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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • We already beat back the fascists, back in 2020 and 2012 and so on. When do you expect we’ll be able to check that one off?

    We elected Biden and even had a Democrat majority in both the Senate and House until 2022. Do you mind refreshing me on what they did to implement ranked choice voting?

    RCV is being banned by states quicker than it’s being adopted (and many of its opponents are Democrats) even though it wins by huge margins when people are allowed to vote for it. I’m skeptical of any argument against voting for parties with our best interests in minds until it’s implemented. I’ve been hearing the rhetoric that “this election is critical and if you vote third party, you’re throwing your vote away” since Gore vs Bush, and I don’t think it was new then, either. Lately it’s morphed into “a vote for a third party is a vote for Trump,” which isn’t even remotely how it works.

    If Democrats aren’t competently opposing the fascists, why should we keep supporting them?





  • From https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61311966

    [In 2021], the House of Representatives, controlled by the Democratic Party, voted to approve legislation that would secure - and, in some cases expand - the right to abortion afforded by the Roe decision. The vote was 218 in favour and 211 against.

    The bill then moved to the evenly-divided Senate, where one Democrat - Joe Manchin of West Virginia - joined the Republicans in voting it down. Because of Senate rules that several Democrats (including Mr Manchin) are adamantly against altering, passage would have required 60 votes out of the 100 senators - a mark the abortion bill did not approach.




  • But being rude and abusive to support staff doesn’t help, encourage, or even compel the support staff do their jobs any better or faster. In fact, I’d wager it’s rather the opposite.

    I work in IT (not IT support, though) and I’m fortunate enough that none of my business partners are outright abusive. Even so, I still have some that I deprioritize compared to others because working with them is a pain (things like asking for project proposals to solve X problem and never having money to fund them). If someone was actively rude to me when I had fucked up, much less when I was doing a great job, I can guarantee I wouldn’t work any better or faster when it was for them.




  • I’m Hedgehog, the poor senior dev who was assigned to review Hal’s code.

    Panel 1: ✅ (PR Approved) LGTM but you’re missing the styling from the mock-ups, should be easy to add.

    Panel 2: ❌ (Changes requested)

    Nit: Hal, your PR failed in CI. You should have used const instead of let. Did you forget to run the linter before pushing?

    Also, the useState hook isn’t doing anything. If it doesn’t need to, just leave it as an uncontrolled component. I didn’t look at the surrounding code but this is part of a form, right? If not then it should be receiving the setter/value as props.

    Panel 3: ✅ LGTM, ship it.

    ❌ Actually wait, you still have that do-nothing state code in there. Either get rid of it or do something with it.

    Panel 4: ❌ Hal, I don’t like where this is going.

    Panel 5: (during stand-up) I reviewed Hal’s PR and just had a couple pieces of feedback. Shouldn’t take long, right, Hal?

    Panel 6: ❌ WTF, Hal. <InputField /> is literally just passing through props to input, so you don’t need it.

    Also, Hal, I recommend you look into the Styled Components library. It might better fit your needs here. You could rewrite the LoginComponent as a styled input. Of course, if you do that you should refactor the existing places where you’re using style sheets to use styled components and themes instead.

    You also still have the do-nothing useState hook for some reason. Seriously, Hal, get rid of it.

    This is how I’d write this without bringing in Styled Components, but if you use it make sure to test it first:

    import React from ‘react’;
    export const LoginForm = (props: React.ComponentPropsWithoutRef<‘input’>) => (
      <input
        {...props}
        className={`border rounded-md p-2 focus:outline-none focus:border-blue-500 ${props.className || ‘‘}`}
      />
    );
    


  • This article is full of misinformation and reads like the rantings of an angry and incompetent MAGA propagandist.

    Does it make sense to have robust protections for an event that will have 65,000 civilians present - and where the equipment and personnel involved can be deployed to other high profile events afterward, even if there isn’t a specific drone threat? Yes.

    This year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas has better protections against rogue drones than the many small U.S. bases in the Middle East like Tower 22

    “Many small US bases,” huh? And the author thinks that each of them should be better protected than the Super Bowl? That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. Is this in a heavy casualty zone or something? No - we’ve had 3 casualties, total, across all bases, since this engagement started.

    Don’t get me wrong - I think our soldiers should be kept safe. Leave it to me and I’d have every single one of those soldiers back on US soil. That would keep them safe but probably wouldn’t make the author happy.

    Unlike Tower 22, this year’s Super Bowl will enjoy a host of “hardened” measures including electromagnetic weapons that can incapacitate drones.

    The bases have anti-drone tech, but they also have drones and one was returning at the same time as the attack, which likely is why a large part of why the attack was successful. Does the author think that the super bowl defenses would have foiled such an attack? He implies as much but gives no evidence in support of that claim.

    In fact, the entire region is a no-drone zone. So sure, we can deploy the super bowl defenses to those bases - they just have to understand that their drones will be shot down, too.

    To be honest, from my uneducated point of view, the defenses described for the bases sound more sophisticated than the ones in place at the Super Bowl, not less.

    That all said, the author’s other article has this tidbit:

    Just a week before the attack, the military announced an $84 million contract to work on a replacement to the TPS-75, a mobile, ground-based radar array from the 1960s.

    So the military is literally in the process of improving their defenses and they just haven’t been built yet? Strange, in this article the author said there hadn’t been any efforts to improve them.

    Compare this hypervigilance with the glib way the Biden administration has discussed the terrorist drone that slipped past military defenses and killed three Americans and injured 41 others.

    Glib how? This is what I found for their response:

    The president, in the written statement, called it a “despicable and wholly unjust attack” and said the service members were “risking their own safety for the safety of their fellow Americans, and our allies and partners with whom we stand in the fight against terrorism. It is a fight we will not cease.”

    Doesn’t sound glib to me.

    For the most part. You know, besides the deaths of three National Guard soldiers from Georgia. Working class people with families — the supposed focus of the Biden administration’s “foreign policy for the working class.” But who cares about them?

    I imagine at least the victims of the 85 retaliatory attacks the US made cared.

    It’s unclear what the author wants, other than to wave a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag around while getting drunk and posting misinformation.



  • To summarize, since the article headline is a bit misleading and the autotldr comment was garbage:

    At least 33 times, shortly after the “Libs of Tiktok” X account posted about an accusation about a particular school, hospital, government office, small business, etc., that place received a threat of some kind. 21 of those threats were bomb threats.

    Detectives, police officers, and government officials find the timing of the threats suspicious and believe they might have been issued by supporters of the account. When NBC News asked about this, Raichik, who runs the Libs of Tiktok account, declined to respond, but referenced the communication on X with a yawning emoji, dismissing such claims, stating that the threats were by people seeking to paint her as an extremist and discredit her.

    Three of the threats have resulted in prosecutors pursuing charges.

    The article also gives some other info on Raichik and the account:

    • EM unbanned the account and he regularly engages with and boosts the account’s posts
    • “Raichik was appointed to the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee by Superintendent Ryan Walters” earlier this year
    • Konstantine Anthony received violent threats by email within an hour of Libs of Tiktok featuring him

  • There are a number of logical inconsistencies in your comment.

    First, “someone who had a hand in assembling my car” necessarily includes the corporation employing the people involved in assembly, not just the laborers themselves.

    You’ve probably heard the phrase “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” It’s relevant here. To make a profit, the companies involved in the R&D, production, marketing, distribution, and sale of any product, like a car, must pay the workers less than their labor is worth; this is inherently exploitative. If an “ethical” company tried to enter into this space and avoided doing that, it would be outcompeted by unethical companies that exploited their workers. Strategies to avoid this, like injecting capital from elsewhere, simply move where the exploitation occurs.

    Any art funded, produced, marketed, or distributed by a corporation cannot be ethically consumed. Art created by an independent artist can be ethically consumed, but only if all of their supplies were ethically sourced.

    As such, the point - that abandoning art because of something one artist involved did requires the use of a line of reasoning that would necessarily result in refusing to make almost all other purchases - holds.

    It’s especially relevant given that the original post regarded someone who has no fortune because he is dead. A dead person’s fame is irrelevant. Unless there is an estate or some other institute that is profiting from increased visibility into his work, their art can be consumed or criticized on its own merits. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for criticism or analysis of it with the additional context from the artist’s life, but if such criticism takes the form I’ve described above - if it boils down to “You shouldn’t consume X because of Y thing related to its creation” - it’s reasonable to dismiss it due to it relying upon the same fallacy.

    Listening to a CD you already purchased has no further impact on the band’s livelihood.

    Streaming their song on Spotify has a negligible impact, but it doesn’t “facilitate their abuse” any more than buying a loaf of bread does. In either case, the companies involved are enriched more than the laborer, and since the companies themselves are themselves a larger problem than just the few members of a band could possibly be, you have to choose between:

    • refusing to consume anything and starving
    • only refusing to consume a product arbitrarily - e.g., when the problems relating to its production resonate with you or when the problems are currently in the spotlight
    • only refusing to consume a product when the producer was the least ethical of its alternatives
    • only refusing to consume a product when the problems are particularly egregious (think Nestle levels here)
    • only consuming products that are the most ethical options for a given product class
    • adding the ethics of a product’s creation to the criteria you use to determine which product to consume, such that you more frequently consume more ethical products but will still sometimes consume the least ethical product of a given class
    • some combination of the above
    • consuming products without considering the ethics of their production

    Saying that someone should not consume Led Zeppelin but that buying a car is okay would fall firmly into the “refusing to consume a product arbitrarily” category.