck is that response? There’s a ton of difference. We don’t have FPTP lives, where your only options are “do something that helps Biden” and “do something that helps Trump.” FPTP only applies to voting itself. It’s fucking bizarre to make the analogies you’re making. They don’t work at all.

    Fuck that. The only people who should be blamed for Trump getting elected are the people who vote for him.

    Ideally? Sure. But shit in one hand, put your ideals in the other, see which one fills up faster. Unfortunately - and I really do mean that - our election system is a bunch of antiquated bullshit that guarantees whoever gets a plurality of votes wins, and if you don’t want fascists winning, you vote for the non-fascist who can get that plurality. To fix that, push for RC voting at the state level.

    I’m a trans woman and an open communist, they’ll probably try to fucking kill me in a “conversion therapy” death camp.

    And yet you’re voting in a way that helps the ones who want to kill people like you - and people like my trans son. Very little in life is a zero-sum game, but FPTP elections are. In those, anything that isn’t a vote for the person who can win empowers the asshole who wants you dead because of who you are.

    But you know what? If Democrats win I just get to die slower; do I get to die in nuclear Armageddon because of brinkmanship with China and Russia, or do I die when climate change destroys our habitat, or do I just work for the rest of my life until I die at work? No matter which party wins, as a working class woman my life has no value and no hope. Nothing will fundamentally change.

    What Democrats are you looking at?!? Russia’s nuclear threats are empty, China doesn’t want nuclear war either, and Democrats recently pushed through the largest environmental package ever. They’re not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but you’re behaving like they’re Republican-lite, when they’re demonstrably not.

    I can no longer be bullied or terrified into voting for my oppressors, just because they happen to be the lesser of two evils.

    I’m not trying to bully or terrify you. I just want you to think about my kids, and what kind of world they’ll grow up in if guys like Donald fucking Trump cement their grips on power.


  • Eat my ass.

    Nah.

    I don’t even think my vote matters. I literally just want to make Democrats mad. Nyaa nyaa~

    Like I said: Trump supporter.

    Whether you like it or not - and I’m sure you don’t - any vote for a third party in a state that doesn’t have Ranked Choice (RC) voting is a vote for the guy you hate the most. And if that irks you, take it up with MATH, because that’s what you’re fighting against.

    Let’s say you’ve got two major parties, the Kissing Puppies party and the Kicking Puppies party. Along comes a third party, Snuggling Puppies. Now let’s say in an election, the Kickers get 33.4% of the vote, the Kissers get 33.39% of the vote, and the Snugglers get 33.21% of the vote. Well, guess what? If you live in a state with First Past the Post (FPTP) voting, the Kickers just won.

    So yeah. Trump supporter. Because that’s what you’ll get if enough people switch from voting Dem to voting Green (or whatever) in FPTP elections, a Trump second term. You are the Republican party’s favorite “queermunist,” because they understand math.

    Maybe you can afford to be that. I can’t. I have two kids, both LGBTQ+, and I have to look out for them, which means doing everything I possibly can to ensure Donald Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office again.


  • Yeah, I’ll take my lumps. I fucked up. Had both primaries open in different tabs, mixed them up, along with a news story about the app (it was developed in 2016, but you are right that it was used in 2020).

    Still, gotta disagree with you on this:

    When the entire DNC covertly coordinates together in a strategy to stop a single candidate, it’s a fix. That’s not a strategy that any candidate could ever use, that’s the whole Party working together to stop an outsider.

    That’s not what happened. A bunch of candidates who had no chance dropped out when they were polling at negligible levels of support. It’s not like they suddenly added huge percentages of support to Biden.

    And it’s why I’m voting for Cornell West. The Democratic Party is not the path to socialism, we can not ever change it from the inside… I mean the Green Party isn’t a path to socialism either, but at least it pisses off Democrats

    Ah. So you’re a Trump supporter. Got it.


  • You’re getting the 2016 and 2020 primaries confused. The “Shadow App” thing happened in 2016. And it didn’t give Iowa to a “complete nobody,” but to Pete Buttigieg. Biden didn’t even run in 2016, and the app for reporting vote totals wasn’t used in 2020.

    Furthermore, you just described strategy, not a “fix.” If the centrists coalescing behind Biden had the numbers to win, that means Bernie didn’t. And he might have, if young people had registered as Democrats and voted. But they didn’t.


  • Please describe the “fix” and how it would have been effective if young people had showed up to vote in the primaries for Bernie.

    The problem here is that most states don’t allow people who aren’t registered as a member of a party to vote in that party’s primaries. And Bernie attracted a lot of attention from independent young people who didn’t want to affiliate with the Democratic party.

    Like it or not, that independence bit them in the ass, because they could rally and chant and protest and send money to his campaign, but they couldn’t vote. Meanwhile, more pragmatically-minded people who knew they couldn’t vote in primaries without being registered as Democrats all lined up behind Biden, registered, and voted.

    It didn’t thrill me. Biden was last on my list, and my preferred candidate was Elizabeth Warren. Bernie was #2 on my list. But when I talked to my pro-Bernie friends, I knew - and so did they - that Biden was going to win, because his supporters registered and turned out to vote.

    Since then, young people have clearly smartened up and recognized the same problem. They’re showing up to vote in every election, and it’s causing Democrats to overperform and beat the polls. I absolutely love to see that.