Eccitaze

Or they think that the people above their station deserve those benefits--they genuinely think and support the rich getting richer is a good thing, regardless of whether they'll see any benefit themselves. It's the mirror image of the progressive mindset of voting to raise their own taxes to help the needy.

Well, aside from the obvious "make myself my fursona" bit...

I'd get rid of my ADHD, or at the very least get rid of its interaction with food and exercise. It's been such a burden, to the point where it's singlehandedly prevented me from taking up new hobbies (because I know I won't stick to them and can't afford to waste the money), kept me from focusing on new certs (because I suck at self-directed study), and it's the single biggest reason why I'm overweight. I fucking hate it. ADHD superpowers, my ass. This is a fucking debilitating disease, and even with medicine it still sucks.

Ah, so you're a literal 90s-era troll.

Yeah, that seems to be the end goal, but Goldman Sachs themselves tried using AI for a task and found it cost six times as much as paying a human.

That cost isn't going down--by any measure, AI is just getting more expensive as our only strategy for improving it seems to be "throw more compute, data, and electricity at the problem." Even new AI chips are promising increased performance but with more power draw, and everybody developing AI models seem to be taking the stance of just maximizing performance and damn everything else. So even if AI somehow delivers on its promises and replaces every white collar job, it's not going to save any actual money for corporations.

Granted, companies may be willing to eat that cost at least temporarily in order to suppress labor costs (read: pay us less), but it's not a long term solution

Yeah, I won't deny the quality has gone down, too. Marvel's biggest mistake was thinking they could keep the gravy train rolling past endgame. They SHOULD have let it rest and given the creatives some time to cook and plan a new arc, but instead they pushed forward before they were ready and are paying dearly for it.

It's the same damn mistake they made with the star wars sequel trilogy--if they had sat on it for a year or two, hashed out a coherent overarching plot, and let it cook, we would've gotten something better than "Somehow, Palpatine returned." Hell, if they needed something immediately, they could have brought in Timothy Zahn to adapt the Thrawn books. Instead they went off half-cocked and gave us a barely-coherent retread of the original trilogy.

Nah, there's definitely an element of fatigue. I used to watch superhero movies pretty religiously, even renting movies I missed before watching the new avengers flick. I even went to see Infinity War day one, and it was such a shock that I remember sitting in the car in silence on the way home (though I did cue up Snow in Summer from the NieR soundtrack... IYKYK). After Endgame, though... It was like a switch flipped. I had just watched this big, amazing payoff film that celebrated nearly a decade of cinema, had highs and lows, I watched actors and characters I had followed for years giving their goodbyes... It was a big, emotional moment, and the feeling I had afterwards was like the end of Thanksgiving dinner where you've finished your slice of pie and are enjoying the warm and fuzzy feelings. In other words, I was full.

So when Marvel kept producing more movies at the same pace as before, it was like the end of Thanksgiving dinner, except now the host is starting to bring out another pie and putting a slice in front of me, and now I'm side-eyeing it and trying to find a polite excuse to say no and go the fuck home.

Deliberate ignorance, accelerationist "if we let the fascists win it'll totally result in a communist revolution, trust me bro, you definitely won't be one of the thousands whose bones are used for the foundation" idiocy, or actual fascists trying to depress left turnout. Take your pick.

Yeah, there are so many moments I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and yell at various people while shaking their shoulders.

For the love of God, Barack, don't make fun of Trump at the White House correspondent's dinner, he'll run for president to dismantle all you've built up in revenge and HE WILL WIN.

Please, Ruth, I beg you to step down now while there's still an opportunity for you to be replaced with another liberal justice. If you don't, your legacy will be undone I'm under four years and it will herald the end of American democracy.

Please, Barack, don't let them steal a supreme court seat like this, you have to force the issue while there's still time or else you will watch the heritage foundation gloat about the second American revolution against the left while a corrupt court anoints the president as above the law of the land.

For the love of God, Biden, please run in 2016, I know you're still grieving over the death of your son, but if you don't you'll be grieving over the death of your entire country.

For the love of God, Hillary, please step aside and let Sanders be the candidate, I know you agreed with Obama that he would give you SoS in return for you running after him but the Republican propaganda machine has made you toxic.

Barack, you can't sweep this Russian interference under the rug, it's too important to ignore, please!

I beg you, Hillary, don't ignore the rust belt, your numbers are weaker than they should be there and they are too important to lose, the literal future of democracy is at stake.

For fuck's sake, Comey, don't reopen this stupid email investigation two weeks before the election, we both know there's nothing on that fucking laptop. You need to shut down the trumpy faction before they leak its existence because they are trying to interfere with the election, and if Trump wins he will reward you with a pink slip while gleefully dragging the country to a dictatorship.

This timeline could've been so easily avoided, if only one variable out of dozens was different. But here we are, with me wondering where I can even flee to in order to escape the coming dictatorship.

The hush money payments were before the election so they were still felonies. It's possible Trump wouldn't have bothered hiding them like he did if he lost, but in any case there wouldn't have been the appetite to prosecute him.

As for the coup, he absolutely would have tried it, definitely through filing lawsuits, and probably up to the same fake electors scheme and the riot, but it's debatable how far he would've gotten. Definitely not as far as he did in reality, though.

Hoo boy, it's a toughie. On the one hand, Trump would still be around. He also wouldn't be in as much legal peril as he is now (it's likely there wouldn't have been an appetite to prosecute him over the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, and the classified documents case would have never happened to begin with since he wouldn't have had access). But he almost definitely WOULD have tried to pull off another insurrection similar to Jan 6th--he was foreshadowing that he wouldn't accept the results if he lost even back in 2016, using the same language as he did in 2020 before he launched his coup attempt.

The world where Trump doesn't attempt a coup isn't very interesting, at least for this thought experiment--he slinks off, continues shitposting about Hillary on Twitter, but likely doesn't try to run again (or loses in the primary because he's a sore loser). Everyone ignores his hush money payments in the interest of "statesmanship," and at best he becomes a minor kingmaker in the party apparatus. MAGA withers on the vine, and we largely continue with the late Obama administration status quo.

The world where he attempts a coup is much more interesting. The real question is, what would have changed after the failed insurrection attempt? It's highly unlikely it would have succeeded or even gotten anywhere as close as it did, since a lot of the original plan relied on access to the levers of power (I.e. being able to withhold security to let the rioters overrun the Capitol). But how would everyone react to it long-term? In this timeline, Republicans genuinely distanced themselves from Trump and Jan 6th at first, likely out of shock over the realization that they were actually in danger and the very real fear that they could end up hurt or killed. But as the shock wore off, Republicans started shuffling back to MAGA as the propaganda machine did its work to downplay and normalize the failed coup, and they realized that their base saw Jan 6th as a good thing.

In a theoretical timeline where Trump tries a coup in 2016, it depends on how far Trump gets before he fails. If he's thwarted to the point where he doesn't (or can't) hold the rally that stormed the Capitol, then nothing really comes of it at all--it becomes a footnote in history that is only cared about by political historians, pub trivia enthusiasts, and people who like to talk about politics on the internet. If he gets to the point where he holds a rally, but the rally is prevented from interfering with the certification process (complete with provocative images of cops in riot gear swinging at MAGA rioters), it's likely that this downplaying and normalization would have been ironically amplified by virtue of the coup attempt being less successful. Without the visceral fear of hiding from rioters, Republicans would have no reason to distance themselves from the attempt, and they would almost immediately start using it as fodder to attack the new Clinton administration. In short, the hypothetical coup attempt would become another Benghazi scandal for Clinton--something that she had little real involvement in and largely wasn't her fault, but that she gets blamed for anyway. Trump, meanwhile, would remain largely in the same position as in 2015--the dominant force in the party.

Aside from that, the court wouldn't be as openly corrupt as it is now. It'd be filled by a moderate Clinton appointee if democrats have the 51 votes to abolish the filibuster for supreme court appointees (or held open by McConnell otherwise), and when RBG dies her replacement is decided by whoever wins the 2020 election. Roe v. Wade would still exist, the chevron deference would still be the law of the land, and we wouldn't have the terrifying prospect of legally sanctioned presidential death squads.

Overall, I think we would be largely in line with the status quo of 2014-2015. Not great, with a worrying trend towards fascism and an establishment largely too busy huffing their own farts to address the vast majority of problems facing us, but a LOT better than where we are right now.

Basically, X11/Xorg doesn't isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it's also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone's answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn't "let's fix Wayland" but "let's develop an extension to fix Wayland" and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won't bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.

ETA: Basically, my (layman's) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there's 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).