Honestly I'm sure firefighters spend most of their time being bored waiting around for a fire so they probably welcome the distraction.

Sure, in response to this statement that is a criticism that Biden did not deliver:

This all sounds like shit he should have done in his first term if he wanted Dems to have any faith in him whatsoever.

You said:

You seem to think a president can act unilaterally. Or that Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema weren’t holding the senate by the balls until the house got taken by Republicans two years ago.

I don't think it's unfair to say you think it is naive to believe that the "president can act unilaterally", and the natural converse of naivety is being savvy.

Anyway, I fail to see the point of arguing with someone who thinks I am a liar, so I will bow out of this conversation. Have a nice day. Believe it or not, I do sincerely wish you well.

I'm going to say a thing that would be considered entirely reasonable if we were talking about any other profession, but since we are talking about the powerful, will be disregarded:

That is not my job. That is the president's job. I should not be expected to come up with a strategy to solve their problems. When they tell me they are going to do something, and then fail to do so, they did a bad job.

I used to think like you do. I used to think I was savvier than all the naive people who wanted things from their politicians, and criticized the politicians when they didn't deliver, because how could they have? But over time I've realized that I was being duped. That I should stop arguing that better things aren't possible, because when people believe that, it comes true.

A criticism I'll head off: I understand I can't vote for them and forget it. I'm not advocating for reduced civil engagement; it's our job to protest and agitate.

You don't have to make excuses for the powerful, you know. There are always going to be challenges to overcome to create positive change. We should judge people by how well they overcome those challenges.

Everything the Nazis did in the Third Reich was legal. People who resisted them were breaking the law. Maybe we should evaluate things by their impact (pollution/invasion of privacy) rather than their legality.

Ok

So you're saying I could be famous if I can hold out till February. 🤔

Millions of soviets died fighting nazis.

If reacting to something always makes it more likely to occur, you have just made reacting to things Elon Musk says more likely to occur.

Technically true, since you could also just replace them with nothing

Executives believe nearly half of the skills that exist in today’s workforce won’t be relevant just two years from now, thanks to artificial intelligence.

1. Executives are such dumbasses

2. That is literally all this "study" did. Ask people how many of their skills they think will be obsoleted. This headline is ridiculous.

Why was his gf upset?

That's not the point I was making, and bringing that up isn't disgusting.

You're right. The point I was making was that congressional members are like people with minimum wage. Your response is definitely not dodging my argument.

If someone did a study on whether raising the minimum wage impacts people's quality of life, raised it a penny, found that people were still in poverty, and said "we should give up on minimum wages," would that convince you? Your statement, that we've raised congressional wages and corruption is still present, is an equivalent argument. No one is arguing that giving politicians any raise will completely eliminate corruption. I would argue that we should give members of congress wages comparable to the amount of money they would get from taking bribes, and the result will be reduced, not eliminated, corruption.

It's just really hard to talk about expected lifetimes and not sound that way.

It does, because we're talking about the total lifespan instead of remaining lifespan. A person who is 120 may have a 10% chance of living another year; but a 50 year old probably has less than a 1% chance living 71 more years. Of course the 50 year old probably has more than a 99% chance of living another year. So the older you are, the older your expected total lifespan is, even if your expected remaining lifetime is shorter.

Contrary to the meme, it's probably very quiet, if they keep the RPMs low and the fans are arranged correctly

Want to exchange information in json? plaintext? binary data? Sockets can do it.

This is exactly why you need something like dbus. If you just have a socket, you know nothing about how the data is structured, what the communication protocol is, etc. dbus defines all this.

Trump did massive damage to journalistic integrity as a whole

Not nearly as much damage as access journalism (e.g. Maggie Haberman style palace intrigue stories) did. The press and politicians being buddy-buddy is a disaster for journalistic integrity.

You ever hear the words “fake news” before he used it?

I did. The first time I heard it was on the PBS NewsHour, second half of 2016. Trump didn't really start using the term until 2017/late 2016, IIRC. They were using the term to describe news sites that felt like "official" news sites but were not journalistic, using social media to spread and get ad revenue.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Trump's press strategy was good. Overall it was harmful; but the adversarial nature specifically was good.