Nah, raising a shitload of money fast for tax breaks to pay off the billionaires who handed him the presidency is the point. Cruelty is why idiots would vote for this

This is why eggs should be sold in packs of 15

What, you don’t think he’s getting rich off this?

I find it weird that there is this whole conversation about new/experienced users, and it’s perhaps a problematic thing with Linux. Many people, myself included, don’t give 2 shits about how their OS works. I don’t want to spend my time tending to it as if it were a fucking garden. I just need it to work, so I can get on with my own stuff. No matter how “experienced” I get, that’s always going to be the case. Maybe I’m just a little traumatized about this because the first Linux distro I used was Gentoo.

If you want nice warm hues in your portraits, always pose with a Walmart shopping bag

“tell Vance he can schedule any time after Monday”

That’s entirely the point of all those tariffs. Raise taxes on everybody without calling it that.

Have you considered that maybe moral bankruptcy isn’t the most effective way to win elections, at least not if you’re presenting as the slightly-less-right-wing option? The Democratic party is broken, nobody is buying their shit any more, and that’s why someone like Trump can get elected. There is no opposition party. It’s not a problem that will get fixed by ignoring it.

It does make me wonder what safeguards if any Lemmy has against such shittification. What system might work for that? Maybe if you had a way that users could flag other users as trolls or quality contributors, and those flags carry vastly more weight if the person flagging is themselves a quality contributor. That would perhaps create a stable community, not necessarily a good one but at least one which resists change, yet allows a way in for new people.

Sure, it’s just a way to raise taxes on the public without calling it that. Upside is they bring in a lot of money quickly. Downside is they do a fuckton of irreparable damage to the US economy, the standard of living of people in the USA, and a fair bit of collateral damage to the rest of the world. But at least Elon gets his tax breaks for another couple of years so yay!

The funny thing is that it’s supposed to stimulate US manufacturing. Like companies are going to invest years of time and billions of dollars building factories and moving production to the US, because of a tariff system that changes every 2 days.

Yay, now when your coworkers suggest getting some sushi and you use your laptop to look up the nearest restaurant, you’re going to get a paperclip pop up saying “It looks like you’re trying to get back to that tentacle porn hentai you nutted to last night. Would you like help with jerking off?”

I had a feeling he would try something like this. If you only need to convince 57 thousand people, throwing money at them is a very real option. But I never imagined he would go so cheap. 2 million dollars for every man woman and child would only cost the USA 120 billion dollars. Not a bad price for Greenland. 10k is a fucking insult.

I see it more like saying his handlers ought to be handling him better. Maybe the people who Trump is supposed to serve are having trouble with that. I do hope so. If his wealthy backers turn against him, he won’t last long.

Really, I couldn’t stay interested past Dumbledore’s death knowing there was like a hundred ways he might not actually be dead. The whole deathly hallows thing even acknowledged that, it’s good that Rowling very intentionally chose not to do a C.S.Lewis there. But the problem was the inherent brokenness of the world, which was just unsuitable for a serious story.

Underpants. Especially if you have the high ground.

Monopoly was also designed to annoy people, yet somehow people play it hoping it will be fun.

Seems to me it’s an efficiency problem.

If you want to send an email to someone, you don’t send it to a mailing list of all your contacts. You just send it to the person to whom it concerns. But suppliers, who want potential customers to be aware of their product, are just sending their message to as many people as possible. And even targeted advertising isn’t useful because it aims to promote one product rather than helping customers to make a balanced assessment of all the choices available. Plus it’s typically unsolicited and therefore an intrusion and an unwanted waste of time and attention.

People out there who want that product need to know what’s on offer and who offers the best quality and value for money, which would have to come from an independent source. Independent review sites are a very good alternative to advertising, and maybe they could do more to promote new products and inform customers about things which would suit their needs, which would be a cost effective way to help suppliers reach their customers. That sounds a lot like advertising but if it were truly independent and on-demand, it wouldn’t be. In theory AI might do a good job of this, but it’s so open to abuse, it’s a natural pathway to push whoever pays for promotion. If advertising were illegal, I wonder how you would police that.

More broadly, if we rely on reviewers to help customers find what they need, how can we ensure they are independent and fair? Maybe if there were a network of independent reviewers, they could act as a check on each other, if a reviewer consistently favors one brand when the rest don’t, it could be somehow highlighted and shown up as a bias.

If you were 4 and now you are 44 then you might be an integer variable. If sister is also a variable, we don’t know when she was allocated. She might also be an integer constant in which case she’s arguably immortal.

If your parents had another daughter in the meantime (or if your older brother became female), “my sister” would still be a valid reference, to a completely different person.