With one parent who turned 80 this year and the second in their late 70s, I’ve realized there’s a difference between “elderly” and “old.” A lot of people equate the two. I think “old” always started in one’s 70s to me, even as a kid. “Elderly,” however, is not based on a number but on a physical state of being.

My dad is elderly. He’s frail and struggling to move around much. It’s hard to watch and it’s been going on and worsening for a few years now. My mom, despite being only 3 years younger, is not at all elderly. She has more energy and vivacity than many people over 20 years her junior (hell I’m in my 30s and she can do loops around me, but I got the chronic illness genes that she didn’t have). Technically, she’s old. But no one who knows her would think of her as “elderly.”

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

Texas is also a voter apathy state. A lot of the apathy comes from gerrymandering, which I’d call a form of voter suppression, so your point still stands.

Also reminder for every state except Maine and Nebraska: your voting district has NO effect on who gets the electoral college vote for your state. Even if your state is gerrymandered to all hell and there’s no chance your district will go blue, that has literally zero affect on whether your vote is counted for president.

So go vote, even if it’s hopeless for the local races. Your vote can help flip a state!

The blonde girl with a ponytail in the top right and bottom right look like real photos from a rally. The other photos of groups of people with the “Swifties for Trump” shirts all have the plastic sheen and soft background that’s indicative of AI. If you start zooming in there are little oddities here and there that also make them look generated.

So I’ll buy there is one girl out there with her own shirt who got photographed twice at the same event, but I don’t believe any of these other photos for a second.

That sounds a lot like advice I read in some book (maybe Atomic Habits?). What I remember of the point was that your habits will follow your identity. If you’re a “former smoker,” you’re a small step away from becoming a smoker again. If you’re “not a smoker,” you have to consciously defy your identity to pick up cigarettes again, and it is hard for people to change their foundational perceptions of their identity.

I thought it an interesting premise. It seems in some ways opposite to the guidance of Alcoholics Anonymous, which as I understand it is that everyone there identifies as an alcoholic, no matter how long it’s been since they imbibed. That’s supposed to keep them conscious of the choice to not drink (though it might also be intentional to drive the community mindset and participation that’s also foundational to AA…)

Do you not remember all the leaks showing extreme bias towards Clinton, derision of Sanders, and even deals between Clinton and the DNC?

The emails and documents showed that the Democratic Party’s national committee favored Clinton over … Bernie. … The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership’s publicly stated neutrality, as several DNC operatives openly derided Sanders’s campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton’s nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. source

Or that DNC leaders argued in court that they didn’t need to hold impartial primaries and could select whatever candidate they wanted?

… DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate. source

For their part, the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise—political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts. The Court does not accept this trivialization of the DNC’s governing principles. While it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way, the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle. source

At the end of the day, yes, Bernie got fewer votes. But that is a small part of the iceberg, ignoring all the things that led up to it and all the biases at play in the organization putting the vote on in what I would (and did) call a “rigged” primary.

I agree with everything you said, except worrying about November. Stay worried, stay motivated to vote, and motivate others. Too often right-wing policies or candidates have gotten voted in because the left thought they had it in the bag and didn’t bother to vote.

I threw an idea out in response to a comment here right after Biden backed out and the more I think about, the more it seems likely to be right.

My theory is that the DNC likely timed Biden stepping aside so it would be late enough they couldn’t hold primaries for the nominee. It came out in 2016 that the DNC was basically rigged for Clinton to win, regardless of what voters wanted. The 2016 primaries caused dissension with voters leading to lower turnout, and I think that was also somewhat true in 2020. By waiting as long as he did to back out, Biden took voter choice out of it and helped rally everyone behind Harris.

I could absolutely be wrong, but every time I run it through my head it feels more likely to be true. And if I’m right, it is a bit sleazy. However, I have to admit I’m surprised and impressed by how it’s turned out. I didn’t expect people to rally so strongly behind Kamala, and I’m excited to be a part of it!

THIS! My cardiologist has instructed me to eat 7-10 grams of salt a day. He literally encouraged me to eat things like chips, pretzels, pickles, salted nuts, and ramen to get more.

I supplement with electrolyte mixes with 1g sodium. They cost over $1 each and I am supposed to drink 2-3 a day. I still don’t get enough salt to feel my best.

It’s fucking obnoxious to have health conditions that mean I need a thing that so much of the world tells me is bad, and everyone else is trying to get rid of.

That’s when it becomes Rita as opposed to “heat Katrina”.

For folks who don’t remember/know about Rita because they didn’t live through it, less than a month after Katrina a record-breaking cat 5 hurricane was heading for Texas. Everyone still had Katrina on their minds and panicked. Millions of people (literally estimated as 2.5–3.7 million) evacuated, or tried.

The highways out of Houston came to a total standstill. About 100 people died before the storm even hit land because of the evacuation. And then the hurricane itself was nbd; the evacuation was literally the worst part.

My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.

Maybe it’s just the low quality image, but that looked to me like the part of the ear protection that goes over the head (is there a name for that? It’s not a strap, but that’s the closest I could think of), like it was just pulled down over her forehead instead of sitting on top of her head. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

I saw the guy get attention because he doesn’t use a bunch of fancy gear. Looks like the woman doesn’t either, yet this is the first time I learned meme man was even on a team.

She has bigger ear protection and it looks like she’s pulled it in a way that shields her eyes from the light. Still not all the high tech fancy gear they were competing against. So leaving her out of every post made about him not using a ton of gear definitely sounds like what this meme is saying.

Age 79 and up. They make up almost 5% of the US population. Source (Btw, 0.13% of the population is in the generation before the Silent Generation!

However, the 5% goes up to about 6% of the voting population. (Math: Using the source above, we can take out 12.76% for all of Gen Alpha. We can probably drop Gen Z to 15% total under the premise that if the same number of people were born every year, ~70-75% of them would be too young.)

6% still sounds fairly small, but that is over 16 million people.

Yes, there’s physical and mental decline at that point, but most of them still probably have the facilities to vote. Fuck, the current sitting president is in the Silent Generation and yeah, obviously there are questions about his capacity to continue for another 4 years, but he’s definitely capable enough to vote. There’s also mail-in voting that’s heavily used by these demographic groups.

It’s probably because it’s a city that has a large enough venue to host nearby rural folks who are his target demographic. If I had to guess, it will have low local attendance and the audience will largely be made up of people whining about Asheville and its residents.

Hey, I just made a post about this the other day! https://lemm.ee/post/39037973

TL;DR: in every state except Nebraska and Maine, the popular vote determines the electoral college vote for the state. So no matter how badly gerrymandered the districts are, the presidential candidate elected by the state is NOT affected!

I want to know this answer too…

To clarify for anyone else who might be unaware: It’s not a toilet; it’s a bidet. It’s like a wash station for your underside, so you still do your business in the toilet but then come over here to wash. So, much like there’s no flush in a sink, there’s no flush on this.