Try being in a relationship with someone who may become a target of the administration due to their status as a resident (but not citizen) of the USA and tell me the outcomes don't change.
You're right. I need to calm down. It's all theater that doesn't impact real people. We can just go about our merry way because no one has been kidnapped by federal agents in defiance of judicial orders.
There was a massive protest in the US this past weekend. Millions of people standing in solidarity. This was the 3rd such protest, each larger than the last.
What has changed?
One of these days the US will realize that emoting together with costumes and posterboards, bitching online, and loudly talking about how "my team is right!" is not effective.
So, in what ways is it effective to give a fuck about national politics? I haven't found any, and I'm emotionally tapped out. The government gets none of my attention.
Local government participation might yield small results, maybe. Not enough for me to give a shit. Seems like twice a week a state-or-lower politician gets rung up for bribes, corruption, etc. I have no desire to play that game, personally.
The people of Montgomery in the 60's boycotted a bus for a few weeks. What changed? They just got hosed down in the end.
If you're hoping for instantaneous change over a single event, you're not going to see that over a mass protest. The point of protests is to bring awareness and change sentiment.
>So, in what ways is it effective to give a fuck about national politics?
Kristi Noem didn't get fired because people "didn't give a flying fuck about politics". We aren't seeing dozens of republican representatives retire or not run for reelection because "people didn't give a shit about politics". The Epstien files, the push back against ICE, the pressure against the SAVE Act. I can go on all day.
If you feel powerless then feel free to stand by. But let's not pretend that absolutely nothing has changed just because you don't bother to read up on the news you admitted you "don't give a shit about"
Looking over the course of these past 15 months, it's clearly having some effect. I'm sorry if it's not fast enough for you, but not all problems are solved by bullets. Feel free to prove me wrong if you want.
If you do this, you are in effect ceding the stage to assholes. They will go and spew the post-truth hate soup to your aquantances and friends and family and come election day, they win.
I think protests are just a tool with varying success depending on context but political action is necessary if you don't want t o lose your country.
It's fair to expect people to pay attention to political issues that can affect them.
It's not fair to expect everyone to be intimately aware of every political gaffe, and instantly make the connection when you repeat it so they know not to reply to the comment seriously -- as the original comment was doing.
FFS, just put it in quotes so people know you're quoting someone. (Or if it's not a direct quote, mention that it's from the mentality of the person you're mocking.) Is that so hard? Is it so important that you feel special as someone who knows about that incident that you just have to provoke a confused flamewar?
The head of the DoJ, being questioned about the president of the United States' involvement in (one of) the highest profile child sex trafficking ring in US history and it's subsequent cover up using the FBI itself, yelling about the economy and that nobody cares about child sex trafficking... Is not exactly a normal "political gaffe".
I would, in fact, say it's a huge deal that anyone remotely aware of what's happening in politics should know about. It was headlined and broadcast on most major networks.
Nor do I see anybody upset that it was misinterpreted or that someone didn't know. Just people who didn't know about it name-calling anyone who did. So not sure how their little joke "provoked" a flamewar, vs people being sensitive and lashing out that they aren't in on the joke immediately.
I'd bet this is something the next Gen will be taught in high school history. I guess it's easy to pretend Watergate is just another Tuesday in midst the scandal.
As opposed to posting on HN complaining about reddit, which is where the real money's at? Nah, this shit was dank enough to make it into popular culture. We have:
1. The shamelessness absurdity of using "market is up" to deflect from a pedo scandal
2. The fact that the market said "nope" and tanked immediately after Bondi tried to lean on it
... and comments requiring the reader to be that way too should be downvoted/flagged. Look at the replies it produced: troll mission accomplished, "productive conversation" not so much.
At the very least, they could have put the comment in quotes to indicate they're quoting someone and it shouldn't be read at the object level.
Edit: Seriously? Am I wrong here? Are you all really okay with Poe's Law-ifying HN, where people post comments that are easy to read as serious when they were intended as ridicule of the person who said them, and the comments erupt in confusion and flames? That's not what we should be expecting out of HN.
Where did you get that idea about NYC water being untreated? NYC treats its water. Chlorine is added if and when needed. Testing stations exist to evaluate water quality all around the boroughs, etc.
You can't have a city of millions of people and have the water be potable from the tap without testing and treatment
> New York City’s water (including drinking water) is unfiltered, making it the largest unfiltered water system in the country. Were New York to begin filtering its water, it would cost the city approximately 1 million dollars per day to operate the filtration plant.
They have hundreds of sampling stations to check daily.
Oh, thanks for the link. I've been using flameshot for most of the past decade, but haven't been able to use it with pop-os and my monitors recently because it was derotating my monitor.
There were publications in the 80s that used that term iirc, and I do recall the term for how slightly incongruous it was, and how it didn't come with an explanation.
In looking into ut some more, it looks like the executive was a term from mainframes for the layer of the kernel that enforced isolation, but I must have read the term being loosely used in pc magazines. Or maybe mockingly?
In that context, what leads you call yourself and the rest of humanity primarily "consumers" in response to an essay? I think this has become uncomfortably (to me) normalized, and it begs the same question that Le Guin asks about whether we understand what we are doing when we are defining ourselves. A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?
> A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?
I find this is at the core of Stallman's criticism of the term "content". We speak of media "content", of "content authors", etc, as if movies, articles, books, etc were just that: content, ready to be commoditized, packaged and sold. And some of it is! But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.
Haven't read Stallman on it, but it's funny how vague & generic the term is, and how it requires the existence of a container. Content is simply "that which is contained." Seems to me it's a word you use when your primary interest is the container. Like you're the managing editor of a news website or the like. Metaphorically you have a mouth you need to fill with words, any words, or else people will stop paying attention. But I don't look at the world that way. I appreciate something good and call it whatever it is. The only time I use "content" is as an ironic and derisive synonym for cynical low-quality crap.
You should read Stallman, because what you said (container vs content) is his actual beef with it. It's looking at it from the perspective of companies who own the platform (the container) rather than from the more human perspective of artists and authors.
Less and less people have the option to male "art" and need to make "content" to simply survive. Art has historically been reserved for the elite privileged and it seems the world is heading back towards old norms as wealth consolidates.
In a similar breath, that may be why we don't heat much of the next generation of Stallman's and instead hear of a looming crisis in FOSS as the old guard retires. Less devs (if they are even pursuing that path down the line) will have the free time to choose FOSS as a path, unless big tech is paying for it to bend ot to their will.
>But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.
Specialization pretty much requires it, and our adherence to capitalism demands it.
You specialize to get paid, and by getting paid you can pay others that specialize to create. And you're right, it's a depressing system, but it's no less depressing than what came before that.
I have started to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow and while I cannot speak to most of the book, even in the first hundred or so of (ebook) pages, it challenges that frame of reference in a way that is clarifying, in the sense of being a palate cleanser, admitting different ways of thinking about these things.
>but it's no less depressing than what came before that.
You can make an argument that it is more depressing when the compartmentalization of everything also isolates off community. No amount of individual riches can repair a trusted community to engage with. We're definitely getting lonlier in the process.
Have to? No, there are other options. But to twist this question a little bit - does a child that grows up in the United States have to speak English? They do not, technically. And in fact some small percentage don’t, but the vast, vast majority do. And not because they chose to, but because that is the overwhelming tendency of the environment they live in. I think much the same happens with consumerism.
I think I hear you, but you're phrasing your twist as a choice made by individuals or made by their circumstances, e.g. choices that you are not a party to. However I'm asking about you in this case, alongside the "us" that comprise the people taking the time to observe and hypothesize about the world we're living in by discussing in on HN. Maybe after that it'll lead elsewhere.
A person doesn't have to be defined as a citizen either, even though membership in a community is as fundamental a part of being human as consuming goods is.
La Liga (the football company) likes to send out takedown notices to anyone who may host anything that looks like a football to protect their precious games, no matter the collateral damage or the lack of any requirements to show damage. They have the right to block anything in Spain at their discretion either by DNS or IP. They do seem to work in good faith if you talk to them, though, and if you can either remove sites or content when they ask.
So you think that people who have repatriated themselves would not have any interest in adopting some or all of the values of the place they have gone to? That seems really wrong at a lot of levels, though people rarely adopt all of the values of the place they move to (whatever the circumstances).
Doesn't seem to work in Firefox on Linux when I follow the TRY NOW! link and get sent to /setup. Ironically it asks me to copy the link and open it in my browser.
Unfortunately Firefox rarely has passkey support; so our whole auth system sadly doesn't work on that browser. In the future we'll add multiple auth methods. But for now you can switch to Brave, Chrome or most other Chromium browsers
I have met people who said they use vim for programming and don't know how to use commands like `%s` and `G` to do those basic things. I don't think most people understand how to use vim, and for those cases it's about the same as using any other editor with a find, and arrow keys and delete. That is, about as much an editor as any textarea in a browser.
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