SomethingMusic
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User ID: 181
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I'm also split 50-50. I know who I'd like to win, but I really do believe it's an overall tossup, even if polls are hedging.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
Even though I've seen people here claim the 2024 election doesn't have the energy of 2016, I disagree. No one does this unless they're willing to have fun with it, and Trump is definitely having fun with it. It is a way to political points, sure, but it just sparks joy seeing these kinds of antics.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
Monarch uses 3rd parties for authorization, so Plaid, MX, or Finicity will log into your account. Monarch itself does not store passwords. Whether you trust the 3rd parties, of course, is another discussion.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I use Monarch. Having multiple commercial trackers is incredibly useful as a number of banks don't play nice with Plaid (including my primary bank). It's great as it is quite comprehensive, I can track all of my investment accounts on it quite easily from individual accounts to 401k, manage budget and expenses and add notes for purchases for reminders (very useful if you have multiple revenue streams and you need to match expenses to income for tax deductions). I find it fairly comprehensive.
I have a referral link here if anyone wants to try it.
There is no election fraud in Ba Sing Se.
Many words on The Motte have been spilled about the lack of any real election fraud in the US and about the security of modern elections. The arguments against election fraud can be summarized as there being no election fraud as all audits in the election process have found no notable fraud. On the other hand, the actions of election committees, the opaque processes, strange and unexpected results, last minute rulings, and statistical anomalies has convinced many people that election fraud is much more widespread and commonplace than we are led to believe.
Recent news in Pennsylvania has shown that an election committee has caught approximately 2500 instances of fraudulent voter registration., with another 1500 fraudulent registrations in another county.
A large number of suspicious voter registration applications were dropped off at the county elections office near Monday's deadline, county officials said. An investigation by the district attorney's office found incorrect addresses, false identification information, false names and names that did not match Social Security information.
Adams said her investigators found problems with 60% of the registrations they have so far reviewed. She did not say how many of the 2,500 registrations had been investigated. She said applications came from people living in the city, as well as Columbia, Elizabethtown, Akron, Ephrata, Stevens and Strasburg.
The problem about fraud investigations is that they largely focused on where the ballots end up and not on their creation and submission. Like laundering money, mixing real with illegal votes becomes impossible to distinguish when you might only need 5000-10000 fake ballots of 200000 people to flip a county. The more legitimate and illegitimate votes combine, the harder it is to prove that there were fake registrations to begin with.
Even if it is from a lazy ballot collector half-assing their work to get paid, extrapolating from this limited data set is concerning. These are just one or two counties of a 67-county state, and it is incredibly difficult to prove fraudulent registrations once these ballots pass through. Lancaster County and York are historically red counties who are probably more vigilant than, say, Philadelphia in regard to election integrity. Also, these registration submissions were quite obvious, a mass drop off of 2500 right before the deadline. What's the likelihood there were other registration submissions that weren't caught during the submission time period?
There are some real questions that need to be raised about securing failure points regarding election integrity, and there's finally some concrete evidence indicating that there are attempts to manipulate the vote through fake voter registrations. I doubt any of this would have been caught if it wasn't for Trump's fight regarding election integrity in 2020.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
Even if normies can only get through 15-20 minutes, for a voter who gets their information about only the most outrageous and bifurcating statements, any exposure to humanize himself is an incredibly positive move. Going on the podcast circuit was a genius idea supposedly pushed by Baron, and this type of forward thinking really sets himself as a trendsetter instead of an evil bogeyman. It's much harder for the media to discredit his personality when there's a 3-hour long form podcast, even if the interview is fairly benign compared to the interviews by legacy media.
I slightly agree with number 8, at this point the battlelines are largely drawn. I voted before the interview even came out.
Also, I'd like to point that the 18 million views with Rogan is just on Youtube. This doesn't include Spotify or any other media platform where this interview may have been shared.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
It'd still be a valuable cultural commodity if people could open the NYT, or WaPo, or watch CNN or Fox News, and go "yeah, that's probably true enough".
Where do comedy podcasters get their discussion topics? When Joe Rogan goes 'Jamie, look that up' where do you think Jamie gets his links? All podcasters did is eliminate the middlemen of a team of writers between the personality and the news.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I'm not so sure about that. Most millennials and zoomers grew up on 'comedy politics' as their primary method of political indoctrination in high school through college, be it "last week tonight" with John Oliver, 'The Colbert Report' with Stephan Colbert, 'The Daily Show' with John Stewart, etc. Political comedy has been around for the past 70 years and has been an important part of at least informing, if not indoctrinating, the past few generations.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I haven't followed the DJT stock at all. It's pretty clear Truth social's constituents client base has been basically cannibalized by Elon buying X and making it a more open platform for a fuller range of political appetites. Perhaps Elon will use X to buy Truth, but it seems unlikely. To be fair, they could have many paths towards diversification, (Truth.TV?) (Truth.news?). The question is if they raised the capital requirements to make such a website, hire talent, and prevent hackers from attacking their platform.
I agree though, unless there is a clear plan going forward, I highly doubt DJT's long term profitability unless they can post some insane earnings.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I could never get into HPMOR. I've tried several times, but the author always gets caught in their own intellectual obsessions and forgets about characterization, the plot, and generally seems like an autist overanalyzing every situation. It reads like bad Frank Herbert, or a particularly bad Ender's Game with a need to articulate every thought an analysis of every situation.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
The soul bending bit is by far the weakest part of the show and is the one thing I truly dislike about it (much more than season 1 starting clearly as a kids show). It undermines the roll of the Avatar and one of the most important lessons Aang has to deal with - to be the arbiter of justice, you must sacrifice your own spiritual needs to protect the world. In the same episode, they completely undermine this important lesson with the soul bending. I understand why they did it (it is a kids show) but it undermines an important parallel of the real world, that to be the arbiter of justice is to sacrifice your own humanity protect other peoples.
What makes avatar great is that there clearly is a power curve where characters get more powerful over time, but what's much more important and prominent is that the characters grow and have emotional and physical challenges over time. The avatar is stupidly powerful, yes, but in Shonen anime the character arc is about getting more powerful to defeat the bad guy, while in Avatar it's much more about the change from a kid to an adult, and the emotional and moral growth you have in that journey. Diminishing it to just a 'shonen anime' overlooks a lot of what makes it popular.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I'm surprised the number of responses that recommended split keyboards. Maybe I should look into those more closely.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
Something that bothers me about the whole mechanical keyboard market is that there really is no good way to test keyboard without spending the money. It's more than what I'm willing to spend by about $100, especially if I'm going to be leaving it in an office. I might bring my current keyboard into the office and keep the new keyboard at home.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I'm leaning toward Keychron myself, but almost everything I heard says they still require modding after work to make them really good. Maybe their higher end models are better out of box experiences.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I'm starting another office job which requires a reasonable amount of typing, so instead of using the work supplied keyboard which makes me want to throw it out the window, I'm interested in what input devices everyone uses. I find my YouTube and internet searches aren't definitive, and I really don't want to spend a grotesque amount of time and money on finding the right keyboard. My current criteria are:
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I prefer linear over tactile or clicky. I hate clicky the most.
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Full size is preferred. I use the num pad for work
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Hall effect is a plus
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Minimal out of box tinkering, even if it comes at some premium.
What keyboards are you using?
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I'd watch that show.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
The supreme court ruling made their job harder, but there's plenty of ways to get around AA directly. They just have a harder time sorting and categorizing student essays and using plausible deniability. They have to go by application address and correlated by essay instead of a box the applicant clicks.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I agree, Trump had a lot of attack vectors. Debates are stressful. If your body was in full adrenaline mode, it's hard to fully concentrate and really have the calm analytical mindset. As soon as Trump is in control he dominates, but Kamala really prepared well and was able to match Trump's energy, preventing from giving him time to calm down. Having to debate the moderator as well didn't help.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
He's a very extroverted and present focused individual, I think he probably feels emotions and slights acutely which causes him to overreact when attacked. I would argue it is a strength in many situations, but a weakness in prepared debate prep, especially when the 'moderator' is actively causing a further hassle for him.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
Kamala got under Trump's skin. Trump had good zingers but is forced to fight against Kamala and the 'host' at the same time. The mics are live and Kamala was talking over Trump when it was Trump's turn. He should have pointed out how Kamala claimed she was the 'president of democracy and not name calling' and proceeded to name call Trump.
Trump did one of the three things he needed to do in the debate: Kamala and Biden's weakness and failure on immigration.
The other things he needed to do is remind viewers how unpopular and useless she was as Vice President and how much we wasted government tax dollars on projects which yielded nothing. If he wasn't emotionally suckered into Kamala's attacks, he would easily dominate the debate.
Kamala is performing better than I thought. Trump is performing about par compared to his other debates.
I would prefer a Trump presidency vastly compared to a Kamala presidency.
Kamals' voice is not particularly pleasant to listen to.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
Conflating Canton with Cleveland is a misnomer, Canton is about an hour drive away and doesn't share any local government services with Cleveland . The likelihood of any significant cross pollination between impoverished Clevelanders and Cantoners(?) is pretty minimal unless Cleveland is buying a one-way bus ticket for the mentally ill.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
You know the media's successfully pigeonholed reality when no one is mentioning that Trump was shot at and very nearly killed at a rally. Don't you think that would negatively damage ones ability to rally?
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
The larger problem is that it'll be ineffective. As you said, it really isn't enough to defray costs. Every 1st world country is running into population replacement problem, but the larger problem is sticky wages, the lack of young men willing to be fathers, the lack of infrastructure in cities for children and families, and the widespread popularity of reproductive services. Current societal standards aren't supportive for children, and the increasing selfish nature of young generations is compounding the problem. At some point throwing money at the problem isn't effective, it is the culmination of many social issues compounding into the lack of family formation.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
Ahh ,my bad. Still pretty accurate and funny in a dark humor way.
Ammo is probably more liquid and has less oversight as well.
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