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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Also never been a fan of Biden (but voted for him, and will again, if I have to). You’re falling into a Sunk Cost Fallacy. Yes, anyone chosen to replace Biden would be a gamble. But, Biden is a losing horse. The right time to replace him was last year. But, just because we missed that opportunity doesn’t mean we should throw good time after bad. He should be replaced before things get so late it literally cannot be done.

    This wasn’t some otherwise strong candidate, who just had a bad day. Biden is already struggling in polling. While the economy hasn’t been fantastic, it’s good enough that he should be crushing Trump. Even in 2016, Clinton was polling ahead of Trump and still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Biden isn’t winning. He’s maybe tied and maybe losing in current polling. Trump had already proven that he can be convicted in court and not lose support. There’s just not much left to hurt Trump. And Biden doesn’t seem to have anything left to gain support. Things are not going to get better for Biden.

    Biden is losing this race. It’s time to follow the rats off the ship, before we’re trying to escape a ship on the bottom of the ocean.







  • I may be wrong but I figure if it’s on Fox

    Oddly enough, polling is the one area where Fox News isn’t a complete shit show. 538 has consistently rated them highly throughout the years. In this case, the poll was run by Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. 538’s pollster ratings have them at #15, with a 2.8 rating out of 3.0. While it’s proper to be skeptical of anything with the Fox name attached, this is one of those areas where you can accept the poll at face value. That said, it’s still June and polls this far out are wildly bad at predicting the final outcome. They are better as a barometer of current sentiment and may help candidates to calibrate their messaging and campaigns as we get closer to the election. Also, a 1-2 point “lead” is almost certainly within the margin of error. So, this poll is really saying “it’s a dead heat” and drawing anything more of a conclusion is more of a rorschach test than anything.


  • Java is dying in the same way that Linux is winning the desktop war, it’s always going to happen “next year” but never “this year”. I spent a lot of years as a sysadmin and while I would have been quite happy to piss on the grave of Java, we always seemed to be installing some version of the JRE (though, usually not the latest version) on systems. There is just a lot of software which is built with it. This was especially true when dealing with US FedGov systems. Developers for the USG loved Java and we had both the JRE and JDK (because why not require the Development Kit for a user install?) sprinkled about our environment like pigeon droppings.

    That said, don’t get too caught up focusing on one language. A lot of the underlying data structures and theory will transfer between languages. What you are learning now may not be what you end up working with in the future. Try to understand the logic, systems and why you are doing what you are doing, rather than getting too caught up on the specific implementation.



  • Well, unlike the vast majority of pundits and other forecasts FiveThirtyEight had Trump at about a 28.6% chance to win, and was catching all kinds of shit over it. While you would still expect a 70-30 favorite to win a majority of the time, sometimes the dice do come up craps. So ya, while I wouldn’t take his word as gospel, he did predict Trump to flame out in the 2016 GOP Primary after all, he’s also pretty good at evaluating polling data and is probably worth taking seriously.

    And let’s be honest here, the fact that Biden is somewhere between tied and a slight underdog to Trump is bad, really fucking bad. If Biden had been willing to swallow his ego a year and a half ago, and bow out of the race, we might have had a much better candidate at this point. With his numbers slipping and his approval rating being so low, it’s hard to believe we would have had worse. Of course, were he taken out behind the shed now, that could result in a lot of chaos, which could be worse for any resultant candidate. So, it may now be that Democrats are committed to Biden and just have to hope things improve for him. But, with the DNC convention yet to be held and the Democratic Candidate yet to be officially named, it may still be worth considering the metaphorical Old Yeller option.


  • I have to believe the actual poll and report aren’t as glaringly stupid as that headline. If you ask nearly anyone, “do you want peace?” They are going to respond with “yes.” The devil is always in the details though. Ask them, “should the war in Ukraine be ended by the Ukrainian Government capitulating to all Russian demands to secure an immediate peace?” And, you might find a lot of folks are suddenly less peaceful. This reminds me of the old saw:
    There’s lies, damned lines and then there is statistics.

    With a crafted question and a bit of p-hacking you can get a lot of results you want out of people.



  • My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That’s more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that’s fixed now). I’ve had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It’s really been a lot of “it just works” all around.


  • And once you have found your specific collection of plugins that happen not to put the exact features you need behind a paywall but others, you ain’t touching those either.

    And this is why, when I’m investigating phishing links, I’ve gotten used to mumbling, “fucking WordPress”. WordPress itself is pretty secure. Many WordPress plugins, if kept up to date, are reasonably secure. But, for some god forsaken reason, people seem to be allergic to updating their WordPress plugins and end up getting pwned and turned into malware serving zombies. Please folks, if it’s going to be on the open internet, install your fucking updates!



  • Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said last month. “I think a lot of these cases [will] work up, and the Supreme Court finally says enough is enough, we’re not a banana republic.”

    I really hope they do Senator. In a Banana Republic, the Glorious Leader is usually not held to account for his crimes. In the US and in functional Republics, we actually hold people to account for the crimes they commit, regardless of their current or former positions. Trump committed a crime, being a former President doesn’t mean he can’t be held to account.


  • It does seem that there is an implicit right to vote, but not an explicit one. Which is why I mentioned the Privileges and Immunities clause, if there is a Constitutional right to vote, it likely derives from there. But, being implicit, rather than explicit, means that it falls to judicial review to codify it. It’s also not as solidly guaranteed. Unlike say, the right to assemble, there is no specific text you can point to and say, “this bit of text, right here, says it.” So, it wouldn’t be surprising to see any such decision overturned later on (see: Dobbs decision).



  • The US constitution does include the right to vote

    Kind of, but also kind of not. I replied to another commenter on that, I’ll point you there.

    The state level clause about exclusions is only necessary if the right to vote exists in the first place.

    I agree that, and event directly stated in my previous post, exactly that:

    there seems to be an assumption implicit in this that people have a right to vote

    Unfortunately, an implicit assumption is not the same as an explicitly enumerated right. It’s a fine distinction, but can be a big pain in the arse. In theory, US Citizens have a lot of unenumerated rights, via the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution. However, as it’s left open to interpretation, it ends up amounting to almost nothing.