Are you not reading anything you just wrote?

one thing that will move a politician is knowing they can’t get elected again

If you do that with Biden, that means that Trump gets elected, and shit gets a whole helluva lot worse. Not just in Palestine, but everywhere. Of course, you’re going to say that I’m "throwing ‘But Trump!’ at you, but that’s not me - that’s the system that we live in.

You have a functionally binary choice. You can try to minimize damage, or not.

It’s your choice whether you, personally, do what you are capable of doing to minimize damage. And I hope that you have the intestinal fortitude to tell your LGBTQ+ friends to their face what you did, and why you did it, if it all goes the way I expect it will.

Goatwhore - Baring Teeth for Revolt

It’s not the leaks, it’s the fact that Anthony Blinken has been holding talks in Cairo to try and negotiate a peace settlement.

He would need some kind of finding of fact in the US to support that, and that hasn’t happened AFAIK yet. The ICC has made that finding, but it wouldn’t be legally supportable to use that finding to withhold appropriated funding.

That’s why I qualified it as far-left by American standards.

We’ve had far-left in the past, but student terrorist movements were largely left behind in the 70s.

…And exactly, EXACTLY, how do you pressure him in a way that doesn’t actively risk making things far, far worse, not just in Israel, but here in the US as well? Because if your answer is, “don’t vote for him”, well, congrats, you’re going to make things worse.

He’s had that power from day 1

Not as such, no. When congress appropriates funds, the president is legally obligated to disburse those funds for the purpose that they were appropriated for. This is a law, and it’s not something that’s up for debate. That was part of the underlying crime that Trump was first impeached for; he attempted to withhold funds corruptly. Could he have vetoed that? Sure. It also would have vetoed funding for Ukraine though. (And, just pointing out here that Trump would have vetoed assistance for Ukraine, while helping Israel kill more Palestinians faster.)

You can–and should–condemn his rhetoric, because he has been supportive of Israel waging war in Gaza. But he’s also been working behind the scenes, trying to negotiate a peace that Hamas will accept, and that Israel will accept. Even when he’s supporting Israel in public, it’s been clear that he’s been working to negotiate a truce.

Oh, there is definitely a far left. They’re just not doing the same kinds of things that the far right are doing, and they’re smaller by an order of magnitude.

By American standards, the Stop Cop City people are a ‘far left’ group; they’ve used violence (property damage, arson) in order to bring attention to their cause, and to try and prevent an injustice. OTOH, unlike the state’s actions against the far right, which is mostly just shrugging their collective shoulders, action against Stop Cop City has been pretty brutal.

Bad take.

You get genocide either way; one is a guy trying to stop the genocide that’s been negotiating behind the scenes for months (and yes, also giving the Israelis arms), and the other guy wants to accelerate the genocide while also ending democracy.

Apprenticeships are damn near impossible to find in the US, period. Usually people go to trade schools.

Cheapskate parents, actually. Most parents get their kids a BALCS carrier with level III soft inserts, some ESAPI plates, and a level III or IIIa helmet. But some parents cheap out and just get their kid a backpack and split a set of plates between kids.

No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.

Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.

Deviant Olam is another good one for physical security. After seeing a few of his videos on gun “safes”, I looked into genuine gun safes (TRTL 30x6 or better, and/or DoD-approved weapons containers) with S&G mechanical locks, and the prices are eye watering. An S&G lock by itself ain’t too bad–about $600, IIRC–but the safe body itself was $15k+, easy. …Without shipping included, since there’s no fucking way I’m getting that into my basement myself. Most gun “safes” are not even UL-listed Residential Security Containers, and you get into $2000+ for one that meets that basic, very, very minimum level of protection. (Yes, I looked in the local gun stores that carry them.) The fact that most gun “safes” aren’t capable of resisting an 18" prybar that’s used continuously for 15 minutes is not a pleasant thought to think about.

Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably get an Apple device.

Sadly, I also don’t like spending money. :P You used to be able to make Hackintoshes, but Apple tends to break them with every software update.

I had been thinking about getting an IoT Enterprise LTSC release of Windows and manually adding the components that I needed. Might still do that with dual boot.

There are a lot of ways to get around that, such as:

I’m doing all of that except the last one already. As has been noted in many other places, Windows itself is now in the business of serving ads directly, and it looks like that’s getting harder and harder to disable. I managed to mostly lock down the Pro release of Win 10 that I’m on right now, but Win 11 will make that much, much harder. If it weren’t for security issues surrounding end of product life, I wouldn’t switch versions at all.

C’est la mort.

But yeah, I’ll def. look for a user-friendly version of Linux when I build my next system in a few months.

I have to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro every day for my day job. I have to keep up-to-date with my versions, because clients send me files that use features in the latest releases, and not being up-to-date means that things don’t render correctly. (I’m super-pissed that I have to update since Adobe dropped all support for Pantone colors abut a year (?) ago.)

I use Corel Painter 2022 and a Wacom pen display for fun. My guess is that a pen display might get a little weird in Linux, but the one I have is not cutting edge at least.

Yeah, don’t use that for regular work, that’s an uber-paranoid distro that’s intentionally locked down, which means things are likely going to be more difficult to get working.

I know, I know, but I liked being functionally untrackable online, and not getting ads shoved down my throat (…despite working in advertising…) all the time. It’s neat, but almost everything online seems to have privacy-invading features so deeply embedded that the browser built into Tails just can’t use them at all.

Allow me to piggyback on this a bit, s’il vous plait.

Is there a Linux distribution that will run Adobe CC out of the box, games from Steam, and VR headsets? I need a new desktop badly, but I need to be able to use Adobe products as part of my job. (No, I can’t switch to GNU products, because I get files from clients, and I have to be able to work to industry standards.) I’ve used Tails before, which is not a user-friendly product, and it doesn’t play nicely with any other software.

I agree with all of this. At the same time, I think that, in most cases, people should allow their body to adapt to heat, if they are healthy enough to do so. Most people can learn to be comfortable in higher heat than they believe, although some people have medical conditions that will make them more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. If you can get by without it, you should. If you’re at risk by not using it, don’t feel guilty.

(FWIW, my office only has a/c because I have a very, very large printer in here, and it tends to have head strikes and scrap prints out if there’s no climate control. But since I’m not printing at the moment, the current temp in here is 82F.)

Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

A historical Jesus might have had a small cult following, enough that the Romans couldn’t ignore him. He would have been talking about Jewish liberation from the Roman rulers, and how he was called by god. And then boom, he gets executed. His followers probably believed that he was actually the son of god, sent to liberate them. But now he’s dead. How do they reconcile the belief with the reality? So they retcon everything; he was a spiritual messiah, and he’ll eventually return and free the Jews, once the people are spiritually prepared.

You can see traces of this in the way that the four gospels don’t agree with each other, but they all include bits of prophecies from earlier scripture about the messiah. They were written with the intent of making Jesus appear to fit in to older prophecies about who the messiah would be, since he ended up not being the liberator that they had been expecting.

You can see similar behaviors in cults now. It’s clearly visible with Q; Trump was supposed to be their messiah, but he hasn’t managed to make any of their prophetic beliefs come true. So they’ve invented reasons why Trump’s holy will has been thwarted, and changed their history, rather than accepting that he was a false messiah.

Interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of my text messages to my partner fail to send as well, and I also swear frequently and voluminously. I should test this and see if this is what is going on with my carrier.

Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings

I wanted to add to this because it might catch someone else.

I live in a cedar cabin in the mountains. The wood is untreated on the inside. Cedar is not usually attractive to insects that eat wood, but, well… Every year since we moved there, we’d get small amounts of frass (chewed-up bits of wood) from insects eating the exposed roof beams (!!!) of our house. I would spray the beams with permethrin, a bunch of dead ant-looking things would be on the floor the next few days, and that would be it for the year.

This year I called an exterminator, since it keeps happening. He said that it wasn’t termites (yay!), but thought that it was some kind of beetle. (Powder post beetles are a huge problem in our area.) He said we had two options: we could either fumigate the entire house (cost: about $10k, since the whole house would need to be tented), or we could paint all the woodwork in the hose with a 1:1 solution of Bora-Care and water. Bora-Care is a disodium octaborate tetrahydrate and glycerin solution, and should poison the wood for pests, without being toxic to people or animals once it’s dried. (I may also have to drill the beams in inject a similar product in order to get deep enough penetration.)

This should be a one-and-done process; I should not need to repeat it.