Rhaedas

That “having a chance to beat Trump” is even something said these days is insane.

Imagine a parallel world where there are two or more candidates for leadership who argue over the ideas to better the country and world, and all of them have their valid points. Where the difficulty is in figuring out who is a better choice, but even the worst winning would be okay.

I mean ever now and then I think we could have had that.

“How did it come to this?” Yeah, Theoden, I get it.

Who’s going to buy them, Ben? Aquaman?

No argument that he’s not a great choice. But we’re not being given a way to make another choice, unless it’s to vote for Trump. And if you want to go down that rabbit hole of health and mental issues…sure, it’s a whataboutism. What about it?

We’ve got one of their pull around vacuums. Superior product, best vacuum I’ve ever had in reliability and features.

Good to know. I regularly pull it out and clean the vent with a vent extension brush anyway, once I got a house with a long vent where all sorts of things can settle. Huge fire hazard that most home owners don’t even think about. It seems to be catching the lint it ought to be, but perhaps this goes back to the idea that even in a line of product you can have good and bad machines made.

I like our used Samsung dryer. For basic drying. It has all those other bells and whistles that I don’t care about, but it’s done well for years. That damn finished drying tune though…with the option to turn it off or…not turn it off. omg

We bought our current car used years ago with a similar philosophy - it was the first year of a new change, and they hadn’t changed or recalled anything in the few following years. Combine that with a one car owner locally, and it obviously was a good buy at 17 years old running strong.

But I will say even the best car makes, models, and years have their lemons. You have to look hard at each car’s history and evidence to really win. We got pretty lucky.

The fact that there are so many facepalm memes available in Star Trek must mean something. Like they see our future…

They wouldn’t use the word competitive though. They use that word for the lower employees, and its meaning is “we’d pay you lower if we could”. Well actually I guess for a few hundred they did just that by going to zero. Nothing can be done though, line is all. The joke at my work is about the company stock price. All praise stock. We don’t see anything from it, but it’s glorious.

What a ride that is, especially for Doom players going in blind.

Right, it’s been demonstrated for years why it’s a broken system, but ironically the only ones who can change it are those in power because of it. State and local are a different matter, and there has been progress in some states to use multiple pick systems. The gerrymandering though…I’m from NC, so I know all too well about a corrupt state congress, drawing lines to benefit one side, and lots of voter intimidation in certain areas (that would vote Democrat, of course). When I was in grade school decades ago I read about using computers to draw fair voting maps and how it could help representation. Decades ago…and fixed maps are still a thing.

The baffling part is how not only are we stuck with a two party system that keeps any significant changes from getting a foot hold, but also how we have so few choices with the parties we have. In a country of millions of leaders in various forms, we have nothing to pick from outside of Biden, and he’s potentially losing to someone with Trump’s long track record of failure both in politics and business. Remember when Trump running for office used to be a regular late night show joke for years?

The only hope for change in politics is local races, and even lots of those are pretty sad. “Get out and vote”, yeah, but years of doing that hasn’t really helped much, so pardon my pessimism. I’m not George Carlin level just yet, but I always understood his point.

“Look at my men. Their courage hangs by a thread. If this is to be our end, then I would have them make such an end, as to be worthy of remembrance.”

Depends on the cat. If they’re simply going with tapping the roll to spin it, that may work for a bit. I’ve found that rolls accessible to a cat tend to morph into big balls of clawed unusable pulp.

Microsoft dominated with IE back in the day for the same reason Chrome and Safari are the dominant choices. People don’t tend to change the default if it works okay enough. Firefox dropped heavily years ago as the market was saturated with other new choices already installed on mobile and Chromebooks, but recent numbers are about the same as they have been for a while. Maybe even still growing, as all the numbers I find are percentages, and there’s no doubt we’ve had an explosion of device use.

Yes, there is a low unemployment number. As with the rest, you haven’t validated that it’s a good measure of the current state of things. It’s arguably never been.

Yes, definitely increased some. Where’s the rest of the data, such as part time or unemployed, or even population growth? Like I said, a single number means not so much without context. But it’s an impressive graph.

Curious what shift there has been in full time/part time numbers. Full time wages going up is great for those who are experiencing it, but if there are less actual full timers, is that an improvement?

The art of a good statistician is to make sure what their numbers are saying is an actual reflection of reality. I’m not saying this graph is falsified, I don’t know. But numbers can be made to say anything. I learned this years ago in arguments about what “unemployment” meant. It’s much more complex than a single number, but a single number is used in the media because it’s easier to paint the picture wanted.

Usenet. Go back to the base level.

I’ve come to the conclusion that all these breach notices and the free stuff they offer for X months is a huge scam to get you sign up up for something. Either that, or every company has woefully underpaid/incompetent IT people. I’m waiting for the next news story to break on another company that somehow got passwords or identity info hacked that was stored in plain text…something I learned how to not do back in the 90s with basic HTML and PHP.

In short - I don’t believe them. They all are using the same form letters, it’s a scheme that they’re all in on.