n1ckn4m3

Instead of working to create a cost effective, quick method for users to buy (AND OWN, NOT LICENSE) digital movies, the MPAA is instead going to try and censor the internet. Brilliant move, idiots.

Can’t argue with any of your points – I can only commiserate with the way you feel as I share a lot of the same sentiments. I appreciate the open candor and willingness to have a dialogue about this!

In my opinion this is flawed logic. Not voting doesn’t accomplish any of the things you want, on the contrary it plays into goals of parties because they want voter apathy – the less people voting the easier it is for an unpopular candidate to win. I’m definitely not voting for someone I like, I’m voting against the person I think will destroy democracy (and I similarly hate that this is the set of options we are given – no one would have picked these candidates).

Doesn’t matter what polls say, doesn’t matter what the media says, don’t be complacent – go vote. Go vote. Go vote. Go vote. I can’t stress this enough, this kind of bullshit puff piece exists solely to keep people from voting by lulling into a false sense of security.

I don’t care if there’s a poll that says 100% of the country hates one or the other, GO VOTE. Ignore these bullshit polls, they are completely and utterly worthless.

Are you kidding? On the contrary, Carlson has been proven to be the perfect puppet, he let Putin show up and say whatever the fuck he wanted completely unchecked. Carlson’s now on Putin’s Christmas list. This isn’t the last we’re going to hear of their friendship.

Yeah, but the right only agree that indoctrination exists when it’s colleges indoctrinating people into free-thought which they call being woke. Say that word to them and they’ll be like “rubber, glue, you” because that’s about as many syllables as the average right-winger can muster, and about as intelligent a complete thought as I expect from them as well.

If anyone has watched the last 8-12 years, they’d realize polls exist solely to suck people into a false sense of security to manipulate the vote.

Ignore the fucking polls. GO VOTE. Vote in your local elections. Vote in the primaries. Vote in national elections. Polls are completely and utterly bullshit, just ignore them and GO VOTE.

It doesn’t actually, the law is written specifically to disallow people from boycotting companies that destroy the environment, hate LGBTQ, actively promote anti-LGBTQ ideals, etc., but it DOESN’T stop the alternate – the right can still boycott people who support LGBTQ rights, people who support working to fight climate change, etc. Just another one-sided law attempting to illegalize entirely legal business decisions by the left while allowing the right to continue saying it’s OK to deny people wedding cakes if you hate the gays.

Wait, you’re telling me that this is a one-sided law made in bad faith to illegalize behavior that’s 100% constitutionally protected but that negatively impacts the conservative right while still allowing actions that negatively impact the left? Say it ain’t so.

These laws never seem to backfire because for them to backfire, the left would have to start using all of the loopholes that the right have put in place, and for some reason the left continues to act like they’re “better than that” as the entire country devolves into fascism. I hope they sleep well at night when they say “well we may have lost our country to fascist dictators, but we didn’t break a single rule on the way!”

Just look at the gerrymandering in this country and how it wholly benefits the conservatives and you’ll realize the democrats are wholly incapable of even stressing against the rules, even to save our country from people who are actively working to destroy our freedom and our rights. We’re never going to beat the opposition when the opposition cheats at every turn and we obey all the rules. It’s a losing game and there’s no ethical silver bullet that we can say we upheld when our country is overtaken by immoral and deceitful thieves.

I gave them a crap review in the Android app store because of it – I have absolutely no need for my lights to be able to be controlled over the internet outside of my house, and I don’t want the feature nor do I want my hue bulbs connected via any stupid cloud link so they COULD be managed over the internet outside of my house. Their response was “as we add new features, so too do we add new security features to protect the platform and that justifies us requiring you to have a login and make your devices controllable via the cloud”. Uh huh.

I’ve set the Android app to never automatically update in the future and I’m really hopeful that I can avoid this garbage requirement by doing so, but I’m sure they’ve thought of it and I’m going to end up having to move to 3rd party apps to control them eventually.

^ Exactly this. I was an Apple fanboy (perhaps even shill) until the iPhone 5S when my device had a bad NAND chip causing it to randomly and sporadically blue screen and reboot (as a PC user, the blue screen irony was not lost on me) and Apple jerked me around for 3 months until the phone was out of warranty and then told me I should have bought Apple Care on the phone even though the issue started before the 1 year warranty had expired.

I didn’t find this acceptable as I had written proof I’d taken the phone in to the shop multiple times during the warranty period, ended up calling their corporate office of the president where they worked with me to generate logs from the device and send them to Apple techs who would review it, at which point they came back and said “yeah it looks like the NAND chip is bad” and “but it’s out of warranty”. When I told the person from Apple this was ridiculous because I’d been an Apple customer for decades and I’d had umpteen Macs and Macbook laptops and iPhones and I’d never had this problem with any other Apple device (the whole point being the devices are 30% more expensive because they’re high quality and don’t have these types of problems), she cut me off and said “Apple doesn’t have a customer loyalty program, sir.” and dead-ended the entire conversation right there.

I took the 5S out to my driveway and smashed it with a hammer and went and bought a $200 HTC One E8 and I’ve been an Android user ever since and will never give Apple a penny if I can avoid it. The products were fine, the software was good, but the service/company is rotten.

I think it’s a mix of things. I agree a lot of people don’t participate in the primaries and they really should, but I’d also stress the importance of elevating the quality of the candidates we have. I don’t believe any of the primary candidates right now have any idea what it’s like to live in the USA as an “average” person. For starters, the average age of US citizens is 39, but the average age of the 3 current candidates is 74, with each of them being a minimum of 30 years older than the average American. I am not trying to promote ageism in any way, but I would really prefer if we had leadership that was less removed time-wise. I just don’t personally believe that someone at 70 or 80 has any reasonable idea what it’s like to be an American in the 30-40 age range right now – their experiences with that age come from a time prior to the advent of cellular telephones, social media, personal computing technology, etc.

On top of that, even if you look past the age gap, the choices we have so far really don’t instill great confidence.

RFK Jr is an admitted openly vocal anti-vax believer and also a vocal science denier (he still promotes belief in the link between vaccines and autism which has been systemically dis-proven), neither of which are popular positions to the left and will likely cost him votes. Biden has a low approval rating and a lot of Democrat voters don’t see him as a strong or effectual president, but he’s likely to get the nomination because he previously beat Trump and seems to be the defacto “if you’re voting against Trump instead of voting for someone, vote for him” nominee. Marianne Williamson is at least a fresh, non-dynastic face in the political race with a reasonable track record as an independent, but because she’d been an independent until 2019 and because she’s female there’s a subsection of voters who will adamantly refuse to vote for her regardless of her political stance, making her unlikely to win the nomination over Biden.

I really hope that we start to see greater candidate diversity in the future and I agree that it starts with showing up to vote, I just wish we had candidates that felt more representative of the party ideals and also of our overall population than what we’re getting now.

I used to use 1Password standalone, but they moved away from it and started only selling password management as a service and I really didn’t want that, so I’m running Bitwarden now on a private VaultWarden instance for myself and my wife. It’s been great and is a good option if you want to run your own platform and not use Dropbox or other third party cloud storage or platforms for the data. Obviously, you’re then responsible for backing the data up, etc., but I like the flexibility and data ownership of it.