@best_username_ever mentioned Semantic Versioning. It’s an actual spec. Not everyone follows it, and it doesn’t make sense for a lot of things, and far too many people are dogmatic about it. But it’s a good thing to read, and it’s not long.

A related, but not tightly coupled, spec is Changelog. Used together, and used correctly these two are nice for users.

I don’t know about this meme, but you know memes come in waves. It’s just the nature of memes.

That said, Germans - at least the Bavarians - have a special relationship with pizza second only to Americans. It’s kind of weird, because it’s so random. You don’t see this in, e.g., Southern France, and Italians seem almost ambivalent to it.

I think it’s because, despite the world wars, Germans generally have a fondness for American culture, the same way Americans generally have a fondness for Mexican culture. They have Germanized versions of American food, like we have Americanized versions of traditional Mexican food.

I don’t know who the French are fond of, besides themselves.

Did they watch the same debate that I did?

Because people fear having their culture and race replaced by immigrants. Even if they’re not overtly racist, few people wish to become a minority in “their own country.”

The US is famously a melting pot, and yet we still have a bunch of descendants of white immigrants from Europe who fear that South Americans will take over; that Mexican culture will replace good old-fashioned hodge-podge Western European culture. That their language will become less dominant. That they’ll find themselves strangers in their own country.

It’s usually an indistinct fear. It seems obvious from the verbiage in the dog-whistles, but white European immigrant descendants don’t want to become second-class.

Now, if we treated our own minorities well, they wouldn’t be so afraid. They wouldn’t be afraid that they’d be the ones with Hispanic cops kneeling on their necks; or that Hispanic immigrants would be living in giant homes and they’d themselves be the ones having to eak out a living as seasonal workers.

I think it’s not despicable to want to preserve your cultural heritage, your cultural language, and to have your country legislated with the values you grew up with; but people react poorly when they think it’s happening.

What I most despise in the Republicans in the US is that they’re advocating for preserving cultural values that never existed broadly in the US. The closest subculture to what they’re pushing is a return to the Confederate South: religion, and white supremacy. The Confederates got their asses handed to them, but the racist fuckers never gave up their values, most most Americans are blind to what their real agenda is. And they’ve been good insurgents, cleverly taking advantage of weak areas in our democracy to return power to a minority: themselves. It’s been said and it’s true: if America was a true democracy and we selected leaders by popular vote, no Republican under their current platform would ever be president again.

Anyway, getting back to your question: immigrants bring their own culture with them, and very few completely abandon it and adopt the culture and language of their new country. This dilutes the host country’s native culture, and people are afraid of that. In the US, it’s the highest form of hypocrisy, because our native culture displaced the indigenous culture, and now we’re afraid of someone else doing the same to us.

She was born in October; shit, you’re right. She’ll be barely legal in time for the election, and certainly eligible by the time she’d take office. So she won’t be too young to vote for by the time of the general election.

Wow.

The problem is that upvotes serve two conflicting proposes. Upvoting raises visibility, so one use is to say, “this is a post people should see.” In that case, you may not necessarily agree with the content of the post, but rather believe it’s worthy of debate. A good example of this is c/unpopularopinion, where the community rules specifically state to upvote if you agree it’s an unpopular opinion, not whether you agree with the opinion.

The other, conflicting, use is to signal approval or disapproval.

You can’t do both at the same time. It’s a flaw in design Reddit had, which they fixed but monetized. Lemmy did not learn from Reddit’s mistake and instead repeated it.

Two conflicting uses for the same action is terrible UX design.

Yah, absolutely. I’m frankly a little surprised Trump is still alive.

We know who Biden’s running mate is going to be, unless there’s a surprise upset. Trump’s is still up in the air and the weasels are currently fighting for it.

Thank you! So, in that situation, instead of 3 consecutive terms, we could see 4.

Assuming she’s successful, becomes far more popular, and there are no major crises that work against her.

The most reliable way to get re-elected is to be president when a war starts. Like how Bush Jr engineered 9/11 so he could ensure re-election(*). But it tensions escalated with Russia and we got involved, that’d do it.

(*) Yeah, no. I don’t really believe that. It’s just a joke.

2 years and 1 day

OK. This is a specific reference to something about our laws of succession about which I’m embarrassingly ignorant. Can you save me a web search and elaborate?

For sure. But there will be a lot of indirect debate on social media, because Trump can’t keep his burger-hole shut, and Klobuchar’s free to murder him (metaphorically) on public platforms. Even if he only posts to TruthSocial, everything he says gets parroted on X and Facebook, and that’s still where the most eyeballs are.

And old school public media picks this stuff up and repeats it - that’s mostly what they’ve been reduced to -but it still reaches a lot of eyes and ears.

And: Trump refusing another debate, she could just hammer on his cowardice, over and over. That’d be a win.

Klobuchar is tough. If nothing else, I’d love to see that fight. Only slightly less than I’d love to see an AOC v Trump fight; that’d be like watching a skinny junkie enter the MMA ring against Holly Holm. It’d be hilarious. But AOC is too young, and Trump will be either dead or in a home by the time she’s old enough to run. I just hope Bernie is still active enough by then to support her. I don’t know that she could get elected - she’s too polarizing - but it would be a marvelous spectacle.

Anyway, I prefer Yang’s politics, and I’d be thrilled to see Buttigieg in the White House, but I stand by Klobuchar as the best bet.

🙁 🤝

Lemmy really, really needs emoji responses that don’t require and entirely new comment.

Agreed, and agreed.

Why not Klobuchar? She’s got some national recognition from the 2019/20 cycle, politics are acceptable to moderates, progressive (enough), and she’d eat Trump for lunch in debates and on social media. Plus, she’s from the Midwest, and might pick up some folks for regional loyalty, and could play against the “slick New Yorker” which might still work.

The bases are going to vote party lines. I think undecideds and wavering moderates are the pick-up points, and I think Klobuchar could do that.

I like Yang’s politics, but he’s got a popularity problem, and Buttigieg - Trump would just harp on his sexual orientation, and I’m not confident enough that America’s ready yet to vote for a gay president. Hell, we can’t even get a woman into office.

IMO Klobuchar’s the safest bet against Trump.

Why?

Once again, we agree.

Why always with the old white men, when we have prominent politicians like Yang, Buttigieg, Klobuchar? And as for Bernie, if you want a firebrand who’s going to alienate moderates, why not AOC? Well, she’s too young to run, but she’s not the only truly liberal option. Warren is old enough, progressive enough, and a woman. But, no, Bernie Bros gotta Bro.

Yeah, it’d have to be a Lemmy design change, and then all of the many clients would have to implement it… momentum is a powerful force in the software world, and difficult and dangerous to overcome. Look at the fiasco of Python 3; that was a cock-up of epic proportions. Lemmy’s got enough users and clients now that changes have to be made extremely carefully.

which is what I’d wager many think of when you say “the Internet”

I wager you’d be right, but most people are wrong.

I’m saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees’s creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it’s clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.

I’m not saying it’s right; I’m just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.

I’m sorry if I’m repeating some other response; often my Lemmy client can’t load sub comments, and I see you already have 6.

I think we’re voting for Kamala. She’s not running because she can’t win, not against Trump, and probably not against anyone else. She’s even more unpopular than Biden, and the Right would have a field day if she were the front runner.

But, frankly, side by side, Trump looks more healthy and robust than Biden, and it’s saying something. If Biden is elected, Kamala will be president before the end of his term.

I don’t know if that’s terrible; I don’t particularly care for her, but she’s better than Trump, and is on the right side of most of the issues I care about. Also, if she did a decent job and had some luck, she’d be able to run again for a second term, and we could get an unusual streak of three liberal(ish) terms.

As for Biden, a president’s staff does most of the real work of any president; I think of a president more like the captain of a large ship: they take a lot of input from the crew, and make decisions. They don’t gather the information or touch the controls; as long as they have a competent team, I suspect nearly anyone could functionally be president. As long as he’s mentally capable of processing the information he’s given and making rational decisions, he can do his job. I’m just no longer convinced he’s going to be capable of that for a full term, and the way he’s looking, I wouldn’t be surprised if he physically failed in the next 4 years.

So: President Harris. I just hope they’re putting effort into making sure she can step into the shoes quickly. If Biden can even win this election.

Biden, though. Dude’s looking like Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China.

They need a “follow accounts” button here. Like if a reporter used

Thank you!

And: dude! I have totally thought the same thing! It’s so weird that Mastodon has follow-accounts, but no communities; Lemmy has join-communities but no follow-accounts; and they’re both ActivityPub. You’d think that would be a no-brainer feature, right?

I think most non-Southerners’ exposure to it is in media, where it’s almost always racist in context. There’s a surprising amount of subtly in Southern social interactions that I think it’s missing from most of the US. Sure, Midwesterners are known for raising passive-aggressiveness to an art form, but you recognize it no matter where you’re from.

The subtly in social interactions in the South are truly exceptional, hard to get a handle on, and unmatched anywhere else in the US - IMHO. Southerners have as many ways of being condescending as Eskimos have words for snow.

Is that phrase still acceptable, or is the Eskimo/snow comment now not PC? Is it still OK to use the term “Eskimo?” If the Eskimo thing is offensive, I sincerely apologize. An alternative would be “as North-westerners have words for rain,” but I don’t know if that’s as widely understood an idiom.

The internet originated in the US. All of the original specs were made by Americans. ASCII is literally built around English, and ASCII is at the foundation of every single core technology of the internet. Hell, even when they designed UTF-8, it was still Western-centric; to this day it gets some push back from the Orient, because it’s makes things harder for them - I think there was a fight to standardize on UTF-16 because it was easier for Asian languages; I may not be remembering the details correctly, but there’s some legitimate beef some Asian languages have with UTF-8.

Now, obviously, more non-Americans are on the internet than Americans, but it’s the same argument as Critical Race Theory: when the entire foundation and infrastructure is built on a bias, that bias influences all interactions even when isn’t overtly obvious, or even intentional.