EldritchFemininity

I never said otherwise. I said that the economy does better under Dems than Republicans. That doesn’t mean that it’s the way things should be done, just that under Dems jobs are added to the economy rather than lost and the national debt grows at a slower rate than under Republicans. Between the two, the economy objectively does better under Dems.

I simply was saying that the “Biden bad because brown people and the economy broke because woke” narrative is a farce no matter how you look at it.

Your timescale is skewed. You’re either young, pushing a narrative, or both, so let me describe how things look historically from a sample size that actually matters. 2 presidents is not a big sample size.

Starting in the 80s, the American economy began to decline and the national debt began to rise under Reagan and politicians like him - trickle down economics had begun. In the late 90s, a president balanced the budget and actually began reducing the national debt (by cutting funding to social security and other less than stellar actions). That would be Clinton. And then along came Bush Jr and the post 9/11 forever war in the Middle East. Ever since the start of the Iraq war, the national debt has risen like an ICBM. I remember when news channels talked with disbelief about Bush possibly doubling the national debt within a year.

So it’s 2008, Bush just finished up his second term, and hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything in the 2008 depression (except for Bush’s rich friends. They got government bailouts and made bank buying up all the poor people’s houses). So, what now? Now, a black man who runs on a campaign of changing things for the better wins the election in a landslide, and tries to do most of what he promised. The economy sees large amounts of growth and jobs added, and the spiraling of the national debt slows down. However, Republicans vow to never let a black man do anything in the White House and the Democrats capitulate before the fight ever starts, so Obama is hamstrung and despite trying, ends up being forced by Republicans shutting down the government to not fulfill any of his campaign promises in his two terms (except for installing a healthcare system that Republicans fought tooth and nail against because it makes it illegal for health insurance companies to kick cancer patients off their health insurance and then refuse to cover them for having a preexisting condition: cancer).

Now it’s 2016 and a man who ran on a campaign of undoing everything the black man before him did and the promise of kicking out all the politicians that he’s been friends with since his big business days in the 80s has been elected. And what does he do? He spends the first 2 years largely going line by line and undoing every single thing that the black man did while in office, and then spends the next 2 years mostly giving tax breaks and government money to the friends he said he would kick out and “drain the swamp” while the national debt once again rises like a tide in a swamp and the economy stagnates. Then 2019 hits and the economy collapses again under a worldwide pandemic, just a month after he got rid of the office the black man set up to prevent a pandemic.

So now it’s 2020 and the country has just elected the old guy who was the black guy’s right hand man. He campaigned on not rocking the boat and keeping the course. Nothing exciting, but we’ll see what happens. True to form, 4 years of stabilization happen. The debt slows down, the economy sees jobs come back, and things are looking a little more calm.

Then, in 2025 the old guy who was so upset about the black guy comes back and his swampy friends are right behind him. The debt begins to balloon and the economy starts to shudder under the weight of global tariffs and worldwide uncertainty of a possible trade war against friend and foe alike. And that’s just in the first 3 months of the year.

Tl;dr: the economy consistently grows under democrat presidents and the national debt slows down. Under Republicans, the economy shrinks and the debt skyrockets. This stays fairly consistent the farther back you go, but Reagan is an important point in this because he started trickle down economics and showed the Republicans that big government can be good for them, too, so long as they hold the purse strings, and Bush is the other important point because he’s the tipping point for when the debt went from manageable to using a sink to try to put out a burning building.

makes me wonder if people will go with whatever works well enough and for the least amount of effort.

This has always been the case. People want something that just works right out of the box, and familiarity will keep a lot of people from considering anything else.

I’ve been talking for a long time now with a friend of mine about how sick we are of Windows, and more recently about how I’m planning on installing Linux on a spare HDD I have before making the commitment to getting rid of Windows entirely, and he’s decided to go to 11 despite hating it because he’s afraid of trying something new and having to learn a new system.

And it’s not just a computer thing. People can and will hurt themselves by repeating the same mistakes because it’s the familiar habit and doing something new - even if it’s for your own good - is scarier. Been there, done that, plenty of times.

Men may not like it, but this is the ideal IT body.

Why would you smear Charlie like this? He died protecting our 2nd amendment rights, a noble sacrifice just like he said we need, and by showing any empathy, you’re doing a lot of damage.

The unicorn also has forward-facing eyes like the horses in Skyrim, implying that the unicorn is a predator.

even windows added support a year ago or so supposedly

You answered your own question. I spent years playing the game of “This image is a JPEG. Will the website force me to save it in a format that can’t be opened by the basic Windows photo viewer, or will it actually be a JPEG when I download it?”

You’d be surprised how often it would turn out to be the former rather than the latter.

While true, with hand drawn animation it’s slightly different as not every frame is drawn (usually). Disney films looked so good because they were done “on the two’s” instead of the industry standard of “on the three’s” - meaning that Disney films had a drawn frame for every 2 fps instead of every 3, or 12 drawn frames per second instead of the normal 8. Your brain interpolates the rest of the between frames, but this is why Disney looks so much more smooth.

Another great example is Akira, which was done on the 1’s and 2’s. That it has 12 to 24 hand drawn frames per second makes the visual quality difference really visible when compared to other movies.

No, you’re absolutely right. Discord is incredibly impermanent. Besides the lack of being able to search for things or split conversations into separate threads for every topic because it’s a chat tool, not a forum, as soon as a server disappears, everything hosted on that server goes as well (as far as end users are concerned. I’m sure Discord can pull stuff from their backend).

We need a return of niche forum communities and the like for the sake of the preservation of information.

You’re thinking of Gandalf Big Naturals. Easy mistake to make.

Here’s a fun one: Anemoia - nostalgia for a time you never experienced (from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

Air quality is getting worse everywhere thanks to wildfires and the like, but my point was that you don’t look at a city like NYC or Boston and see an orange haze from the smog and leaded gasoline emissions anymore.

The biggest issues with cities largely come down to cars, and having grown up in a summer beach hotspot, I can tell you that it can be just as bad out in the countryside. From noise pollution to emissions to traffic, you can largely thank cars for all of it. Road noise is actually one of the loudest things in a city. In places that have limited access to cars, you can immediately tell the difference.

The homelessness epidemic is a problem everywhere in the US. You just notice it in cities because of the population density.

Cape Cod, the famous summer vacation hotspot south of Boston, has the highest rates of drug addiction and homelessness in the entire state. The same is largely true of any vacation area, actually. They often have the highest rates in their state due to high CoL and poor job opportunities outside of low wage jobs in the tourism industry (all of which are seasonal jobs as well, meaning they close when the tourists leave).

But out of sight, out of mind.

Smog hasn’t been a problem in US cities since like the 60s…

The King James version was also written to specifically reword the Bible to include as many references to a monarchy as possible in the hopes of propagandizing the population during a time when kings were losing their heads at an alarming rate in Europe.

“If God truly does exist, he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.”

Thomas Jefferson

50% of the Founding Fathers were agnostic or atheist. My question is: why does she hate America?

In the end, possibly the one good thing to come out of Overwatch.

The whole reason that the steam engine took off was because they did the opposite. It’s the same reason that you don’t hear people complaining about the AI used to spot cancer or find stars. They changed workflow, but they didn’t negatively disrupt it. They made it easier to do more.

People hate AI the same way that they hate touch screens in cars. They actively make things more difficult. Not only are car manufacturers being required by law to bring back physical controls for things like the A/C because the lack of a physical knob or dial means that you have to take your eyes off the road to change something on a screen, the last time I was buying a car I was talking to the guy at the dealership about how I was limiting the model years I wanted to look at to those before the 16+ inch screens became common, and he said that the vast majority of people coming in had similar sentiments - the screens are just generally unpopular, especially because of how big they’ve become. They’re unwieldy, unintuitive, and require too much concentration to use when actually driving.

Google’s AI has been found to be wrong 60% of the time - even frequently making up “facts” that directly contradict the works that it cites as sources. They hate that trying to find an accurate picture of a penguin or whatever has become so difficult because image search tools are filled with AI generated images that range from slightly off to completely inaccurate. They hate that refrigerators now come with an AI assistant in them. Something like 80% of users in a study either actively disliked the AI features on their phones or said they find them useless.

The current AI trend is a Dutch Tulip bubble, or more accurately, a solution to the problem of people being paid that investors and c suites want crammed into everything in order to justify the money spent.

Medical malpractice is a huge issue for LGBT people - especially trans people who require specific care and are therefore much easier to spot. It’s honestly a big issue in the sciences in general, and it’s definitely not a new issue, but more likely against specific groups. Women are much more likely to have to be their own advocates to get proper care, often being denied pain medication, told that they’re just making up their symptoms, or having their agency denied or choice of treatment being deferred to their husbands (generally when it comes to things that might affect sex, such as surgeries to constrict the vagina after giving birth or having their uterus removed due to medical issues).

And it’s not just that trans people often have to understand HRT at a doctorate level in order to fight for their right to the proper care and treatment that they deserve. I have read plenty of stories of trans people being denied care by bigoted healthcare workers - even a case of a woman in New York who only found out she had an aggressive form of cancer after the technician who diagnosed her tests called her to ask her how her chemo was going. Her doctor simply never told her the diagnosis and the only reason that she’s still alive is because of that technician who made sure that she got proper treatment after the shock of hearing that she didn’t even know that she had cancer.

Bias affects medicine all the way up the chain, from how nurses treat you to what gets taught in schools and even what fields get research funding. I taught my therapist pretty much everything he knows about transgender people, for example - because he’s older and they didn’t teach about trans people. And I have no qualifications in the field other than being trans and therefore having to teach myself to ensure I get proper care. Many doctors don’t know about trans specific medical care despite HRT starting to be researched in the 1920s in Germany (and only reappearing at the end of the 20th century after the Nazis burnt all the research). The medical field is taught based on the white body of a specific weight, which leaves out the differences in care that black people and people above or below that weight require. We only really started looking into what exactly female ejaculate is in the past 30 years or so. AIDS research was denied funding by the US government for at least a year while roughly 120 Americans died of AIDS every day, during which time all bottled medication was pulled from stores and the safety seal was developed and implemented over the course of 3 months because somebody poisoned a couple of bottles of Advil with cyanide.

It’s not a new issue, but it’s become more prevalent in recent years as people like the student above have become emboldened by recent events - like the rulings that say that doctors don’t have to treat certain people if it would “violate their religious beliefs.”

Call it what it is: nationalism. I’ve been weirded out by it since I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in elementary school.

Fun fact: the pledge was created as part of a campaign to sell more flags to schools.