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

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  • The minimum sentence is a hefty fine, but the judge in that very trial already determined that fines do not discourage Trump’s behavior, given the contempt punishment that he ignored, so I don’t think it’s going to be a slap on the wrist for him unless the judge truly is a hypocrite or a coward.

    That being said, even if he gets prison for each of his felony counts, he can serve them all concurrently, a maximum of 3 years per count. So he could theoretically be out of prison right before the next election cycle with a year left to campaign for 2028, that is assuming he truly is sentenced immediately after the election in November and it’s not just pushed back indefinitely due to recount horseshit or Trump crazies doing another insurrection.

    But there are other trials that are far more likely to result in additional prison time, the most important two being the classified documents case and the Jan 6th case. I have faith that the justice system will eventually follow through with punishing Trump, but the system is set up to slow-walk the rich and powerful to accountability.





  • I think the difference is that right-to-die advocates have gone to insane lengths to ensure beyond a reasonable doubt that their setups which administer the lethal substance do so painlessly, so as to ensure that the person willingly choosing to die spends their last few moments not in pain anymore.

    Prisons don’t seem to have the same standard in mind with their own setups. If anything, they seem to want to maximize suffering for the sake of the spectacle they’ve arranged the execution around.



  • I’m honestly shocked that the board hasn’t gotten rid of him yet. he’s just a massive source of problems for them. My suspicion is that he is so good at creating controversy that they can time their watches to it, so to speak, and buy/sell their positions in the company while Elon takes all the heat from the SEC for insider trading, not the crooked board members who know he’s a total whacko but acknowledge the reality that he has a lot of gullible techbros with too much money on their hands hanging on his every word and they will rush to buy Tesla stock or Dogecoin or whatever if Elon says he’s making market moves when he’s actually running his classic pump-and-dump schemes.



  • I’m not going to downvote you, but, I disagree. Nintendo might have had a leg to stand on if they tried to say Palworld infringed on their Pokemon intellectual property and/or copyright, especially after the mesh controversy, but they didn’t attack them on that. They’re going after Pocketpair for patent infringement on a so-far undisclosed patent. Probably a game mechanic of some sort. Pokemon did not invent the monster collecting and/or battling genre. Dragon Quest predates it by a good margin.

    I’d like to see the patent they claim to have. In what way might Palworld be infringing upon their patent that another similar game, like say TemTem for instance, is not? I hate the idea that a fun game mechanic can be patented and locked down by one company for up to 20 years.

    Palworld would not have caused the stir it did if not for the blatant “It’s Pokemon with guns!” angle.

    This was 100% a fan reaction to the trailer, and not an official stance by the developers at all. That’s obviously what they were going for, but they stopped long before outright saying it out loud and let the consumer make their own inferences.

    They have every right to go after them, but I really hope they lose this one. Nintendo doesn’t deserve to have a monopoly on fun creature collecting games.


  • I really don’t want Trump to get shot and killed.

    I really really want Trump to live the rest of his life in constant fear and paranoia, never able to enjoy the things that he loves, isolated from the world and starving for the adulation of the people who will quickly forget him in the prison of his own making as he taps away at his phone on his own little social media bubble, grasping at being relevant again until the day he dies of natural causes and the nation lets out a wet fart of false sympathy and lowers the flags to half staff for the day while the news media puffs him up one last time before they, too, stop giving a shit and we close this chapter of our lives and our nation.

    That requires Harris to beat Trump in November, so I need the fucker to stay alive until then.


  • The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it’s just only in the last decade or so that it’s been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it’s being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights… the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.

    The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is “Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade” it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don’t really care about. It doesn’t help that very few people understand the relationship between “the economy” as outlined by experts and “the economy” as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn’t matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that’s what they will remember when voting next time.

    Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.



  • We should’ve held a goddamn primary. If the Democrats were so convinced that the incumbency effect was worth skipping on a primary, they should’ve put it to the test and asked the American voters if they thought Biden was still the best guy for the job. Not a choice between Biden and Trump, but a choice between Biden and a number of other qualified candidates.

    If we’re being honest, pre-debate I would have still chosen Biden. I still think he’s capable of doing the job of President despite the poor showing, because I know that’s not Biden 100% of the time, that’s him 1% of the time when not on top of his game.

    Couldn’t be happier with the Harris replacement, though. It brought the energy we were sorely lacking. I’m just crossing my fingers and praying that people show up in November. Please, god, don’t let that fucking crook back in.


  • The one thing that just about anybody inside or outside the U.S. can agree on is that we have the best national parks, and the most unspoiled natural beauty across entire swathes of land. This doesn’t happen by accident. A love of nature transcends political affiliations. If anything I would say despite the social stigma of Democrats being “tree-huggers”, it’s actually conservatives and Republicans who have a vested interest in preserving and maintaining national parks and nature conservatories. Hunting and fishing in particular are big pass times in red states, so it makes sense that Republicans care deeply about the environment.

    Climate change denialism only takes root in conservative circles because it’s abstract enough to not be directly observable and is at direct odds with things like fossil fuels production that are major economic drivers in predominantly Republican controlled states. Although I think conservatives are finally waking up to that fact and are refusing to be spoon fed bullshit anymore. Hopefully not too late to reverse course.


  • If his team were actually smart they’d realize that lightning won’t strike twice and keep Trump’s mouth shut and keep him far away from the debate stage. Kamala will rip him apart in September, no doubt in my mind.

    The only reason he didn’t get a ton of criticism for his insanity at the last debate is because Biden was somehow worse and distracted everybody from Trump’s failing mental health and complete lack of a plan of action to fix the problems he rants and raves about all day and night.




  • When I first signed up for reddit, the upvotes and downvotes were not only separately tallied, but also showed the usernames of the most recent people who did them if you hovered over the button. Then very shortly after that they changed it so that it made votes private by default, and you could override it in the settings, but almost nobody went to check that box back on. Eventually, they completely removed that feature around the time upvotes and downvotes were combined into one. which along with vote fuzzing was one of the worst changes to reddit comments, imo.

    Lemmy feels like old reddit right now, which is a great spot to be in. I don’t think you necessarily need public vote info, but maybe it could be enabled on a per-community basis? I can see some communities like politics not wanting to add additional drama to the equation while other more content driven communities might enjoy knowing who was giving the feedback.


  • If something is locked behind plexiglass at a store, I simply won’t buy it. The few times I have because I was desperate for it and didn’t want/couldn’t wait for the online shipping, I always had to stand there in the aisle awkwardly waiting for an overworked employee who probably wasn’t getting paid enough to come unlock it for me. Feels bad and just makes me want to buy online every time rather than waste a trip to CVS or Home Depot or wherever they’re locking shit up now.