Thrashy

joined 2 years ago
[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

To play devil's advocate, when Social Security was established (bringing with it the concept of a "retirement age"), the age of eligibility was deliberately set such that less than half of Americans would live long enough to draw on it. The clear expectation was that you would work until you couldn't anymore.

That said, in an era when changes in life expectancy are starting to take on a K-shaped distribution and labor force participation has been on a long steady decline, tying governmental income support to age and employment duration is becoming distributionally regressive. I'd much rather have some sort of UBI system that everyone can benefit from.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I believe her chief aide is one of Pelosi's children, and people read into that manipulation by Nancy herself -- usually along the lines of "she's propping up Feinstein to keep out a progressive replacement!"

Feinstein belongs in a memory care ward rather than the Senate, but it doesn't take nefarious scheming by everyone's favorite bogeywoman to explain a cantankerous dementia patient refusing to accept their limitations and step away from something that they find comfortable and familiar.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 48 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

As always, the radical flank is perfectly happy to leave unimportant issues like "can we help people in small ways now even if helping them in the bigger ways we'd prefer isn't achievable within the limits of our current democratic system?" And "how do we stop the right-wing fascist takeover of the country?" by the wayside order to focus on the far more critical problem of enforcing maximal ideological purity.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

As a corollary, should tweeting on The-Platform-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter be tested to exclusively as X-ing? Just to rub it in?

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Because, frustratingly, Biden isn't the sort of LBJ-esque power player who can haul miserable DINOs like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into the Oval Office to threaten them with political death unless they fall into line with his agenda. The fact of the matter is that just like in Obama's first term, Democrats really only had control of Congress for two years, and by a margin so slim that they needed unanimity to actually advance rules changes in the Senate, let alone legislation. That meant that Biden's entire agenda was bottlenecked by two of the most worthless assholes in the whole party, people who are definitely guilty of the short-sighted political gamesmanship that you want to ascribe to the entire party. Their obstructionism meant that, because of Senate rules, there's only one chance or year to pass major legislation, and even then it has to ostensibly be budget-related.

Despite all that, Biden and the rest of the Democrats did manage to get major legislation on climate enacted, in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Was it the whole Green New Deal? No, Manchin the coal baron wasn't going to vote for that. But it's still major change in a positive direction. Your frustration that there hasn't been more is misdirected at the party generally, when it should be aimed at two senators in particular -- and the solution to that is not to throw up your hands and declare "both sides are the same!" It's to get out the vote for more progressive legislators to make those assholes politically irrelevant.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think this is a more cynical view than can be supported by facts in evidence. For sure, in Ye Olden Days when the parties weren't actually all that far apart, there was some level of building up a bogeyman to get out the base while everybody was friendly behind closed doors. But especially in the era of Trump, I think most congressional Democrats (leftwards of Machin and Sinema, at least) are genuinely afraid of what a second Trump turn would mean for the country, not least because it would likely mean a practical end to democratic processes at the federal level. Hard to benefit from the bogeyman when the bogeyman has made your presence in politics impossible-to-illegal.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 15 points 2 years ago

the kid that was tracking his jet

The kid that was reposting public flight tracking data of his jet. He's so fucking petty.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

HAM-VER-BOT, just like the good ol' days!

I'm not mad about Norris ahead of all of them, though

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean, who's to say that the plot of STEINS;GATE isn't real and ~~SERN~~ CERN isn't about to unravel the fabric of reality with time travel paradoxes?

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

I've only ever needed to use a tool like Wireshark a couple times, but when I needed it nothing else would do, and the convenience of being able to just download it and go instead of having to shepherd a purchase order through the organization was a lifesaver. It's one of many reasons why I am a big proponent of open-source software.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

The thing about EVE is that caveat emptor is the social contract, and as long as you don't get your dander up about being pirates or scammed, the "bad guys" are more than willing to help you learn to avoid the next trap. I was once part of an "anti-piracy" roaming fleet that got bored with the quiet night, and ended up jumping a newbie who was hanging out where they shouldn't have been, tackling his ship, and proceeding to ransom it back to him for the princely sum of 1 ISK while we laughed our heads off in Teamspeak. Then we sent him on his way with a few hundred thousand ISK extra, some pointers on highsec versus lowsec, and the valuable lesson that there were always sharks on the prowl for easy prey.

[–] Thrashy@beehaw.org 14 points 2 years ago

Speculations indicate that Navi 3.5 might enable integrated graphics with performance comparable to an Nvidia RTX 3070.

Uh huh. Given that the Radeon 780M that represents the current state of the art in Zen4 iGPUs is still trailing a discrete 3050 (by no means a strong performer itself) by about 30% on average, this seems wildly optimistic. Don't get me wrong, I would love a beastly iGPU, but this seems less like informed speculation and more like fanboy hype.

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