That’s the neat part: Convicted felons ARE excluded from most public service jobs like being a teacher or a mayor. It was widely believed that this included the presidency until the Supreme Court decided it somehow didn’t.

The thing that gets me is that it’s true. It’s a patchwork… of so many people taking more than they should and giving less than they should. If UHC tomorrow used every penny of the premiums they charge purely to cover healthcare, they still wouldn’t fix the problem. A fix would require change to the pharmacies, the drug companies, the medical equipment companies, the hospitals and hospital networks, and more levels of bullshit middlemen than I even know exist. No single person, be they President or CEO or billionaire, can fix it.

He is still an asshole though. He is just pointing to the problem and saying “Good people are trying to fix it.” Are they? Where’s the evidence? I would love to read an article that made me think, “Yes, the healthcare industry is making one small step in the right direction” but it hasn’t come up. If this dude wants me to sympathize with him or with Brian Thompson, he should say ONE THING that either of them has ever done to address the problems of the industry and make things genuinely better for everyone. My money is that he can’t.

It’s been a long time but I recall a study featured on Freakonomics where a national park tried different signs to get people to not steal rocks. Signs like, “Taking rocks hurts the ecosystem” and “Taking rocks is a crime.”

The only effective one was something along the lines of, “A million people visit this park every year and leave things alone.” Suggesting that telling people to do the right thing is less effective than peer pressure.

It’s way more professional than I could manage under the circumstances.

You can’t take motive for granted. I would be willing to bet that police are operating under the assumption that it’s related to his job. But you can’t just rule out a personal grudge or something else. The writing on the bullets could just as easily be a distraction. It’s probably not, but it could.

I knew healthcare was messed up but I legit didn’t know how messed up until it happened to me. My daughter got put on a specialty medicine because of a relatively rare kidney condition. It had to be compounded, because she is a small child but the medicine only came in adult doses.

Aetna denied coverage, stating I had to get the medicine from CVS (which is owned by the same parent company of Aetna). CVS does not compound medicine, so we couldn’t get it from them. I spent almost a full year on the phone arguing with them and around $6000 paying out of pocket before I was able to switch insurances.

I consider myself reasonable. Even in a functioning system, mistakes can happen and need to be resolved, and I spent the first month or more assuming this was just an innocent mistake. What got to me was the total lack of recourse. Day after day on the phone with people, some of whom genuinely seemed to care but could do nothing. They intentionally separate the patients from the people making decisions so that all the decision makers get is a few fields in a form, not the whole story. The people in charge are even more separated so they never have to hear anything about the people they’re screwing over. And if I couldn’t afford the extra $6000 burden, I just wouldn’t have gotten the medicine and in the best case she would have spent that year in and out of the hospital and in the worst she wouldn’t have survived the year.

I tend to think most people are decent. But the system we’ve built makes sure to separate people by impenetrable layers of bureaucracy to ensure that the decent people either can’t do anything or never know there’s a problem, while the indecent never have to be confronted with the damage they do. It’s insane.

I think about this sometimes but the challenges for direct democracy are very hard to overcome. To vote right now, you go to a place and someone verifies your identity and then you vote on a machine that should theoretically have not just your vote but some form of backup to ensure your vote is counted.

Obviously this would get really obnoxious if you were voting constantly. So something like change.org maybe where people can propose things and others can vote on them. But now how do we handle identity verification, and ensuring only one vote per person? On something connected to the Internet, how do we verify security? This needs to be even more secure than a bank, as every hacker and government in the world will want to sway the results.

We could maybe distribute something like a USB key to cryptographically ensure everyone’s identity, but then you will need to handle people losing theirs, or theft, and it wouldn’t work great with cell phones. There’s other identity solutions like scanning documents or facial ID but they have their own security issues and also are a nightmare for privacy.

I dunno. There’s probably a solution out there that might work, but it would take a lot of work to make it trustworthy and that work would largely be overseen by people the system is meant to replace so they aren’t exactly incentivized to get it right.

I hate when people downplay the economy or employment as trivial or at least not very important. It is important, and for many it is rational to consider it the most important. At an individual level in America, employment means food, shelter, healthcare. It even means companionship… People who can’t afford to date, have a harder time finding love.

At a high level, even if we implemented universal healthcare and fixed our other problems, the health of the economy would STILL dictate our access to food, shelter, and healthcare. A government with no funds cannot sustain programs.

I can confirm that it has not appeared to affect the functionality of those sites for me. Although… There are some sites with multiple fields that don’t work and some that do, I’ve just assumed that the sites which don’t work were down to poor code.

I just picked a state. Average infant daycare cost is $1172/mo. Maximum of 4 infants per caregiver, so a maximum of $4.688.

Health insurance here averages $400/mo, for an individual (some often paid by the employer).

Assuming they are employed, the employer is paying for federal unemployment insurance, workers compensation insurance, state unemployment insurance. It was really hard to get solid numbers but based on my reading, we can estimate about 2% will go to that.

So we have $4296 left over. Assuming payroll and supplies and everything else costs nothing at all (which is definitely not accurate), and assuming we give the rest straight to the employee… Their gross would be $51,000 roughly.

The average daycare worker in this state makes about $33k/year.

And where’s the list? Like if I could just find a list of like, “Congratulations on being a homeowner, do all this shit because if you don’t the repairs will eat you alive” it would be handy.

Contraception is not perfect. If you are on birth control, and you take it every day, you can still get pregnant, it’s just unlikely. If you have an IUD, you can still get pregnant, and even worse every pregnancy is more likely to be life threatening. And of course, condoms can break.

As for having less sex … that’s an interesting thing to say …

I think of it exactly in terms of the trolley problem. The whole premise is that if you do nothing (don’t vote) more people die. By flipping the lever, fewer people die but you’ve taken an action that leads directly to their deaths. The philosophical question isn’t just “is it better for fewer people to die” but “in pulling the lever, are you directly responsible for those deaths?”

My answer would be that inaction is itself an action. In this scenario, you have found yourself responsible either way. Suppose you pull the lever, though, to save as many lives as you can… Wouldn’t the ones who die as a result of this have loved ones that absolutely do blame you?

So your argument is “it doesn’t literally say that to the letter, so you’re wrong?” At best it suggests that this relatively wide swath of the population shouldn’t vote. What’s your interpretation?

From the article…

These are the men swimming in the electoral pool. It’s not too late for it to be drained.

The article is cautious at first, pointing at facts and figures. At times, it almost seems to care. But when it comes to the final arguments, it is just: We gotta get rid of these men. Not even a viable solution, much less a sensible one.

It’s everywhere. It’s not hard to find, but it’s not always overt. Usually, it is dismissive: “Well that’s not what we’re talking about right now.” “Well feminism would fix those problems too.” Or the person gets lumped in with Nazis, or misogynists, or whatever when what they’ve said doesn’t really support that.

I’m going to say something that I fear will not go over well, but I think it would be said. The left has some culpability here. Not in who they chose, but in how they approach the problem.

One of the things that draws me to the left is that people are all supposed to be people. No one is beyond redemption, and much of the worst aspects of people are due to changeable circumstances and not some genetic defect.

Criminals probably do crime because of their circumstances so if we can improve those circumstances we can help rehabilitate them. Addicts who are treated with dignity and compassion are more likely to be able to get their lives together. We shouldn’t paint over people with broad brush strokes, like assuming all Muslims are terrorists just because a few have done terrible things while claiming it is in the name of Islam.

But the left has a blind spot for men. The problem is solely with them, and they are garbage beyond redemption. They clearly are acting only out of hate, and not a result of their circumstances, so people seem to think. “It’s not my job to educate you” became a trope in a society where educating others is literally the only way to make change.

I submit that these people can be changed and can be rehabilitated if they are shown a better way. If their problems are listened to, rather than dismissed. If their circumstances are improved, rather than belittled. There are valid concerns, valid reasons for them to be upset, but they are handwaved away: “Well feminism cares about that too (even if you don’t see it)” or “The privileged feel like equality is oppression.”

Anyway, I don’t expect anyone will learn anything from this result. The left will say, “Man, misogyny just won’t let a woman be President” while ignoring how few people actually even voted. The left will say, “Men are to blame” without ever questioning beyond “I guess they’re just spiteful.” And if we get another election, we’ll have a Democratic candidate who moves right on everything except these problems.

As a nerd, I don’t expect my parental control settings to work forever. They’re more there to prevent childish naivete from getting them into trouble, they probably won’t stop dedicated teen horniness. And I won’t even be mad, figuring out how to get around them requires learning more about how technology works.

This. It’s not an election, it’s what’s next. Is every American election just going to be “Outright Fascism vs. Traditional Conservatism?” Is it always going to be this unrelenting and horrible from now on? Trump losing would be a good thing, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

The way I see it, the problems are that we’ve lost trust in the concept of society. We don’t trust expertise. That’s not even a right vs left thing. I know it’s unpopular to “both sides” these things, but in truth it’s not even a matter of sides: Everyone of all political stripes just disregards what they don’t want to hear.

At the same time, truth is getting harder to discern anyway. Botnets distributing and promoting misinformation, deepfakes making lies look real, and hordes of the financially incentivized pushing whatever their audience wants to hear over what is real.

Anyway, I try to be optimistic but I just don’t see how things will actually get better.

I’ve had a few of those little gimmick penis candies and they are terrible. I mean, it’s just some trash molded into a penis to be funny. Where are the gourmet candy penises?

You are correct that a reboot will trigger a full rescan. I’m always on the lookout for better sync. I just don’t think it’s out there right now for easy bidirectional sync.

Basically, if you want to set and forget, Syncthing is the best option. If you want more control, you’ll need to look into setting up rsync scripts or similar, which will at least better let you control how often to sync.