CatBus

CatBus said:

As long as Trump’s approval stays above ~32%, they keep the Senate–with no real risk of losing it until 2022.

A few more serious hits and I may change my fairly dismal 2018 predictions.

That said, further progress would involve changing the minds of people who approve of Trump today, so it would take quite a lot. Each percentage point is harder-fought than the last, especially when you’re digging into core support.

Also worth noting–once Trump hits or slips under ~32%, Republican Senators up for re-election may show a sudden interest in joining their Democratic peers in the congressional oversight process, as a way to improve their odds (i.e. erasing their history of stonewalling for Trump). Which would also be a good outcome, one that could yield results before 2019.

I can’t even.

CatBus said:

I doubt we’ll ever hear much more detail about this.

The leaker of this info has been ID’d and nabbed. Seems much less a case of Trump’s plumbers so much as really shitty OpSec on the part of both the leaker and the Intercept. Therefore, definitely not the same source as other leaks.

There was a time (long gone) where Opera used its own renderer, and it supported some unique features none of the other browsers did (CSS paged media comes to mind). Now AFAIK it’s just the Chrome renderer.

I doubt we’ll ever hear much more detail about this.

Not because of cover-ups and whatnot, but as we discovered in the recounts that did happen in 2016, there’s simply no paper trail in many cases, and therefore no way to prove a vote was legitimately cast or recorded.

So basically:

1. Russia attempts to alter US election (not just influence voters)
2. ???
3. Trump!

Where step 2 is our own damn fault for having such terrible elections systems that we can’t see if it’s broken or not. The only proxy we have for that data is exit polling, which can be countered by conservative media with nothing more than hand-waving and maybe-its-true-maybe-its-not bothsiderism.

This year’s Excellence in Punning Award goes to Bingowings. The year’s not over yet, but why pretend we’ll see anything better?

Yeah dahmage has it. I actually got into computers back when the whole point of computers was to avoid dealing with people. That was the draw. Now we’ve got all this awesome tech and people just waste it on communication. Besides, I only check my e-mail every few days, and that’s not the response time people look for on texts.

dahmage said:

i guess CatBus wins the luddite award?

FYI: i never realised that the original meaning was one who destroyed cotton machinery …

Hey man, my phones are touch tone. I’m hip and with it. No rotary here.

Okay, I’m gonna raise my hand now. I don’t have a smart phone. I don’t have a flip phone. I don’t have a cordless phone. I have a phone at home with a wire that goes into the wall. I also have a phone at work with a wire that goes into the wall. That covers every possible phone scenario for me. Either I’m at work and can talk to you on the phone, I’m at home and can talk to you on the phone, or I’m at neither place and have no interest in talking to you on the phone, so leave a message.

Want to text me? Too bad for you. If it’s not important enough for you to make the call, it wasn’t important enough for me to read anyway. For Internet I got a laptop, but the Internet’s not really necessary.

Now, all of you, off my lawn.

Another day in post-racial America.

Firefox, but I got no religion for it anymore. I switched back in the day when Firefox (or Mozilla Seamonkey) was the only thing going, and everything else had some major problem. Now you’ve got two really good browsers to choose from. I guess I only switch when something is woefully wrong, though, and so far I haven’t hit that with Firefox. If I ever do, there’s Chrome. Speed/battery life comparisons don’t matter to me beyond a certain threshold of “good enough”. We’re already there as far as I’m concerned–two free, cross-platform products that do everything you need, what’s not to like about that?

I do have fond memories of Lynx though. I even remember Gopher 😉

DuracellEnergizer said:

CatBus said:

I’m not saying I’m comfortable with or even willing to go there. But if it’s already been established that facts don’t work, continuing to use facts isn’t logical.

Spock wept.

That’s actually not far from a child-rearing lesson I’ve learned: if logic doesn’t work, continuing to use logic is illogical. Dr. Spock probably wept too.

The revised March jobs report shows 50,000 jobs created. For reference, the April 2012 jobs report showed 115,000 jobs created. Trump referred to that jobs report as “terrible”.

By “that jobs report”, I mean the April 2012 one, not the March 2017 one, naturally. But credible observers are also calling the March numbers worrisome.

While this may seem a relatively minor failing in the grand scheme of all the other things being screwed up so badly right now, there is the school of thought that a certain amoral Wall Street contingent supports Trump as long as they get their tax giveaways and the stock market doesn’t sour–and literally everything else can go to hell. Well, their tax windfall is being held up by the TrumpCare debacle, and now this jobs report…

TV’s Frink said:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-idUSKBN18T1WZ

U.S. President Donald Trump will decide whether to invoke his presidential powers to block former FBI Director James Comey from giving congressional testimony next week, White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Friday.

Comey, fired by Trump last month, is due to testify on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee in both an open session and behind closed doors. The hearings could add to problems facing the president over probes into alleged Russian meddling in last year’s U.S. election and potential collusion by his campaign.

In an interview with ABC News, Conway appeared to indicate that the president would allow Comey to testify, saying, “We’ll be watching with the rest of the world when Director Comey testifies.”

But asked directly whether Trump would use executive privilege to prevent Comey from speaking with lawmakers, Conway added: “The president will make that decision.”

I guess if you’ve already obstructed justice (and have spineless members of congress protecting you) there’s no reason to do it again?

Quoting myself from Page 258:

Lawrence Tribe, constitutional law professor at Harvard said something interesting: By claiming Comey had told him that the FBI wasn’t investigating him, Trump waived executive privilege with regard to Trump/Comey exchanges.

Jay said:

Also, having a few Trump supporters in my family, I can attest that there’s little a liberal can do to influence voters who remain willfully ignorant of facts and have bought into the fear-based platform of the modern GOP. Can we somehow minimize the impact of the stupid voter without causing the same problems we face already?

Well, that’s ultimately a bit of a purity test. We’ve already established that they can be influenced by fear-based misinformation, so the question is–can we use the only known method of influencing them and still remain liberal? How much fear-based misinformation can we mix into their Wheaties before we’re as bad as Breitbart?

It’s not a hypothetical. Susan B Anthony deserves a lot of credit for helping bring about the end of minority rule in the US in 1920. But you know what she doesn’t get enough credit for? Being incredibly racist about it–playing off fears of black votes by pitching women’s suffrage as doubling the white vote’s margin. Lots of historical progressive wins were really only progressive in hindsight–at the time, they were as reactionary as anything else going on at the time.

I’m not saying I’m comfortable with or even willing to go there. But if it’s already been established that facts don’t work, continuing to use facts isn’t logical.

But what’s also not clear is if we need to convince Trump supporters at all. It would be much easier to convince the 50% that didn’t vote at all than the 24% who answered the call of the assclown.

chyron8472 said:

Plus, without a digital transfer, how else could you get comparable sound from a mobile device or from your car as you do from your entertainment center?

Not a problem.

Trump admin is now claiming the CBO’s TrumpCare score can only be explained by a Democratic mole in the CBO. I suspect they’re laying the groundwork for getting rid of the CBO in its entirety. Hand-picking the CBO chief and allowing them to use imaginary numbers apparently still isn’t good enough to get a favorable score.

I used to work with a chemical called acrylonitrile. In organic chemistry, there’s a new naming convention and an old naming convention. Using the old naming convention, acrylonitrile would have been called vinyl cyanide. Which became the name of my hypothetical band, if I ever had one. Our first album would have been called Acrylonitrile, and only chemistry hipsters would know the album was eponymous.

I, for one, don’t much care for our new совфефе overlords.

You are posting this question in a Star Wars forum, ergo no on the thread title. If what you’re really asking is if you spend too much time wondering what other people might think about you, the answer is yes. Is it more than most other people do, though? Doubtful.

TV’s Frink said:

False equivalency.

Actually, I agree they all have a significant conservative slant. But I’m not talking about bias, which to some degree is unavoidable (big corporations have a bias in favor of big corporations, news at 11). What I’m talking about is outright discarding news you don’t like and seeking out/inventing news you do like, both by the network AND the viewer. Fox is merely the most extreme MSM example of this (nobody else ran the Obama the secret Muslim story into the ground, for example), but it does happen to a lesser degree elsewhere. Very few news outlets actually try to be centrist/unbiased. I don’t think the Washington Post’s flirtation with that will last very long, although I’m pleased with it for the moment. Corporations gotta corporate, they’ll swing right like everyone else eventually.

darthrush said:

Islam inherently contains basic and clear principles that are violent and oppressive to women. I’m not attacking Muslims when I say that, I’m attacking Islamic beliefs/ideals that are seen in the Qur’an.

IMO most religions can seem downright psychotic if you read their religious text and assume a completely literal interpretation. You may need to meet some Muslims who don’t take the Qur’an literally (may be hard to do where you live, but I’ve probably met hundreds in my travels in Muslim countries–and zero who take it completely literally). You may find the religion they actually practice (as opposed to the one you’ve read about) is no more violent and oppressive than that of Christians and Jews who also don’t take their religious texts completely literally.

The three largest Muslim countries have all elected female leaders. Now, this obviously doesn’t mean they are a wonderland of perfect gender equality (any more than it would mean it if the US someday managed to elect a woman), but it does point to the fact that the “wearing a burkha five steps behind her husband” idea of women in Islam is a gross stereotype, a conflation of an extreme minority with the whole. Women may have to work twice as hard to get half the recognition of men, sure–but that can happen in Muslim countries too, not just the US 😉

That said, there are lots of violent and oppressive people out there, no doubt. Did they learn this behavior from their religion, or did they seek out/create an interpretation of their religion that justified their already-existing behavior? I’m very much inclined to think the latter. In a similar vein, Fox News doesn’t mean the entire concept of news outlets is bad. It means people who are inclined to seek out or invent news to suit their existing worldview will create a bad news outlet.

At some point, SSE became GOUT-synced, and versions from that point will work without changes. For versions prior to the GOUT-sync, you’ll need to use the special resync scripts that come with Project Threepio–it’s covered in the README. I honestly forget if 1.6 is GOUT-synced or not, but I think it is. Oh, and PM sent.

Tyrphanax said:

CatBus said:

Must be a day of the week that ends in “Y”.

Why are you trying to distract us from Hillary’s emails?

Easy, comrade. Is double-secret bluff. Nobody vill get past payvall!