davehtaylor

Yeah, it seems like wrt media outlets, “populism” just means whatever they want it to mean

Exactly.

SCOTUS justices need to be elected and have term limits. Give them three total 4 year terms max.

EDIT: I know this would take a Constitutional amendment to change, which given our current political climate, is functionally impossible

Unfortunately that’s not really true. Silicon Valley has deep roots in Libertarianism. Some of them might talk the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” talk, but that’s becoming more and more rare. People like Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, et al are deeply terrifying, and are openly espousing racist and eugencist beliefs.

Bill Gates is pretty decent these days. In fact he probably always was a decent human being, but his poor business practices overshadowed that in the past

Actually he’s a deeply terrible person. Even outside of swallowing up and destroying competition and pushing monopolistic business practices, he was a tyrant to work for, treated everyone around him like shit, sexually harassed multiple women, and has ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Yeah, i have no particular love for Huffington Post. They’re often overly sensational, and also built their company on the backs of unpaid writers and journalists. But they’re not fabricating stories from whole cloth to whip up a hate mob.

This right here. There’s simply no mirror image of Fox News or Breitbart on the left, nor would I want one.

The problem is that we have a wildly uneven playing field where one side refuses to play by the rules. There’s no good faith engagement with right-wing media because they will say and do whatever it takes, destroy whatever and whomever it takes, lie, cheat, spin, etc. to achieve their goals. The right wing is working in a fully scorched earth mentality. It doesn’t matter if what they’re doing hurts themselves, their followers, whomever: they are 100% fueled by hatred and a desire for dominance, and if it means burning the whole country down to get what they want, that’s just fine to them. A while back I saw someone say “Republicans would let Trump take a shit in their mouths as long as a Liberal had to smell it” and it never fails to be true.

There’s simply nothing like that on the left, and I totally agree that it wouldn’t be effective even if there were. Truth means nothing to the Right. But using spin and rage-baiting is not something that’s part of a leftist ideal. For people who believe in truth, equality, equity, basic human decency, and a desire to actually build a society that cares about the people in it, using tactics like that are antithetical.

I don’t know what the answer is though. As someone up the thread pointed out, there’s no such thing as a liberal billionaire, and even if there were, trying to buy back all of the media in the country wouldn’t help. It would just feed the right’s narratives even further. But what the fuck do we do when we have media that presents “Let’s have a more caring and compassionate society” and “We think entire groups of people shouldn’t exist” as equal ideas that should be given equal weight and discourse?

This here. My wife and I went through the process with a local agency that handles fostering for Child Protective Services. Sat through nearly two months of weekly classes, many hours of online classes. They spend a significant time making sure you understand what the situation is, and what your expectations are. For our situation, there were three options for being certified and licensed: foster, foster-to-adopt, or adopt.

For fostering, you could get a different child every night who’s only with you for a night. You might get a family of 5 siblings at 2am who are gone in two days. A child might be with you for a day, a week, a month.

For fostering-to-adopt, they generally only place kids with you who seem likely to not end up back with bio-parents, or where the process for the child(ren) going back to the bio-parents seems like it’s going to take a lot of time (maybe rehab, or some kind of lengthy court proceedings, etc). But it doesn’t always end up that way. Since where I live you have to go back through the licensing process every 5 years, there were people there who talked about how they had been placed with a child who was with them for 2-3 years before ending up back with bio-parents. One foster parent had a child with them for almost 5 years and then the child returned to the bio-parents.

Yes, people who get into that understand what they’re getting into. Time and time again you have to make it clear you understand. But when you have the idea that each new child placed with you could end up being permanent, and especially when the placement lasts for significant amounts of time, it’s impossible for it not to hurt.

For people who are only interested in adoption, they don’t do any foster placements with the parents. They only get to meet children who’s bio-parents have lost all legal rights to them. However, the agency made it very clear about halfway through the program that this will basically never happen. That’s what our goal was. They said “when you’re done with the classes, we’ll get in touch with you for home visits, etc. and then get you licensed, but our timeline for that is 6-8 months.” They never got in touch with us, even when we and others looking to adopt in our cohort tried to reach out to them after not receiving anything. They only care about fostering.

Going through all this made it very clear that the entire system is fucked from top to bottom. The govt is far too happy to leave children in horrific, abusive, and terrifying situations, while also being far too happy to tear families apart who don’t deserve it. There are far too many foster parents who only want to do it for the clout and to feel like they’re saviors. And there are so, so, so many children in the system and it makes these agencies far too eager to recruit new foster homes. The agency worked with 5 different counties, and each time we met for classes, they’d say something like “just to help you understand the need, we took in 20 new children last night, and 10 the night before …” and talk about how they didn’t have enough homes for placing them.

Everything about it is fucked, but regardless of how tough it is on foster parents, the children are ones who really suffer for it. I have no idea what the solution is though. It’s all a complete nightmare for basically everyone involved.

The Mythical Man-Month is a classic

Each language has their own conventions in the style guides for how they prefer variables and functions to be named.

For example,

• Python uses snake_case
• C and C++ also generally use snake case, but have specific conventions for particular types of variables
• Java, JavaScript, and C# use camelCase (like your examples)
• Pascal, Dart, and a few others use UpperCamelCase that’s like camel case, but the first letter is also capitalized

And then some organizations like to override those and institute their own conventions. I generally think the latter is a bad idea, since it breaks with accepted industry standards for a given language. Even for a personal project you know that no one else will touch, I think it’s good to follow the langues guides.

I generally wouldn’t make a compound word all lowercase. strikethroughoffset is much more difficult to read, IMO. If you’re going that route, then you should at least snake case it: strike_through_offset. But again, a lot of this is going to depend on your situation.

It’s not really a “get good” issue so much as it’s just an annoying part of the industry one has to navigate.

Dems will absolutely roll over and give the GOP whatever they want. That’s what they do. They have no fucking spines to stand for anything. “Civility” and “reaching across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” are more important to them than literally anything else. They’re going to politely allow the GOP to march us all into fucking camps while pretending like they’re allies.

Oh for sure. There are people who literally think Portland was physically destroyed by Democrats and antifa in the summer of 2020, and that it’s now a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

It really is a scorched earth mentality. They don’t care if everything they love burns, as long as what they hate burns along with it.

It’s been said numerous times that Republicans would let Trump shit in their mouths if it meant a Democrat had to smell it. And it never fails to be true.

They are listening, and they’re eating it up.

Conservatives don’t want democracy. They want a dictator they agree with. They want what he’s selling. They are greedy, selfish, bigots who want to see others suffer and die to appease their twisted, hateful worldview.

Going into super Tuesday, it was clear that Bernie had the lead. Most of the other candidates absolutely tanked, and afterward dropped out and all of them endorsed Biden. Then fucking Bloomberg joins the race out of nowhere, spends a bunch of money, muddies the waters, then drops out after hardly any time and endorses Biden. And when the DNC super delegates decided they’d go for Biden no matter what, it was clear what was going to happen.

Tell me with a straight face that people at the DNC didn’t contact the other candidates and make it clear that they wouldn’t have a future in the Democratic party unless they dropped and endorsed Biden.

The DNC did not want anyone but Biden to win the nomination, and they made sure it happened. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-superdelegates-110083

She’s a useful idiot. The issue is that the GOP doesn’t want democracy. They want a dictator they agree with. So they always echo fascist talking points because they’re also fascists.

How does one find a middle ground with open christian nationalist fascists?

You don’t. You must never. Because there is no middle ground.

The fact that Dems keep trying to “reach across the aisle” is one of the worst parts of what’s going on right now. They have no spine to stand up for what’s right.

Yep. He is absolutely invested in the status quo. Which is why the DNC sabotaged the 2020 primary to make sure he’d win.

1. “LGBTQ conservatives” is a descriptor for selfish, willfully ignorant people who are happy to burn their own community to the ground if it means they have a chance at being the bully that GOP ideals promise they can be

2. Assimilationism never fucking works. People who want people like you dead will never see you as “one of the good ones.” You will never be anything more than a tool for them to wield against others

3. If you feel like you were mislead by DeSantis, then you weren’t paying attention. He’s been extremely explicit about his stances

4. Leopards, faces, etc.