It’s the same argument I’ve heard about the “complexity” of Mastodon: too many choices, which is I guess why people largely stopped going to websites outside the major social networks. Monopoly over competition, it’s like everyone is pining for a monarchy.

If you say so.

Democrats aren’t authoritarians. It’s a bad comparison. Democrats are always fragmented, it’s virtually a defining characteristic. Post-Biden unity has been quite unusual.

The fixation is because there is no clear line of succession. If he fails, who steps in? They’ll splinter and fragment. They’ll still be deplorable, but less effective when not united behind a single authoritarian leader.

None were leftist, and only one got as far as violence.

You may be right, but it seems to me that sleeper cells need direction. Otherwise, they’ll interpret their ideology divergently. They may block progress pretty effectively, but it’ll be hard for them to make gains in a shared direction.

This is all true, but there’s not clear line of succession after Trump, so they’ll splinter. Redirecting the fervor to some new dear leader will take a long time. The Trump thralls are entirely invested in him alone.

As I’ve said elsewhere: I wonder what controls Mozilla has in place to prevent gradual takeover of their board by those with an interest in removing Firefox as a competitor. We’ve watched the sleeper cell in the Supreme Court transform that body into an illegitimate partisan puppet. Mozilla’s actions over the last few years would make much more sense if it were being manipulated into self destruction.

This was also my recent experience on PopOs!

It’s literally impossible to fully boycott Amazon, I’ve been trying for years. Even if you buy elsewhere, often you’ll find out after the fact that Amazon does the shipping or payment processing.

We should nationalize their monopoly or break it up.

Not only do [the old trucks] only get 9 miles per gallon, they’re also noisy, smelly (I have to close my window every day when the mail truck comes around), have no air conditioning, hard to stand up in, and their only safety feature is mirrors that constantly fall out of alignment. AP also points out that nearly 100 LLVs caught fire last year – a common event when it comes to internal combustion vehicles.

So it sounds like you don’t believe progressive taxation works. I guess that’s an understandable viewpoint. But if you think complexity is the problem, I have a hard time accepting your assessment of me as naïve. People that want simple solutions to complex problems are showing the lack of sophistication that defines naïvety.

When did they last get their way via shutdown? Usually it costs Republicans politically.

Correct, they are different. But if you accept that evaluating a person’s wealth happens successfully for taxation, there’s no reason why the same metric can’t be used for fines.

So you don’t think progressive taxation is possible?

I doubt even the usefulness of polls. Who answers polls anymore? We’ve been polled and surveyed to death. Nobody has time for it anymore.

Maybe there’s some precedent, but I can’t see why equally proportionate punishment should be unconstitutional.

There’s a little historical baggage, but look at Windows: multiple letters for drives, and all of the paths can be modified, so you have to ask Windows where any important directory is physically mapped (like SystemRoot or Documents or Temp or Roaming AppData or many others), because it doesn’t have this nice consistent structure like Linux. Linux presents a logical layer and manages the physical location automatically. Windows makes you do the logical lookup yourself, but doesn’t enforce it, so inexperienced programmers make assumptions and put stuff where the path usually is.

That’s part of why logging in to Windows over a slow connection can take forever if you have a bunch of Electron apps installed: they’ve mismapped their temp/cache directory under the Roaming AppData, so it gets synched at every login, often GiB of data, and they refuse to fix it.

His communications director who?

Saw this on Mastodon: