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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • The issue I have is that there is an incredibly corrupt, absolutely vile, but completely legal explanation for the massive difference in down-ballot participation; Musk and other billionaires flooded social media platforms with heavy pro-Trump propoganda. Easily influenced people were pushed to vote for Trump, but given no directions for how to vote locally, so they didn’t.

    Should these votes be counted is another question entirely. I personally don’t view it any differently than vote buying, as these voters are essentially agents fulfilling their orders, but there’s nothing on the books that bars anyone from manipulating low-intelligence people from voting how they’re told.




  • Like, I can only shoot two portals ever? Single-use would imply only being able to shoot one portal, but that doesn’t seem very useful.

    Also wasn’t portal travel hella toxic? To the point that it killed Cave Johnson? I sure as hell won’t be using it to save time on my commute or anything.

    I think I’d have to use it for violence, like sending a war criminal off a large building, but you couldn’t even really have fun with it. Everyone fantasizes about launching a billionaire straight into space, but you’d need multiple portals to get them into a situation where they’re building momentum first.

    Also, if there’s no material emancipation grids, are the portals just there forever? The portal gun doesn’t have an off switch or a way to deactivate existing portals.



  • There’s some interesting theories in this thread, but I want to bring up one that I don’t see talked about much; American democracy has been so dysfunctional for so long, the average American citizen absolutely assumes they’re being lied to on the campaign trail. Nobody ever believes a politician is going to accomplish even a quarter of the things they campaign on here. This is a big part of what made Trump so popular, with the line of thinking being “he’s an outsider, so he’ll be different.” The problem then becomes one of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, Trump being an outsider should be a reason to always take what he says at its face value. On the other, Trump is a politician now, and as established, politicians always lie on the campaign trail, so why would you expect him to keep his promises?

    I’m not going to pretend to understand how the average American is able to do the mental gymnastics necessary to maintain these two contradictory ideals, but I think it’s important to point out that a lot of his supporters grew up with zero faith in the democratic process ever helping them.


  • It someone creates a program for Windows, that program will likely still work 10 years from now

    I was with you all the way until here. This statement is absolutely laughable to anyone who has messed around with older videogames. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, running it in compatibility mode with the version of Windows the game was made for will work, but oftentimes you’re reliant on fan patches or long installation guides showing you the exact configuration of settings necessary to stop the game from constantly crashing. At that point, getting the older game to run on Windows is just as tedious as getting it to run on Linux, potentially less.

    You still are getting more of a guarantee from Microsoft, because Windows versions have typically had long lifecycles and were pretty averse to risky-changes within an OS release, but even that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore with Windows 11.




  • Pfft, this is almost hilariously naive. Unless you think Kamala Harris seriously had a chance of winning an 80%+ landslide victory, Trump’s election was determined when our Supreme Court made a clearly partisan ruling declaring Trump was an untouchable king. At that moment, it became clear that any contested election would be resolved by the SC in Trump’s favor, ala Bush v Gore in 2000.

    I’m as disappointed as anyone else that he won cleanly, but Trump was inevitable. He’s been inevitable for decades. No country becomes fascist overnight, the American people have been voting towards this outcome since before I was born.








  • This comment really doesn’t help your case. The race is notable because minorities in the U.S. have not engaged in this sort of behavior against us. I imagine it’s because they’re more used to the law being antagonistic against them, or because they come from other countries like OP where the law isn’t traditionally threatened in such a frivolous manner. I’m calling out a very specific kind of American, which I think anyone whose worked customer service in the U.S. knows very well.


  • I work at a company that often gets threatened to be sued by entitled white people. The important thing to remember is that these dumbass Americans have no idea how their legal system works.

    What typically happens, in my experience, is an entitled white dumbass takes issue with a rule or requirement they were told but ignored. They’ll make a big grandstanding show of threatening the lawsuit, because they think if they look scary enough you’ll give them whatever they wanted. Then they’ll get to the lawyers, who without fail will explain to them how they have no legal grounds for a case. Sometimes, if the dumbass is exceptionally entitled, they’ll even shop around a few law firms trying to find anyone to take the case. Eventually, we just stop hearing about these people, because they give up on trying to sue us. They’re all talk and no bite.