jasondj @ jasondj @ttrpg.network

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2 yr. ago

Washington was elected in 1788 and re-elected in 1792. However both were unanimous, unopposed, and done solely by the electoral college. Adams/Jefferson in 1796 was the first proper election, after Washington set the 2-term precedent and relinquished power. That precedent was maintained until FDR served four terms during the First World War sequel, which led to the drafting of the 22nd Amendment to the US constitution limiting presidents to two terms in 1947. It was ratified by 36 of the 48 states in 1951.

Also while trying to remember the dates I read Section IV of the 20th amendment. What the fuck is this word salad? Is this the original “Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like??”

The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.

Honestly it’d probably work better than our current system.

Just give one random guy carte blanche to run everything. Get immortalized if you do a good job. Get executed if you don’t.

And I’m sure lots of people would take it up, and think that they’d do a good job. And more than likely, they wouldn’t.

Sorry, we only have trans-exclusionary feminist trains. Next one boards at Platform 9-3/4.

I really love your black and white dichotomy of either in it or out of it. Really, the world must be very simple in black and white.

Unfortunately in the real world, where I work does not matter. The company will survive without me. The lowest-level cogs are completely disposable.

The reality of that means that if I don’t work here, somebody else will. My morals and ethics now put myself and my family at a disadvantage.

The American dream was mistold. It’s not work hard and live a great life. The truth is, it’s swallow your pride to survive, or watch other people do it instead. The more of your pride you’re willing to swallow, the better you survive. Thats all there is to it.

And where else should I go to support my family? Let’s look at the biggest employers in my region. Essentially it comes down to four pillars…”kill children”, “encourage addiction”, “boil the oceans”, or “sell slave-manufactured goods for insane profits”.

Absolutely, shit needs to change. But your bottom-up approach, attacking me personally, viewing me as your enemy because of the way I provide for my family, is not the way to do it. I know how far I’ve sold my soul. I know it’s far enough to realize that it doesn’t make one lick of difference in the way the world works. Either I sell that fraction of my soul, or someone else will. And in the end, I only get to choose to sell it to some other equally vile demon.

Where do we go next? Would you like to go shit on the single moms out there scrubbing bathrooms at Raytheon instead of Walmart? Clearly they only do it because they want to serve the machine, and not because they have great health insurance, stability, tuition reimbursement, and pays $3 more an hour. Or am I the bad guy because I’m a professional and solidly middle class? Where does the line get drawn?

I recognize we are well past the point of changing each others mind. Ultimately I just want to figure out where the fuck you get off judging me as the enemy for providing for my family just like you. I identify as progressive and I suspect you do as well. I don’t see how you justify this crabs-in-a-barrel mentality.

I don’t think you quite understand where I’m coming from.

The worker bees don’t matter. I l, as a cog in this machine, am nothing. I can be replaced by another cog of equal skill and nothing will change. My company will survive without me. I stopped trying to justify my position in the war machine a long time ago.

The war machine will exist without my company.

I don’t think my county would exist without my war machine, but not for the immediately apparent reasons of defense, but for the collapse of all the industry that it sustains.

The reason why I think USPS would crumble without Boeing, LM, Raytheon, and all the other aviation primes, is because domestic mail and package logistics are highly reliant on air freight. And all of the major airline manufacturers, and the big component manufacturers of those planes, like the engines, are made by said war machine. Not just for American jets, but also for foreign manufactures like Airbus and Dassault and Embraer.

None of their commercial business could self-sustain at their scale without the war machine. The two are far too entwined.

In fact, I think the only prime that is diversified enough and in aerospace to survive such a shakedown would be GE. The only aviation brand that would survive for sure would probably be Airbus.

This isn’t an accident, but it’s not really an evil conspiracy, either. There has just never in the history of human society has “war drives innovation” rung true than in aviation. To the point now that I don’t think you can have a career in aviation (aside from commercial, and then excluding pilots and mechanics) without selling your soul to the war machine in one way or another.

This table gives a clear example of just how entwined the two are, namely the “% of Total Revenue from Defense” column: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defense_contractors

We came close to a better example with nuclear, but chickened out when we started getting electricity that threatened oil and coal. You want a war machine conspiracy, that’s a much better place to look (and also responsible for even more death and suffering, albeit indirectly, but now we are getting far off topic).

And that’s just the example of aviation. There’s other industries that are heavily subsidized by war…aviation is just the best example.

And also discounting that in the US, the military is about the best path for social mobility out of the lowest rungs.

These are systemic issues that aren’t a cause of the war machine, but need to be fixed and addressed before any attempt at dismantling it can occur, because the machine is the only damn thing holding it all together.

It’s not a matter of me justifying it. It’s a matter of comprehending the massive size, impact, and reliance of its existence. It’s Stockholm syndrome, on a national, if not global, scale. It’s far, far deeper than justifying the death of killing kids. We don’t want the child killers. Nobody wants the child killers. But the child killers are essentially responsible for all of the accomplishments and scientific progress from about 1910 until the present.

Including the very internet upon which we are reading this. ARPAnet. Funded be DARPA, to interconnect research facilities and participating universities with the jntent of enabling communication, sharing access to resources, and being able to diversify the storage of data in a way that it can be retained and retransmitted in the event of war on a self-healing network.

I put an ETA on as you were responding, so I’ll move it here for your convenience.

ETA, this is why I see it as more a necessary evil. War pays the bills. My company is probably pretty unique in that we are not a prime and we put most of our revenue towards private research. We are not unique in how our war revenue gets used to subsidize more humanitarian tech, and I imagine even Boeing or LM wouldn’t be able to keep their lights on with just their commercial businesses, either, or the cost of commercial aviation would be unattainable to most people. And without them I imagine FedEx and UPS would crumble, as would USPS. And then the entire economy after that. Just as one example.

World peace is a terrific goal. But getting there will have a lot of unintended consequences, just due do how ingrained the war machine is with the commercial sector and contemporary lifestyle. At least in America.

ETA, again, and that wouldn’t even account to the number of displaced workers inside the war machine, be it on commercial or defense sides. It’s one thing to selfishly think of this for myself, it’s another thing to think of the economic and societal impact of millions of simultaneously displaced, highly skilled workers.

Another edit: I wouldn’t be surprised if, incidentally, the economic and social impact of shutting down the war machine and declaring world peace would actually kill more children, just it’d be white kids instead, and indirectly through poverty, hunger, and slowed research of life saving technology (due to its funding drying up) instead of drone strikes. The system itself is intrinsically stacked against world peace, at multiple levels. The effects of several thousand families, and in some cases entire communities, being deprived of their primary source of income, simultaneously, would be absolutely devastating.

No, you have it backwards, the child killing devices enable my employer to do the cool science markets.

Revenue from child killing devices and related patents pays for the science research. And as it turns out, a lot of those patents also work really well for the cool life-saving science stuff.

Eh, that may be how you see it.

Personally I’ve been more directly involved in actually helping people and things go to the fricken moon than I have in all of my defense projects, combined. And space is just one of our cool science markets.

I can do defense stuff, I’m authorized to, in a pinch I can (and have), but I would really rather not. Work on that side of the house sucks.

Nobody likes how the sausage is made, but it’s going to get made as long as someone buying it. I’m not eating the sausage. I’m not buying the sausage. I’m having a satisfying job, managing operations at a small pig farm that also develops new cutting-edge cancer medications inside of pig pancreases. Different group of pigs, though.

The real ironic thing is, the doctors that are publishing papers saying screentime is bad are the same people who plopped us in front of Nintendo and Nickelodeon because stranger danger (and that, even more ironically, because of prime time news magazines like Dateline and 20/20 and Current Affair)).

Shocker, stranger danger kids are using the TV more in raising their kids.

I honesty think “screen-time” is overblown. Screens are tools and while creative old-fashioned play is very important, screens play an important role, too.

I’ve got two kids, 4 and 7. I differentiate between games (as long as they are age-appropriate or maybe a little older for them), “good-tv” (age appropriate educational shows or shows with “lessons” I.e Curious George, Daniel Tiger, Odd Squad, etc), “great-tv” (purely educational shows like Nova or How It’s Made…my oldest loves both), and “junk food tv” (SpongeBob, Gumball, etc).

They all have their place and none are “bad” as long as moderation is applied and content is age-appropriate.

Worth mentioning that there are well paying, stable jobs in the MIC for the other 99%. I work for a sub (in IT, and spend most of my time on the commercial side of the business) in such a company. While I resent our biggest revenue maker, it does enable the company to fund scientific research and commercial space endeavors.

I wouldn’t call myself a bootlicker, per se, but I do enjoy my job, despite what I’ve started viewing as a necessary evil — the pay and benefits are highly competitive, I’m 98% WFH, layoffs and turnover are rare (there are regularly people retiring who had entered straight from college and worked directly on Apollo missions), the job is challenging and I’m given a long leash.

My mistake, then. I haven’t really used Ubuntu much since focal. I was going off the package list in distrowatch.

Possible I’m wrong? I was going against the Distrowatch details since I was just looking at them a couple hours before I replied: https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=ubuntu

I don’t usually “trust” vendor support for Linux though…Linux is usually a second-class citizen and “support” means there is either a single grey-beard or an intern that’s answering emails about it. Idk about StudioOne, but unfortunately it’s usually expected to not have feature parity or complete documentation for commercial software on Linux. IME, YMMV, etc.

While I don’t disagree, the individual mandate was a crucial part of making it work, and also the weakest part of it. There shouldn’t have been an individual mandate without a much larger medicaid supplement or Medicare-for-All as options. A handslap fee for not having insurance was both a worthless penalty and legally shaky from the get-go.

There should’ve been caps on premium and deductible increases that were way more realistic, too. Like rent-control and tied to either a maximum percent of net profit increase, or inflation, etc.

Ultimately I don’t think Obamacare went far enough, and I don’t think there’s an argument to the contrary that’s not in favor of protecting the true enemies of sustainable healthcare, the insurance companies.

Ubuntu LTS and 23.x are both Xorg. Latest has Wayland. If 24.04 is to be LTS though, I don’t think they’d release it with Wayland as default. I’d think they’d switch to Wayland on 24.10 so there’s 3 more releases to get good before the next LTS build.

There’s other factors than just brushing your teeth but brushing is probably the easiest factor that most people can reasonably take control of.

Genetics, obviously you can’t do much about. But you can avoid sweets and decide not to get pregnant (hormonal changes during pregnancy can cause mouths to get more acidic and make plaque harder to remove, and can also soften the gums and bones that hold teeth in, or even weaken the teeth directly). Also, if you want nice teeth, it’s especially important to abstain from smoking crystal meth. And that’s even more important during pregnancy.

But telling everybody “brush twice a day for two minutes” is a small ask with huge returns.

Guidance for preschools around me is for them to brush kids teeth after every meal that’s served at school.

That was recently reinstated after being suspended for a couple years and the teachers are practically (as much as they legally can) begging the parents to sign the waivers to opt their kids out of it. I don’t blame them. It seems excessive and it’d take a ton of time for two teachers to scrub a dozen or so sets of toddler teeth, while also controlling said toddlers while they wait for everyone to finish.

You are correct. As a typical American, I had forgotten that the rest of the world existed.

Although it’s worth mentioning that on a global stage, American “liberal” isn’t saying much. Both our major parties are pretty conservative, our “conservative” party just says the quiet parts out loud and copies their agenda out of ancient poetry.

They do?

Anti-immigration comes in part from , which is not a liberal view. Opposing immigration from non-white countries while accepting immigrants from white countries is racism, and that’s usually more associated with conservatives talking exclusively about Mexicans.

Idk man. You go hang out on a cruise for a bit you will find some old people who have made cruising their entire retirement plan. Basically just staying on boats going from port to port until they die.

Which actually doesn’t sound all too bad. I’d think it’d get old after the first few weeks (I never heard Cupid Shuffle so many damn times in one week), but hey, whatever floats your boat.