Yup. The guy was caught by the Secret Service as he was “trying to find an opening in the security.” About the only saving grace in all this is that the people trying to do this are idiots. Like that guy who came up with a brilliant plan to get past the bullet proof glass at an FBI building by using a nail gun.

Unfortunately, throw enough idiots into the mix and some of them will succeed just by dumb luck. And the right has plenty of idiots to throw.

Same thing happens in the Jewish community. My father is a Republican and believes that Republicans support Jews because “they support Israel.” He doesn’t see that the only reasons that Republicans support Israel are because:

1. The evangelicals want Israel to exist and be run by Jews so it can be attacked and Jesus can return.

And

2. So the right has a place to say Jews really belong (not in America).

They’ll “support Israel” all day and night while actively pushing for a Christian Theocracy in America where Jews are (at best) second class citizens.

I was the victim of a cyberstalker about a decade ago. This person was convinced that I was really someone else that she had a beef with. Her reasoning? We both like taking photos. (Apparently, I’m the only one posting photos online. All those pictures you see online? That’s all me. No wonder I have no free time!)

I couldn’t argue with her to let her know that she was mistaken because she had it on “very good authority” that I was lying about who I was. Namely, “God told her.” And I’m not exaggerating here. She literally thought that God talked to her and told her stuff like who was committing crimes.

Oh and I was guilty of those crimes according to “God.” I won’t name those crimes because they’re heinous, but suffice it to say she thought I was doing unspeakable things to kids. She was threatening to call my employer, the police, and everyone who knew me to tell them about what I was doing.

Luckily for me, all she had to go on was “TechyDad.” I blogged at the time, but didn’t post my exact whereabouts or my real name. The guy that she thought I was wasn’t as lucky. She contacted his employer (a school in New Zealand) and everyone with the same last name as him that was on Facebook and near him. All to tell them what he did to kids. (Again, her source was “God.” He didn’t really do anything and he had to have quite a few awkward conversations to clear things up.)

I finally got rid of the stalker by grabbing her IP address (from one of her comments) and modifying my htaccess file to report 404 Page Not Found for only that IP. She crowed on Twitter about how she singlehandedly took me down and then moved on. (I and her other targets would report her to Twitter, but she’d constantly have dozens of other handles ready and waiting and would switch to them the second her main one was banned.)

To my knowledge, she’s still out there stalking people.

Now, how would this have been different had she had my real name? Well, with a little work she would have been able to look up my location. (My name’s pretty common, but she’d find me eventually.) Then, she’d locate my employer, my address, and other information. She could send me packages or mail harassing me. She could contact my local police to swat me or just to report my “crimes.” She could contact my employer to report me and try to get me fired.

Now, I eventually did tie my real name to “TechyDad.” I wrote a book and didn’t want to publish under “TechyDad” so I used my two name. That being said, it was my choice. I definitely wouldn’t want it to be required for me to use my real name everywhere.

The only reason that he seemed like a “Genius CEO” with SpaceX and Tesla was because those companies had layers of management dedicated to protecting the company from Musk.

If Musk marched into Tesla and decided that all Tesla cars should have eyeball shaped headlights, managers would tell him what a genius idea that was and that they’d get right on it. Then, they’d distract him with something else while the idea went in the trash can.

Twitter has no such management layer so every Elon Epiphany becomes Twitter policy no matter how bad or destructive it is. SpaceX and Tesla were successes despite Musk and Musk gained his “genius” reputation because those companies were able to filter out his idiocy.

I was assuming that the reason was that Twitter fired all their system administrators so the services are basically held together with bubble gum and string. If too many people use the services, it’ll crash so they need to limit usage.

They can’t admit that the rate limits are due to unmaintained servers, though, so they trotted out the “people are scraping Twitter” excuse.

Come to think of it, didn’t Reddit use something like that as an excuse for the huge API pricing? Are they coordinating on how to ruin their services? If so, they’re doing a great job!

The level of fabrication would be impressive if it wasn’t so maddeningly illegal.

The guy didn’t contract for a website for his gay marriage.

He didn’t know that guy he was supposedly marrying.

And he’s straight.

And he’s been married to a woman for 15 years.

How did nobody check this out and what penalties can the website designer and lawyers face for lying in court?

He’s an anti-vaxxer that echos a lot of Russian propaganda. He even tweeted an image of a woman wearing his campaign merchandise - and then people noticed that the sign on the cafe in the background was in Russian.

If anything, he seems like a right-winger trying to pretend that he’s a liberal and hoping that people vote for him based on his famous family name.

As soon as they stop doing things worthy of criticism (and undo what they’ve already done), then I’ll agree that the liberal justices should stop criticizing the court.

DeSantis is all about performance politics. He does things not because he thinks they are the right thing to do, but because he thinks the performance of him “hurting the right people” will get him more votes.

He doesn’t even care if his laws are overturned later. He can either ignore that they were overturned or he can rail against “liberal activist judges” (even if the judge was appointed by Trump).

Birthright citizenship is in the Constitution - the 14th Amendment. DeSantis couldn’t just have Congress pass a law repealing it. Now, he could have Congress try to pass a new Amendment removing it. That’s possible, but extremely unlikely.

First, he would need to get two thirds of each chamber of Congress on board. Right now, the chambers are basically divided 50-50. DeSantis might get one or two right leaning Democrats to jump on board (Manchin), but there’s no way he’d get enough to pass this hurdle.

Let’s say he did, though. The Democrats suffer a mass outbreak of temporary insanity and wind up passing this. Now, it would go to the states. DeSantis would need three fourths of the states, or 38, to ratify it. 27 states voted for Trump so lets assume they immediately jump on board. Georgia was close and is run by Republicans so we’ll give that to DeSantis also. This still leaves 10 states. He’d quickly run out of swing states and would need to convince some blue states to approve his amendment.

Is it possible that this happens? Yes, but it’s also possible that I find a winning lottery ticket on my front lawn tomorrow. I wouldn’t count on either one happening though.

They want the First Amendment to only apply to straight, white, Christian men.

Of course, they want all rights to apply only to them and all restrictions to apply only to everyone else. It’s why conservatives were very pro-gun control when black groups started marching while legally carrying guns. “We can’t have ‘those people’ using the Second Amendment! It only applies to us!!!”

It’s pretty much the playbook of all of DeSantis’ “accomplishments.”

1. Make a broad law banning or mandating some action.

2. Brag about how great, conservative, and anti-woke you are for passing this law.

3. Law gets struck down for being obviously and egregiously unconstitutional.

4. Either denounce “liberal activist judges who push the woke agenda” (ignoring that the judge was appointed by a Republican) or just ignore the ruling entirely and keep touting the law you passed regardless of the fact that it’s been junked.

The right to practice a religion ends when it smacks me in the face with its zealotry and steals bodily autonomy.

I’m religious and agree 100% with this. I’d never want my religious beliefs to be used to tell you what you can and can’t do. They’re my religious beliefs and should only affect me. On the flip side, I don’t want anyone else’s religious beliefs to dictate what I do.

There are too many people, though, who say “this is a Christian country and we need to follow Christian rules.” I’m Jewish and not Christian so I know that these people getting their wish would make me a second class citizen. And that’s if they don’t go all “deport all Jews to Israel” (which I’m not from) or just go full Nazi and decide to kill all Jews. (And, yes, I’ve met at least one Nazi who faulted Hitler for “not finishing the job.” These people are out there, they’re scary, and some of them are getting into positions of power.)

I started working from home in March 2020 also. I was convinced that my productivity would suffer working from home. Previously, I had only worked from home during snowstorms and that was me sitting on my couch or bed working on just my laptop screen. When the pandemic hit, I got an second monitor and set up a dedicated working area. That made all the difference.

I’m actually more productive now than I was in the office. I can get through an entire days’ worth of tasks in a matter of hours because I can focus without people walking up to me to talk.

I’m also healthier at home. When I went into the office, I needed to pack my lunch and any snacks I wanted. I’d often overpack and since my lunch container was on my desk next to me, I’d snack all day. Now, all my snacks are in my kitchen, but that means getting up and walking downstairs. Laziness actually helps me eat less. Go figure. Plus, I can make a salad fresh for lunch instead of relying on frozen meals.

Do I miss talking to my coworkers? Sometimes, but the advantages vastly outweigh the disadvantages. I’m also now technically working for my company’s home office which is in another state. A commute would be about 10 hours each way for me. (9 hours if I cut through Canada.) So I’m pretty much permanently working from home now as long as I stay in this position (which I have no intention of leaving at the moment).

I agree. The Republicans control enough state legislatures that saying “state legislatures can just declare who the winner is despite the vote tally” would mean a permanent Republican House and Senate majority (with the Senate majority filibuster proof) and a permanent Republican presidency.

Thankfully, any such ambitions to subvert democracy in this manner have been paused for now.

Note, paused and not stopped. I’m sure the Republicans will try to find another way to present this to get the Supreme Court to approve of it. This is a win in a battle, but the war is far from over.

Ask him how Prohibition is going since Amendments can’t be changed.

There is no such thing as expunging an impeachment. You can’t do it. Once someone is impeached, they’re impeached. Of course, the Republicans won’t let a little thing like facts stand in their way.

She thinks many people in the mainstream have assumptions about women who get abortions that don’t match the reality she sees when she protests at clinics.

“They’ve never actually gone out to an abortion mill and seen that the majority of women who come in here — they have very hard hearts,” she said. “They’re flipping us off and screaming obscenities, just wicked things.”

Gee, you’re saying that when you go and call people murderers when they’re going through a stressful time of their life, people don’t tend to be polite back to you? Who knew?!!

Biden wasn’t my top pick in the primaries. (Bernie Sanders was.) When he was the nominee, I jumped on board because any issues I had with Biden paled in comparison with issues I had with Trump. I figured that Biden wouldn’t be perfect but would be decent. He definitely hasn’t been perfect, but even on his worst days he’s been SOOOO much better than Trump on Trump’s best days.

And when you hear he did something, your first response isn’t “Oh God. What did he tweet out now? Did he declare war on a country? He declared war on a country because they criticized him, didn’t he?!!!”

And it’s not like we had some recent example of people thumbing their nose at safety only to have their “safety is waste” vessel catastrophically fail… Oh, wait.

Beyond the whole porn issue, as the victim of identity theft, “put all your personal information in this one big database” make me very nervous. Either that database will be hacked or someone with access to it will grab data for nefarious purposes.

It’s not a matter of IF it will happen, but WHEN.

Well, I know that I’m definitely not voting for Hunter Biden in 2024!

That’s actually a big debate happening in the kosher community.

On one hand, you don’t need to do things like check every organ for signs of illness. As long as the vat doesn’t get infected with something, it’s good. You also don’t need to drain blood from the resulting meat since it doesn’t have any.

On the other hand, if you take a cell from a living animal, is the whole mass in the vat considered a living creature? If so, eating from it might not be allowed (eating flesh from a live animal is forbidden). The lack of any kind of slaughter process could either mean they want harvested meat is fine or none of it is.

There will likely be rabbis ruling both ways for awhile before any consensus emerges. If any ever does. (Judaism is very decentralized and consensus is often difficult to impossible.)

Their goal is to get the cases to the Supreme Court. There, they hope the conservative Supreme Court will rule “gender affirming care is child abuse and can be banned.” Then, they will make more extreme laws and repeat the process. If the Supreme Court justices ever balk, they’ll just go back and reword the law so the Court approves of it.

They’re using the Supreme Court as a “backdoor legislative tool.”

Great to hear! Sync was my first third party Reddit app. I eventually switched to Boost (IIRC, Sync was having some problems with image uploads and so I moved clients), but Sync was still a great Reddit app.

Even though I’m liking Jerboa, I can’t wait to see what the “third party Reddit developers” can do. The more Lemmy apps, the better!

We’re not all insane. The problem is that there’s a very vocal minority that’s insane. There are between 10% and 30% of our population that think anyone who opposes them should be violently overthrown. They justify any actions they take with “the liberals would do this to us so we’re just beating them to it.” (Note: We would not.) This vocal minority is getting more representation than any other group and they still complain that they are underrepresented and that the entire country should bend to their whims.

Unfortunately, things are going to get worse before they get better unless the majority of sane people vote to ensure that the crazies stay out of power.

I buy Beyond Meat bricks for $8.99 a pound. That’s pricey compared to regular beef, but I’m an outlier with pricing. I keep kosher at home and kosher meat is VERY expensive. Between the price and hassle (it requires separate pots/pans, plates, utensils, etc), I keep vegetarian at home. It’s just cheaper and easier.

Beyond Meat lets me cook “beef” dishes for less than kosher beef would cost me and with more flexibility. (Tonight, we had pasta and Beyond Beef meatballs with cheese - a dish I couldn’t make using kosher meat.)

There’s still a market for products like Beyond Beef, but I agree that they’ll need to hit “normal need” price levels before it really takes off.

Even if cultivated meat was initially bad for the environment, I’d guess that it would be easy to minimize it’s environmental impact versus traditional meat. There’s only so much you can do to stop cows from belching CO2. However, a factory making vats of cultured meat could install pollution controls to reduce their emissions.

I’d definitely like to see peer reviewed studies backing everything up, but my guess is that cultivated meat will on par with or be better for the environment than traditional meat and will only get better.

I’m not vegan, but I do keep Kosher and I’m sure there would be a huge debate in the Jewish community as to whether cultured meat was kosher.

Assuming that the animal that the original cells were taken from was Kosher (e.g. a chicken or a cow, not a pig), then would the cultured meat be Kosher? Would it not need to follow usual processes (specific slaughter techniques, salting and soaking the meat to remove blood, etc) if there was no animal/blood?

As cultured meat takes hold, there are going to be a lot of communities trying to take it into account. I’m sure there will be plenty of arguments as to the status of it as well. It should be interesting.

“Debating” an anti-vaxxer on Joe Rogan’s show would (as the old saying goes) be like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter now great you do, the pigeon will knock over the pieces, poop all over the board, and strut around as if it won.

I’m all for open debate when the other side is acting in good faith, but antivaxxers don’t act in good faith. At best, you’d refute every one of their claims , but even then they wouldn’t change their view. They’d just (as you said), release an edited video showing you either stumped by their anti-vaxxer genius or (worse) agreeing with them.

Hopefully, the abortion pills remain legal and easily available. States can’t regulate the mail system so they can’t intercept mailed abortion pills. (Doing so would be a federal offense.)

Of course, we’ve not only got some right wing nut jobs as judges who would be more than willing to decide that states are completely allowed to open and inspect every piece of mail and any future Republican Congress/President could rule that abortion (including pills) are illegal nationwide.

All it takes is one red wave to remove rights nationally that are (at best) hanging on by a thread in many places.

Apparently, those subreddits are now not only open, but completely unmoderated. Reddit’s solution was to remove the mods and put nobody else in charge. I’m sure that won’t backfire in any way whatsoever! /s

Email: “Hi, this is IT. It looks like your password is expired. Please change your password by clicking this link. Ignore the weird from address and the fact that the link obviously goes to a noncompany website. We’re really from your IT department. Promise!”

Way too many users: “Yup. This looks legit. Better coick that link and enter all of my information right now!”

ISPs: “Fine. We’ll build fiber now. And this time, we’ll do it for only $350 billion. Such a bargain!”

Thanks for posting this. It will help me replace a few more of the subreddits I loved going to with Lemmy alternatives. I might still need to go to Reddit for a couple of subreddits (one local one and one hobby one), but my goal is to reduce my Reddit usage as much as possible.

And, just to remind everyone, there were 4 months from when Trump left office to when NARA asked for everything back. Then, there were 15 months from when NARA asked for everything back and when the FBI came in to seize the documents.

Even at the most generous timeline (which Trump definitely doesn’t deserve), he had 15 months from when NARA told him to give back the documents. Trump being “too busy” for this long isn’t an excuse.

And this ignores that he had his lawyer declare that they didn’t have any documents there only to be proven wrong by the FBI.

Trump’s lawyers should definitely tell him to keep quiet (not that he’ll listen) because every interview he gives about this is going to be entered into the mountain of evidence that the government has against him.

Looks good. I can’t wait to try it out. I’m liking Jerboa so far, but having more apps competing to be the best would be great.

I’ve never held security clearance, but I’m reasonably certain that “I was too busy to give you back those classified documents” isn’t a very good defense. In fact, it’s admitting that you had the classified documents and held onto them despite being told to give them back. It’s especially not a good defense given that he had 15 months from the first “give back the documents request” to the FBI raid.

If I ever found myself in possession of classified documents which I wasn’t supposed to have (so, any classified documents) and I was asked to give them back, I’d MAKE time. I’d take time off of work and scour my house from the top to the bottom to make sure I got everything. Then, I’d invite the FBI in to do the same to be sure that I didn’t miss anything.

This would be the biggest priority in my life (absent any live threatening situations) until those classified documents were safely returned. “I was too busy for the past 1.25 years” is not a good defense at all.

But that analogy would make Spez the king who rules over all the lands of Reddit-tania, doling favors out to people who support him and punishment out to those who oppose him no matter what the people of Reddit-tania want.

Wait, maybe the analogy has some merit to it after all.