I’m in TX with a whole bunch of constituents amendments on the ballot. Never too optimistic about making a difference in such a conservative state, and particularly annoyed the only thing that could have a positive effect on our failing electric grid is a tax incentive for natural gas 🤮.

The only prop I’m still on the fence about is the university fund. I’m skeptical of state funding for universities, because my understanding is quite a bit of that goes to admin instead of lowering tuition. But most organizations seem to support the proposition, and the only ones who oppose it say they do so because the universities are too “woke”. I don’t want to vote in alignment with some alt right organizations :/

The bit about “no” not meaning “no” means they’re specifically implying meta employees can be sexually assaulted even if they say no. I’m sure it’s said in jest, but it’s still a fairly offensive comment.

I think this article makes reasonable sense. Also that quote from Spez is so disheartening. Glad I’m not on reddit anymore

Well funnily enough I think that part, legally, is totally fine. There’s nothing anti competitive about being in two unrelated industries, and I don’t think there’s a good case that aws is a monopoly. There are viable and cheaper alternatives like hetzner, aws is just popular but it’s not manipulating the market

That’s a really interesting article on how Amazon makes it money when prime is such a good deal for the consumers. I really hope Amazon gets broken up

Fwiw, I think using a self hosted home automation setup (shout out to home assistant) paired with smart devices that don’t use internet (e.g. zigbee, zwave, or matter once it comes out) can allow you to have a smart home without these kinds of fears.

That said, I would definitely agree to using mechanical locks. Although a monitored smart security system is probably still a good idea - you’re letting a company virtually enter your house, but you can’t rely on a self hosted solution to notify you when your power goes out, for example.

That looks pretty cool! Especially since it looks like they’re recently been working on docs for self hosting it. The obsidian integration also looks really interesting - I need to get better at actually using obsidian as a “second brain” rather than just a glorified TODO list haha.

I don’t want to defend meta here, but I’ve heard this or similar about literally every social media site ever, when it first opens. It’s way too early to tell if threads will be proactively moderating hate speech and other dangerous content.

ooh, that looks like a handy thing I’d like to store! I’m a bit worried I’ll have lost some of my saved links because I think I heard they only keep the most recent ~1000 or so.

Agreed; I have a oneplus 9 5g and it feels way too early to upgrade again, but fairphone sounds like a great consideration for my next device.

I use sublime merge because I really like ST and want to further support the dev. I wish it had more integrations with github (and theoretically github alternatives), but I understand the reasoning not to. Before SM came out I just used the command line exclusively.

I’m personally a pretty hardcore leftist, and from this position both liberalism and conservatism are too right leaning for me. Of course the democrats are closer to me, but I think it’s important to keep in mind they are conservative lite, not truly left leaning. Establishment Dems in particular do not have the best interests in the people in mind, similar to Republicans. “Both sides” are acting to preserve capitalism and consolidate power, not distribute it.

With that in mind, the typical “both sides” argument that there’s extremists on both sides is ludicrous to me. Extreme leftism doesn’t mean forgiving student debt or implementing a UBI, it’s banning corporations in lieu of co-ops, or replacing any company that provides things we need to survive with state-run monopolies (like single payer healthcare, for example). Neither side is left enough, and rhetoric that there’s a happy medium between the two parties will end with us being incredibly right leaning.

Edit: should have mentioned Biden forcing the striking rail workers to go back to work. That is not leftism; democrats are not an extremist party.