Death Stranding vibes.

It goes much further back than Pres. Obama's first term. Dems have always virtue-signaled for at least the last 30-40 years, and then blamed the repubs when something they promised doesn't go through, even when they're a majority. All the while insider-trading themselves to profitability. A handful of them stand up for the party's purported ideals, which is just enough to make it seem the party might care. It's all a sham.

That being said, Pres. Biden's administration did an admirable job cleaning up the mess left behind by Orange Man 1.0 when entire offices were devoid of employees, paper trails, documentation, state. They took too long to appoint an FCC chair, however, and didn't even attempt to find a way to fix the DeJoy post office problem (which arguably would have been difficult.)

But then, now, dems seemingly have been silent about the results of the election. They're acting like the police did in 2020 after George Floyd's death and silent-quit. One would like to hope they are attempting to do anything to ensure as little damage to the country takes place in the next 4+ years as possible, but, in a messaging vacuum, Occam's Razor should apply, and they're likely doing nothing.

So many states have questionable voting security, and it'd be comparatively easy for a relatively smart person to inject temporary code patches on tallying machines, provided they could get the necessary signing certs (if the companies even cryptographically sign their code). It would only take a simple binary patch to execute only on a certain day/time to flip arbitrary votes, and otherwise never. Especially if that Starlink at swing locations thing was true, it could reroute DNS requests when the machines are online for updates, send them to some other IP address to download what looks like a valid patch to inject the sleeper code. (Completely speculation here, no actual evidence, and many pieces would be needed to get through a "trusted" system like the web certs as well, but man would I want to play with one of those machines and 100 ballots for a weekend.) It'd ostensibly be a 100% hands-off process and those "secured" locked down machines would do the dirty work themselves.

If VW can figure out how to cheat emissions tests and otherwise act "normal", flipping a vote bit is babytown frolics.

That's probably the most disappointing thing about all of this, learning that most of those in governance really don't want to try.

Less than 1/3 of American voters voted for the orange man. The rest were apathetic or thought virtue abstaining would "send a message".

Using modern tech with its associated crappy software lifecycle to save cost is a heavy gamble, however. Instead of breaking Reddit for a couple of hours, they can't fire their RCS thrusters to avoid collision with space junk because some stupid NPE that was missed in the QA process that no longer exists because that team was replaced with AI.

Link to Windows is pretty terrible except for basic SMS. Really wish Microsoft would stop trying to make it the iTunes of Android.

On Macs in the 90s, it was the easy and fun thing to do, especially after the Fonts folder was created.

Sadly, no, it takes, as I recall, about 2 minutes for oxygen starvation in the brain to make it fade out.

The one time I ever had an outage on my municipal fiber ISP 8 years ago, shortly after install, was just that the installers misaligned the fiber in the port outside. At 4 or so in the morning, I randomly woke up (I think I sensed the internet went out) and Internet was dead for an hour or so.

Next morning, 11am, city truck rolls up, fixes the fiber, and leaves. I never filed a ticket or anything. Hasn't blinked since. I asked them how that worked. They said, the low light was alerted on their end and a service ticket was auto-generated.

Early on, Netflix (back when it was worth paying for) wasn't working one day on the fiber, since we had recently migrated from DSL with 800kbps uplink that would starve out voice calls while browsing TV for a show. I assumed it was the muni ISP. No, it was Netflix themselves, for everyone.

It's weird having Internet as a utility, as it should be. It just always exists and works.

Nothing but Google‘s is allowed to.

https://www.retailmenot.com/blog/walmart-layaway.html

Walmart actually just stopped layaway entirely in 2021 for BNPL.

Moderate investing of $6.2 million with a 4-6% return would amount to a monthly payout of $25,833/month. Very comfortably.

I have a set of uBlock Origin filters I turn on in the "my filters" tab when this garbage gets too exhausting. Unfortunately this only works on web browsers.

Example:

discuss.tchncs.de##article.post-container:has(.post-title:has-text("Trump"))

Replace with your Lemmy instance domain and keywords of your choice!

Hopefully lemmy apps start enabling keyword filtering.