hotspur

Daaamn, he is literally doing that emoji

It’s a real fear, but they can’t outright fire most federal employees. It’s why they’re so into the schedule f thing, because it allows them to reclassify a ton of jobs as at-will appointment jobs and that would allow them to summarily terminate and replace those positions.

It’s why they’re planning so many other moves like arbitrary relocation (they say ok your agency is now gonna be based out of Iowa, you can move or quit) blocking and cutting funding so that hiring is impossible and people don’t get raises, can’t find projects, etc.

But based on the rhetoric I would agree that there are some very nasty things brewing, and being reclassified and then terminated for being a democrat isn’t a crazy outcome, which is bad.

I have read that at first they’re gonna tread lightly, because if you outright destroy major agencies it causes huge visible blowback. So it may be slow at first. But on the other hand, it’s pretty clear after this election that no one cares about what people want, and they may be assuming that there won’t be more elections that they can’t fake so they don’t have to worry about people being pissed off after they get rid of all the agencies that work to keep things functional.

He’s got such a genuine smile.

I’m also noticing this. Since many of the posts are screen caps of text, this is making many posts completely illegible. The artifacting makes the text unreadable.

Half the country didn’t vote. 70 million people directly voted for this outcome. If you want to rage at something, it would be appropriate to send it that way.

Consider how self-righteous and smug posts serve to dampen enthusiasm and cause people vote in contrarian ways. When dems and their dedicated supporters stopped trying to earn votes and instead switched to the current hostage-negotiation method of campaigning, they also ceased telling any kind of story about the future. The message became “it’s gonna be bad, but possibly less bad than if we let the evil man win” The margins were so bad it can’t be lazily pinned on antifa super soldiers. Something didn’t sell to a huge number of people.

The call is coming from inside the house, and lockstep supporters who refuse to question anything are the reason the DNC felt comfortable running the same losing strategy they’ve run over, and over and over again. To support this is to ensure it will keep happening. The DNC and their apparatus are completely to blame for their poor performance, and trying to externalize the blame simply covers for them and lays the ground work for more poor performance and weak results.

At this point the DNC would probably perform better if it dropped all the consultants and just randomly picked people off the street in different states.

But honestly, this is assuming the DNC fucked up, but they really do seem more comfortable with a fascist being in power than a candidate who might threaten corporate power, so possibly this is just the system functioning as intended.

If I lived in a swing state, I suspect I would have voted Harris based on harm reduction, but it would have pissed me off. They’ve indirectly told me they don’t want, and don’t need my vote throughout the campaign.

Colder war was what got me interested in him, great short story.

They’re pretty fun little books, fairly unique little setup.

Is that the same Charlie Stross that writes the James-bond-meets-Cthulhu-IT-worker books?

I remember when I learned that jeep Windshields fold down not because it’s a cool lifestyle thing, but because it allows you to stack them on top of each other in the holds of liberty ships… didn’t have to worry about roll bars in ww2 I suppose.

Unless we get a blow-out for either candidate that cannot be challenged, which does not seem likely based on the polls and battle lines, even if we have a Biden-esque victory for Harris, I’m fairly unsure of what will happen next. I personally doubt full on Civil War like in the Garland movie, or the actual civil war, but I would expect all kinds of shitty legal tricks, possible Supreme Court involvement and of course, stochastic and targeted violence, particularly towards immigrants and minorities. In other words, win or lose, I think the US may be in for a bad time. Hopefully I’m working in my assumptions here and it is somewhat more boring.

To better answer your question though, assuming things don’t completely fall apart: the two sides already don’t mix much, which is part of the problem in the first place. We’ll get more govt inaction due to gridlocked congress, probably more defense spending and some states, in the absence of federal legislating, will continue to take a larger role as they have been doing already in the recent era.

So basically more of the same, on a not-great trend line. Something has to give at some point, it’s hard to imagine how you could put the genie back in the bottle now, particularly with overall conditions in the world due to late-stage capitalism and climate change constricting each year.

Bulbasaur has curves, jeep is a series of boxes. So very possibly bulbasaur wins.

I also have seen zero ads, which struck me as weird. But also, I bet they count free game codes to content creators, sponsored streams and the like,so maybe a lot of the money was spent targeting streamers, tick tok and YouTube—a bunch of the people I subscribe to have been hyping cod zombies. Granted many of them played warzone a lot so it didn’t seem that weird to me.

According to the totally unintentional and legit executive leak, they stacked 100 them!

Ah that’s interesting. There’s something about the lighting and color that really ramps up the seedy and grubbiness things, seems crucial to the movie.

I hope he doesn’t drastically fuck with the color grading. He has a distinctive look he does since digital everything, and it’s fine, but Fight Club uses it to highlight the anodyne normal life parts, and then has a more organic and vibrant palette for the Tyler durden side.

Man I’d like that so much. Nothing else has come close to Silence of the Lambs vibes like that show does.

Well said-I feel the same.

That is kinda brilliant

Yeah I could imagine that. I’ve also been fairly impressed with it for making something more concise and summarized (I sometimes write too much crap and realize it’s too much).

I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:

1. It ignores the very real number of voters who chose not to vote democratic or vote at all simply because of Clinton as candidate.
2. it ignores massive mistakes made by a hubristic campaign that couldn’t fathom losing to trump.
3. it supposes that people that voted green, would have gritted their teeth and instead voted Clinton, which is not a safe assumption.

Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.

I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.