I’m no longer at my computer where typing is easy. I thank all of you for responding in good faith, and I’ll be reading the various links. Thanks for engaging with me.

I’m now mobile, so my formatting will suffer.

Capitalism = bad. I’m fully behind that, and see it as the root of the problem. What I don’t see is a path forward that doesn’t involve incremental progress, even if not all demographics are served. At least not without violence that will be disrupt even more.

I think this is where we disagree, but I might still be missing something.

You (assorted folks responding to me) want an epoch change where we rise up and take back the power we have. We have it right now, but the price to pay to enforce that is too high for me.

I want a progression where we work towards owning that power. We had it partially when unions were still strong, but it was undermined. In my mind, the solution is education, but I have no power to enact that directly. My ability to influence is limited to my local org and voting.

A green party, socialist party, etc, will never win an election in our current environment. Votes there are literally useless, if not spoiling a candidate that has at least some if your views. The system is rigged, sure, but you can’t flip this table and walk away.

Can we separate this discussion into talking about politics and elections and eliminate Israel/Palestine? I’m a-religious, pro Palestine, pro humanitarian, but having that angle seems to quickly degenerate every conversation into ‘both sides are genocide’ and avoid the’how do we move forward’ question. I think these can be separated, but maybe that is also a place we disagree.

I feel we’re playing different games, or using different terms.

Help me understand.

Firstly. Let’s define words: I’m assuming/using my view of a US-centric Liberal vs Conservative.

Liberal: Democratic party, wants to make life better for the larger segment of the population.

Conservative: Republican party, wants to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a few.

That’s my personal and biased broad-strokes view of the political landscape.

Conservatives have managed to gather enough popular support that people will vote against their best interest for either perceived economic gain or for ‘hurt the other people more.’

Stepping back even further, what is your end-goal? How do you respect the desires of millions of people without some sort of representation, and if you have such, how do you ensure that the representative aligns with the goals of their constituents?

Sadly, I’m offline for the day, but I’d be happy to continue this conversation.

In this post: not realizing that the ideal solution is not a single step away, but rather multiple steps – and they will not be simple to sell to a general populace.

I’ll admit I’m not familiar with the term. ‘Electorialism’ seems to be, according to Wikipedia, a ‘half-way step’ between Authoritarianism and Democracy.

As far as I know, we are still not quite in an Authoritarian state here in the US. We are more likely to be headed in the opposite way from Electorialism; where we are transitioning from what is a democratic process to one where oligarchs have consolidated enough power and influence that they can just say, ‘fuck it, we win.’ In that case, yes, I do want to make a case against Electorialism.

In Electorialism, the dominant party, presumably the authoritarian one, conducts elections that allow their opponents a stage and promises to be free and fair while still controlling the levers of power. What we have seen in the last 8 years is a party, republicans, that are throwing every possible strategy at the wall in the effort to undermine and discredit elections with the end result that if they win, the election will be seen as fair and, if they lose, the election will be seen as unfair.

All concepts of what are optimal democratic processes are going to be just that: concepts. We live in the real world. There are millions of people you have to convince to move to your desired method of representation. I think we agree on the end-goal, I just disagree on how to get there and think we can’t jump from a Trump presidency directly to a worker-owned utopia.

Help me out. What’s our next step?

Mine is to help elect people to local, state and federal offices that want to make life for everyone better.

My comment was removed by the mods… probably because I let my rage show. Though the mod log shows rule 2 instead of rule 1 :P

Here’s a longer and nicer version:

I’m a (US) liberal, and I don’t approve of any of the views described by kittenzrulz123. Lumping half the country into a single bucket is not going to give you a good overview of the myriad ideals we might have individually.

You have a choice. You can look at the political landscape at the moment of the election and choose one of four options:

1. vote for the guy who will absolutely fuck over everyone he can for his own profit. We knew what he was back in 2016 and he isn’t going to change.
2. vote for the lady who has a chance to win, is probably still crappy for some demographics, but is miles better than #1 and not likely to declare war on a random country because she’s hungry.
3. vote for someone who has a 0% chance of winning, effectively throwing the vote to the rest of the population.
4. abstain, also throwing the vote to the rest of the population.

At this time, our election system really only works for two parties. Any third-party vote is useless, if not counterproductive. If you can’t understand how that math works, let me know and I’ll break it down for you. I’d love to change that, but the process is by using our ability during primaries to put forward more liberal candidates that support election reforms, not by putting our heads in the sand and voting 3rd party hoping that we will make people notice… hint: they will not.

If you don’t like your choices when you go to the voting booth in November, the solution is to get involved in late November and make things better next time. Join a local democratic organization and become part of the solution. Complaining online about how your choices suck is something we can fix if we all jump in. If you’re not doing that, then you are abdicating your responsibility and allowing others to make the choice of who represents us instead. If you choose not to be part of the selection process, the very least you can do is vote for the ‘lesser evil’ and not make things worse.

Side note: the Primary election is the end of that selection process, not the start. Putting your values on the primary ballot is where you should spend your energy if you’re mad at the status quo.

I will admit that I’m angry that we didn’t get a Democratic primary and that Harris was ordained as Biden’s successor without any popular input. The DNC is to blame for that fuck-up. It’s irrefutable, though, that Harris would have been better for Palestine, the US economy, US healthcare, foreign relations, and dozens of other topics than trump is.

Would Claudia de la Cruz have been better? Sure. Her platform looks awesome. Did she have even a chance of winning? no.

Removed by mod

I’ve not read the laws, nor am I a lawyer, but I suspect that the budget laws say something like “The [FBI] shall provide a budget by [date]”, but there is no following section attaching a penalty as there are in criminal laws, so there is likely no recourse.

I imagine that this is the same as when you don’t have that report ready for the big meeting, or skipped out early before your end-of-shift duties were done: a reprimand from your boss and potentially getting fired… but his boss is, I think, Pam Bondi, the AG, in this case.

Theoretically Kash could be impeached or censured, as could Pam if she doesn’t act. But we know how well that will go. Until then, his inaction is illegal, but unlike some of trumps actions, which can be stayed or reversed via court, I don’t think you can stay inaction.

That’s really the crux. There are two trump voters: There are 1) the easily swayed, misled, gullible, uninformed, and other adjectives that imply they are just not fully aware of what is going on; and then 2) the evil assholes who know fully that they are breaking things because they stand to profit from the breakage.

Class 1 deserves our compassion, and should be helped to understand why their choices hurt themselves and society.

Class 2 needs to be evicted from this reality.

As with other responses, I recommend a local model, for a vast number of reasons, including privacy and cost.

Ollama is a front end that lets you run several kinds of models on Windows and Linux. Most will run without a GPU, but the performance will be bad. If your only compute device is a laptop without a GPU, you’re out of luck running things locally with any speed… that said, if you need to process a large file and have time to just let the laptop cook, you can probably still get what you need overnight or over a weekend…

If you really need something faster soon, you can probably buy any cheap($5-800) off-the-shelf gaming pc from your local electronics store like best buy, microcenter, walmart, and get more ‘bang for your buck’ over a longer term running a model locally, assuming this isn’t a one-off need. Aim for >=16GB RAM on the PC itself and >=10GB on the GPU for real-time responses. I have a 10GB RTX 3080 and have success running 8B models on my computer. I’m able to run a 70B model, but it’s a slideshow. The ‘B’ metric here is parameters and context(history). Depending on what your 4k-lines really means (book pages/printed text?, code?) a 7-10B model is probably able to keep it all ‘loaded in memory’ and be able to respond to questions about the file without forgetting parts of it.

From a privacy perspective, I also HIGHLY recommend not using the various online front ends. There’s no guarantee that any info you upload to them stays private and generally their privacy policies have a line like ‘we collect information about your interactions with us including but not limited to user generated content, such as text input and images…’ effectively meaning anything your send them is theirs to keep. If your 4k line file is in any way business related, you shouldn’t send it to a service you don’t operate.

Additionally, as much as I enjoy playing with these tools, I’m an AI skeptic. Ensure you review the response and can sanity check it – AI/LLMs are not actually intelligent and will make shit up.

While I would hate to lose actual trees, I’m medium on the idea of this on it’s own. People need lots of things and space, which causes the removal of trees. If we can replicate some of their functions, such as CO2 absorption with this tech, then that seems good. If upkeep is the same as a tree, I don’t see a downside to the overall concept.

My thought would be that this shows up on top of the buildings instead of at ground level, though… Plant real trees and put these on the roof. The real loss would be if we stop making green spaces because these things meet the need for O2. Green spaces in cities do way more than just clean the air, though, so I’m not sure we’re that dystopian yet.

The photo looks like it doubles as a bench too, so maybe that helps justify its footprint. Make them a mini-light show with varied colors and it can become a functional art installation. How long until it has spikes to prevent someone from taking a nap on it, though?

reviewing my replies much later.

What you are doing is perfect. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is normally a quote around material goods, but still applies to things like time and involvement. If you are uncomfortable calling your elected officials, that’s fine. Adding a person to a protest is still an addition that shows engagement.

Your points indicate you are not only voting in presidential elections. You have choices to make things better: ‘Vote blue no matter who’, ceding your choice of “who” to others more involved; or to become involved even though it’s uncomfortable.

I’m not talking to you alone, but also to all those who read your comment, identified with it, and then could use a prod to get involved. I’m also poking at those who vote once every 4 years and are unhappy at their options.

Don’t just hope, Act!

Find and join your local democratic organization. The initial cost in time is almost nothing. Just meet up and introduce yourself.

Once part of the conversation, you can help influence your local party and select candidates for local office that share your values. You can select delegates who vote in larger offices, and through them promote your goals.

It’s not perfect, and we currently don’t have a flawless democratic system, but participating only every 2-4 years during the major elections is not how you get the results you want. A lot of complaints exist online around weak candidates, or ‘opposition party’ that exists only to be a foil for the Right. Those things can only exist if we are not engaged.

The time to be engaged is NOW. Help find or support new House and Senate candidates for your state legislature as well as federal. Contest every office. Even if your precinct/district seems 100% red, not having candidates on the ballot is a huge disservice to anyone who would want to vote for them and hides our strength.

Now is the time to be loud.

As much as I understand and support the sentiment, destroying things that are still functional is a very republican action.

Perhaps deface the mugs (sharpie marks generally survive dishwashers and can be reapplied later for new fun mustaches) and turn the shirts into dishrags or washcloths. (especially fun since in languages with gendered nouns, like German for example, a shirt is a neutral gender and a washcloth is masculine, thus making this really transformational.)

Not OP, but this is a principle thing. We should not have to change our behavior to make the computers work for us. They are unthinking, unfeeling tools, despite anyone’s claims around “AI”. They change for us.

That runs into a problem of tech literacy, though. If the companies running the tech we use don’t have incentive to make it work better, you have to know how to do it yourself and that’s generally not trivial. If I were OP, I’d look into self-hosted home automation. There’s some overhead and tinkering required, but the customization and privacy gains are likely worth it.

Side note. Anyone have any knowledge of a Google Home Mini repurpose? I’m more of a software guy, and have no clue if or how I can make the hardware mine. I’ve been slowly removing my reliance on google products lately. I use it mostly as a speaker, though, so worst case is it ends up as e-waste.

I’ll repeat and elaborate on something I said a few times before the election. As a preface, I fully understand your desire to not just ‘choose the lesser evil’, but the timing of your (the collective you, all the people who either sat out the election or, worse, convinced others to sit out) decision to make a stand is the part I take offense to.

The time to choose the lesser evil is when you have only those two choices and neither are good. You did indeed have a third choice, but that third choice was to walk away and potentially let the greater evil win – which it did. In that way, you are partially responsible for that greater evil succeeding. Had you (collectively) voted for the lesser evil, we would not be slashing federal staffing, waging cold trade wars, deporting people, and letting several idiotic and vengeful toddlers run this country into the ground right now.

The time to take your stand is actually, RIGHT NOW. If you are not engaged in trying to field a better candidate, then you are letting the “system” drive instead, and it will continue to present democratic leadership that is not aligned with your beliefs. You alone probably can’t make any significant impact, unless you happen to be wealthy and have tons of free time and want to go run for office. However, if all those people who were ‘BoTh SiDeS!’-ing in October would come back and continue to hammer on the Democratic party to put forth candidates that reflect their values, we might actually get somewhere.

The way to do this is simple, but hard:

1. Identify your local, precinct, Democratic party organization.
2. Join it.
3. (hard part) Engage and promote your values.

Either find candidates or run for offices. Failing that --which I’d admit is challenging; public service is not lucrative and is also very unstable, which is why we generally see already-rich old people in those positions – become an advocate for your policies and rise up through precinct, district and state to reach the national stage.

If you are not working on those goals, Shut the fuck up and vote for the lesser evil. You are not helping anyone by posting here.

I’ve done step 2. My values mostly align with my precinct Democrats, and I helped with Get-Out-The-Vote initiatives in my area. What did you do to prevent fascism?

Still here, not going to appologize, I stand by my statement, both of them are facist, …

I’d also like to point you to Wikipedia’s article on Fascism and see if you can provide a few examples of where Kamala Harris espoused those particular values. For each item in that first paragraph, I could quickly find you something where trump tells you that’s him. A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on, though, and maybe someone else can take over if you need examples and can’t google by yourself… Kamala was going to at least stay within the system, while trump is going to destroy it.

Evanescence in my Lemmy? Hell yeah!

I jumped into Linux, via Mint, about a year ago when I refreshed my hardware. The transition was pretty easy, and I haven’t looked back. Steam runs fine and I haven’t had a modern game that didn’t work under default proton settings except for things I’ve run outside Steam and mods. Most of my personal PC’s workload is gaming and handful of web-based apps that are effectively OS-agnostic; Everything else has an easy equivalent in the apt repos.

I would say that my decision to embrace Linux as my OS was primarily influenced by my Steam Deck. Gaming on it has been simple and the desktop UI was easy to adapt to. I replaced my laptop with the Steam Deck, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a USB-C dock with HDMI out (all things I already had for the laptop). I now just hook into whatever TV is handy as a monitor when I need a computer on the go.

I was a tech enthusiast when I was younger, and am thus familiar with fucking around on the command line, but now I’m an old man who just wants his stuff to work and it just has… The barrier of entry for the Linux Desktop is effectively gone. We just need PR now.

Also, I think I’d replace Mint on my primary PC with SteamOS, given a simple way to do so. About a year ago, the desktop/beta SteamOS was not fully baked.

This is the part that hurts the most.

I canvassed, I rallied, I pushed people to vote. I did what I could to ensure the fascist didn’t win again, but he still did. Enough of my country either didn’t care, found some excuse to not vote for her, or wanted him to to be president.

I was denied a chance at a primary, but I was excited for Kamala. There is no person who can sit and represent 300 million people and make them all happy, but she was more on my side than not, and I’m willing to push for ‘better right now’ and then push for ‘better later’ too as distinct events.

As part of the now vocal minority, I don’t relish what is to come. I didn’t ask for it and I don’t want it; but lumped in with ‘Americans’, we sure seem to.

What does that mean?

This is the frantic typing of someone who is distraught; who has seen their country die and now has to live with the still-kicking remains.

That might be a bit hyperbolic, but to those of us with empathy for our fellow man, it’s not a major stretch.

They mean to say that so many people are about to die in so many places, both domestic and foreign.

When I woke up after election night, I wept for the uncountable number of people who would die because of that one night. Some will be killed soon by having critical care fully enshrined as illegal because they are women. Some will die later, because their healthcare benefits are cut and they can’t afford care. Some might die because they happen to have said the wrong things publicly. Many will die in a year, as we empower other fascists in other countries to do terrible things. Many more will die in a decade because of policies enacted by the incoming administration, which places vastly more importance on the increase in wealth of a few over the well-being of the many. And I can see a future where BILLIONS die because the people in charge prioritize power and money over the health of our planet.

The nation that I grew up believing in: the melting pot, the country that welcomed those in need has turned hostile and ugly. The first trump election was a fluke, a flaw in the system that allowed a “charismatic” “outsider” to gain power and abuse it. Biden’s election was a refutation, though only barely, and seemed to show we were better than that.

Trump’s re-election, however, is proof that we aren’t better. Enough people couldn’t be bothered to vote that we elected a criminal.

We, collectively, chose this and we will never be free of that legacy.

Here’s my complaint about this. Had trump lost the election, he would be demanding recounts in every possible place as well as launching lawsuits to delay and distract. We KNOW this, since he did it in 2020.

How unreasonable is it, then, that with all the questions raised by both his statements in public (such as “we’ll have it fixed so good you won’t have to vote” regarding 2028) and the statistical anomalies we can’t call for a recount in places where things seem amiss? If nothing is found, great, we elect a fascist; but if there was an attack/hack/fraud, then we find it and expose it. We have nothing to lose (we’re saving money over a trump loss and recounts everywhere) and Democracy to win.

I’m in a swing state and I definitely checked after the election to see that my ballot was counted. However, I can’t see the details as a private citizen, so I can’t verify it was tabulated correctly. I’m in NC, where the republican governor candidate was truly repugnant, but trump won by 3.39 points and Josh Stein won by over 14! In fact, more people voted for Stein than Trump. Maybe we could get Mark Robinson to request a recount…