Yes and no.

You can bet that there would have been 8 years of propaganda against her. And we would have lost even more house/senate seats because people on the left historically decide to not bother to vote in midterms unless there is an active threat on CNN.

And… I am pretty sure we would have lost in 2020 because of COVID. Which would basically put us back to where we were in 2020 in terms of having a deranged fascist who nobody realized was too dumb to accomplish anything (not a problem this time. See Project 2025).

The main difference would be the Supreme Court. Yes, republicans did everythiing they could to protevent Obama from appointing anyone and I would not put it past them to have stretched that out for a full four years. But Scalia (Rest in Piss) would still be dead and so would Ginsburg (fuck her for putting us in this mess). Which would have made the math a lot tighter. 7 justices but the math would have been tight enough that Hilary likely would have gotten to appoint at least one moderate.

I think Hilary would have bought us the better part of a decade because, like her or not, she is an incredibly effective politician… when nobody thinks she is running for POTUS. She is/was even more generally liked by both sides of the aisle than Biden and would never have had to make concessions to sanders and The Squad for the 2020 ticket (Biden is an asshole but his platform is shockingly Left leaning by US standards…)…

And I think trump would have faded into nothing. But there are plenty of other people who were just looking for an excuse to become a magat on the republican side. And people like cruz and romney and even liz cheney would not be complete laughing stocks without trump. So, at best, we were looking at a ticking clock to the next “reagan republican” as it were.

Like, there are a lot of people who consider the day Ginsburg died to be the day the US collapsed. And we are seeing exactly the repercussions of that with shit like today.

The CCP are actively engaging in genocide (remember the Uyghurs? Probably shouldn’t if you don’t want to piss off the CCP) and have a long history of “reeducation” camps.

While I have very serious problems with how the majority of western nations handle immigration and human rights violations, that is more along the lines of “oh, please stop isreal. By the way, here are all those bombs you asked for. Don’t use them all on one mosque!” or actively turning people back to be executed in the horror they are running from (although, the US is doing a great job of having some stuff that looks a lot like concentration camps on the Southern border…).

But it is still night and day in terms of horror. The day is pretty shitty but the night… holy fuck.

But also? That doesn’t change anything. It is a nation’s responsibility to engage in basic espionage if only to protect its people’s interests. And governments all have the power to basically shit on a visitor’s human rights so long as they can keep the embassies from finding out. So why take any risks you don’t need to?

Oh yeah. I DEFINITELY have some horror stories over needing to access GUI apps remotely (my favorite involved a secure tunnel to one facility to then tunnel back to a machine that was literally three doors down from my office…)

But stuff like the web interfaces to ms/google office make the vast majority of this trivial. Since SSH always worked in Windows via (god awful) putty. And increasingly other applications are understanding they need to support server/client setups so you are just connecting over a tunnel rather than using a remote desktop protocol.

Plenty of companies are, rightfully, adopting security models where even domestic workers never have a copy of anything sensitive on a laptop (sometimes even desktop) and rely on corporate servers to do work. Yes, it really fucking sucks during an outage but it avoids the never ending problem of people leaving their laptop at a starbucks. There is absolutely zero reason to not do that on foreign travel.

Also: The point of business travel is to have meetings or collaborations that can’t be done remotely. For the former, you basically just need that set of slides and the ability to fetch a limited subset of other data. For the latter? You are by necessity taking corporate secrets and having a secure connection back home is a bare minimum.

And if your IT department have problems reprovisioning laptops to contain basically a VPN client and a web browser? Then you have even bigger problems. In a semi-competent world, you just reimage a laptop in a closet to the minimum machine that you give to a new hire and then you flag the user’s account for heightened security in whatever VPN setup you have. Because it is REALLY easy to detect if something is connecting from where it shouldn’t be (e.g. Fred is in Canada but suddenly is trying to connect from Australia) or is anywhere near a government facility or airport (… no comment).

As an aside, I’ll point out that I have worked with various government and government adjacent orgs over my years. Their security is complete dogshit next to a decent sized company. Because they are just protecting government secrets and focused on covering their asses. A company is protecting potentially billions of dollars and everyone’s livelihood. Which makes for an environment where you aren’t ten years behind the state of the art because nobody wants to risk jail time (which they would not get if they are acting in good faith…) over approving something as crazy as a VPN.

I’ve personally never done the trip to China for a lot of reasons (you know you are living your best life when a postdoc explains that you should never under any circumstances go to China because of what you have said) but do a lot of foreign travel for work:

No company should let any employee bring corporate electronics on international travel. Have burner phones and laptops that are set up to do incredibly minimal work locally (basically just have the slides… maybe) and to remote in. And work with your IT department to “randomly lock” them if a wrong password is detected in an airport or government facility.

It doesn’t matter if it is the UK asking if we want the left or right hand this time or the CCP: It is just an unnecessary risk that is easily avoided.

And then inform the traveler of whether they want to bring their personal devices or not.

Time for every police union in the country to side with the cowards who enabled the murder of children.

But damned if we’re gonna do anything about it.

I am less convinced that alternate voting models will make a significant difference (especially when we look at stuff like France actively unifying the left-leaning parties to fight fascism), but cool.

Unless you are going to implement that by early October, it isn’t the topic at hand. The topic at hand is harm reduction and preserving human rights.

Yup. The problem isn’t you not giving the slightest of shits about human rights. The problem is people not showing you the proper respect .

Anyone who is that much of a monster was never going to be an ally.

If you can look at women losing basic human rights over the course of a single workday and not care because the guy you liked that had spent literally decades actively dicking over Democrats in Vermont (seriously. Look it up. It is hilarious) didn’t get the full support of the entire party instnatly?

You are a monster.

Anyone who ACTUALLY cares about human rights should understand the importance of voting for harm reduction. They should have fucking understood it in 2016 but they better fucking understand it in 2024.

Because, here is the thing: I’m Chinese. Both parties use my family as the bogeyman the moment it is convenient. AND we have been indoctrinated to let people step on us if it helps others because we “are the model minority”. You give me a candidate who actually gives a fuck about 7.2% of the country and I am gonna scream from the rooftops in joy.

Doesn’t matter. Because I also give a shit about women and immigrants and LGBTQ+ folk and so forth.

And if someone is throwing a hissy because they didn’t win in 2015 at the expense of those folk? They are horrible and SHOULD feel bad.

You do both.

I am not as focused on ranked choice as others (I very much argue we basically already have the outcome with the primary system) and would rather a focus on getting rid of the electoral college entirely to allow for a popular vote. It doesn’t matter

What matters is making sure we have a country where we can push toward that in a few years. Since, especially in 2024, one candidate is outright talking about dismantling democracy entirely. And, because of 2016, we have a supreme court that is basically “what do republicans want us to do?” at any given moment.

Its great that you liked Sanders. I… have very mixed feelings about him and mostly am angry at how much influence he pissed away.

But here is the thing? If you don’t think you are being represented by the party? Then work with it. Even Sanders learned that after he spent most of his career actively dicking over the Democrats and it resulted in him becoming a household name.

Contact your local Democratic party. The Internet loves to paint them as bogeymen who actively hurt any good candidates and… some do. But the majority are the idealists who joined up because they gave a shit about Obama or Hilary or even Sanders. But they support the people who run because… they understand that the goal is harm reduction. Someone who gives a crap and is willing to do outreach work? You have a LOT of influence and can work on seeking out those candidates who DO represent you. And as you shift the local party, so too do you eventually shift the bigger party. Because as much as people hate ol’ Genocidde Joe: he is ridiculously left of Clinton and, in some aspects, even Obama.

I am glad we got The Squad, even if they are sometimes idiots. But Sanders should have led to a mass shift in the party as a whole.

Yeah. My father is a REAL piece of shit and said it in the context of “I hate that <homophobic slur> Bush” but it still sticks with me:

In primaries? Vote for who you like. When it is time for the real election? Vote for the platform you hate the least. Bare minimum, it gives you the right to bitch and moan come February. Because if you don’t vote? You actively chose to not have a say in the government.

… well, you also may have been disenfranchised by a bunch of republican shitheads. But it is the thought that counts.

Also, if you are putting all of your energy into telling people that the election is rigged and the candidate is unelectable and your vote doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter if that particular moron is “just venting” and still plan to vote. You are actively discouraging others from voting.

And those tend to be the same kind of idiots who think you vote once every four years. Rather than every single year. Because your representatives in congress matter a lot. So does the god damned local comptroller in your town. Because “grass roots” is not a bunch of people online deciding they like the c-span meme guy. “Grass roots” is about shifting your local party in the direction you want so that you can get those good candidates in office and turn a red state blue and so forth.

And THIS is why you vote for harm reduction every fucking year.

Yes, this has been part of a plan going back to even before reagan. But one fucking election of people whining that the wrong person won the primaries extra fucked the supreme court for the foreseeable future. And we have the same clowns trying to pull the same shit going into this Fall.

Have you ever tried to torrent something less popular? One seed with shit upload getting ganged up on by ten leeches. Five of which disconnect the second they hit 100%.

Regardless, a torrent-like approach would work for large creators like Michael Reeves where thousands of people are going to be willing to act as seeds indefinitely. Someone like Matt Yuan might be lucky to have enough seeds for the latest two videos.

And it also doesn’t work for anything live. And becomes a huge mess for premiers where people need to wait for the upload to propagate. MAYBE the latter could be handled with pre-seeding with an unlock coming at the release time but… it is a matter of minutes until a kick level creator nopes out by uploading CSAM “for the lolz”

He is a human trafficking serial rapist. End of story. Anything else is just spewing his own propaganda to legitimize the very real hurt he does to the world.

Please, do not even pretend that a human trafficking serial rapist gives a shit about “the role of fathers in a child’s life”

A lot of smaller multiplayer games and older live games. Also a not insignificant number of fighting games.

If you ever noticed rubber banding or games straight up being broken if the wrong player is the host: That is your friendly reminder of how shitty most people’s internet setup actually is. People piggy backing off the starbucks on the first floor is a meme for a reason.

Were the ad companies interested in increased profits? Of course they were. But they also aren’t a charity. And when they are buying ad space for a web comic but having zero impressions, they are going to be pissed. They aren’t running a charity (well… some actually ARE but that is a different mess).

Again, this has been going on well before subscription models were even a thing.

That said, I do agree that it is a generational “problem”. Youtube has been around for almost 20 years and, arguably, in its current form for almost 10. Significant parts of the internet have no memory of anything else. Like, my niece and nephew literally throw tantrums when they see tv commercials when their father is watching a football game. Whereas my sister and I remember the fights over who got to use the downstairs bathroom during the second commercial break in The Simpsons that week.

But… I am an old. I remember heartfelt blog posts from some of my favorite webcomics and gaming news sites that were basically “Look. Hosting costs money. Especially as we are getting a lot more popular. I go out of my way to curate what ads we run on this site and have an inbox set up in case a company sneaks a bad one in. Please whitelist me in your ad blocker so I can keep doing this in the evenings”.

And… I dunno. It is just REALLY frustrating to watch people pretend they care about… anything all while dicking over “the little guys”. Because Google is going to get their cut. The pewdiepies of youtube will also get their cuts because they have literally been doing this for years in the form of sponsored videos. But the low/mid tier creators? They aren’t getting the massive sponsor deals (unless they want to do raid shadow legends or better help) AND are going to not be getting their ad revenue or youtube premium money because no ads were run.