Here’s an actual lawyer doing analysis of the dissent from an actual justice. Maybe you should watch it and learn what the decision actually says about official acts

https://youtu.be/MXQ43yyJvgs?si=ZLIXDxQBJjaYEfyS

Remember when they served him a softball on abortion and somehow he managed to change the subject to an immigrant killing a white woman. Fucking insane

Back in 2016 the voters actually weren’t super excited about Biden either.

Biden did pretty badly in the first 3 primaries

Feb 3rd in Iowa he came in 4th place behind Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren.

Feb 11th in New Hampshire he came in 5th place behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren.

Feb 22nd in Nevada he came in 3rd place behind Sander and Warren.

After these pretty awful results there was a brief period when Sanders was considered the front runner and the DNC shit a brick. You might recall Chris Matthews on MSNBC speculating wildly about a Sanders presidency meaning “executions in Central Park” that was February 8th.

Biden was thrown a life line though by Jim Clyborn who strongly supported him and gave him his first victory in South Carolina on February 29th. A state that would go on to vote trump on Election Day.

This strong showing though was enough for the DNC to see a way to have a moderate candidate win the primary. If they could get the moderate candidates, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Biden to stop splitting that voting block they could stop a more progressive candidate like Sanders or Warren from taking the nomination. Internally the DNC feared that a more progressive candidate would win the primary and lose in the general and wanted a safer option.

The day before Super Tuesday when 15 states would hold their primaries, the more moderate candidates reached an agreement. Buttigieg and Klobuchar announced they would drop out of the race and throw their support behind Biden. In the days before these announcement polling showed Sanders likely to win a plurality of the Super Tuesday delegates. After the moderate candidates lined up behind Biden he won 10 of the 15 contests, losing California, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont to Sanders and American Samoa to Bloomberg.

Buttigieg would be rewarded with his current position as Secretary of Transportation and Klobuchar would end up Chair of the Senate Rules Committee (although it’s less clear how much that was because of her dropping out).

With a victorious Super Tuesday the media rallied around Biden’s amazing reversal of fortune and the Chris Matthews of the world finally had a light at the end of the tunnel for the horrors of a Sanders presidency, line up behind Joe.

An interesting foot note is that of the states holding primaries on Super Tuesday, of the 10 that went for Biden, 6 (7 if you count Maine but I wouldn’t) would go on to vote for trump on Election Day, Alabama, Arkansas, 1 of 4 of Maine’s votes, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. All the states carried by Sanders, except Utah, reliably voted for Biden in the general.

So the DNC, worried about losing the general election, rallied their moderate candidates around Biden, who was losing fairly badly. His overperformance in states that would ultimately vote Republican ended up changing the narrative enough that he became presumptive nominee status on the eyes of the media. This status became generally accepted on April 8th when Sanders pulled out of the race, but you can find the media pushing this in March

I’ll engage with you in case you are acting in good faith.

“Helps” here is an interesting take, but not an uncommon one. There have been and continue to be a lot of people that when they see someone who has adhd or autism or some other neurodivergence think “let’s help them act ‘normal’”

If you are a neurotypical person you might even genuinely be thinking this is a good thing and in some ways it can be. Providing accommodations and life skills that are compatible with neurodivergence can make a world of difference.

The problem is that there is a long history of “help” being neither accommodations nor life skills, but discipline and shame. Here’s a thought experiment if you are neurotypical that might help.

Imagine that the world was majority autistic, since autistic individuals are the majority they consider their way of thinking to be neurotypical and you are neurodivergent. You want to do things that make sense to your brain, you’d like to make small talk and you find it very hard to stay focused during your school days 4-hour special interest hyper focus time.

Society “helps” you by telling you you are lazy and unfocused and all the normal people are able to spend 4 hours in a row completely consumed by their special interest but you keep wanting to talk or have variety and it’s very disruptive. They teach you “how to hyper focus” but nothing they say works for you, your brain isn’t wired to do this. They scold you when you don’t. They finally decide the best path would be to label you divergent and give you powerful stimulants so that you can remain hyper focused like a normal person. They “help” you.

And then one day you learn about how your brain is simply different, that you shouldn’t have felt bad all those years for being unable to do something your brain just isn’t wired to do. You realize that you don’t even really know the person that you are because your whole life you’ve been faking it, running scripts that they taught you so people won’t be upset at you, and taking chemicals to force your brain into an unnatural configuration.

Then someone comments on your post “So what you are saying is a good upbringing helps.” How would you feel?

I find it interesting that it’s always the “adults in the room” aka “the people in power” and their allies that run to the favorite news outlet and let you know “oh it’s far far too late to put anyone else in power.”

Really? I mean maybe, but also let’s not pretend like the DNC and Biden campaign and all their operatives are just neutral observers opining about the objective logistics.

In any other election year you wouldn’t have a candidate before the convention, so somehow it’s not too late in all those elections. And what exactly do we need all the time for? No one ever seems to say why it’s too late, just take it on faith that it’s too late.

If they replaced Biden it’s not like they would have to start from scratch. They have raised funds and they have staffers and campaign offices, as long as you don’t actively dismantle that election infrastructure I’m sure some enterprising intern can find the call script and strike through “Biden” and write in the new candidates name.

It’s not like they would pick a candidate with 0 name recognition, the person would have to be someone in the party they think could win. So it’s not like you need some massive lead time so people can get to know the candidate.

You toss that infrastructure to a younger candidate and what’s the actual thing they won’t be able to wrangle in time?

Not really perfectionism just grammar

I think the fact that using a neuter pronoun is so charged that we can’t even speak or write our language correctly is insane.

I’ve written thousands of technical documents, if you are referring to a generic operator / user / whatever the correct term to use is “they.” That’s how you say “the person that I’m referring to that I don’t know anything about”

There was a brief madness in the 90s when fucking morons used “he/she” for absolutely no reason.

We have all just accepted the term “Human Resources” as something that I guess we aren’t going to revolt against

Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stock he got will also be worth less everyday.

In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers

At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.

The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”

Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.

Thanks for attending my Ted talk

I always tip my hair cutting person 100%. I wanted a hair cut, the hair cut cost $x, that person literally does the entire thing often with their own equipment that they paid for. The place will charge me $x because that’s what the haircut is worth to me but I know the person that actually physically cut my hair with their skills and labor won’t get $x and I think that’s bullshit.

In many other kinds of transactions someone can go “oh well the business deserves a cut of the profits because they provided the ingredients, or they stocked the inventory, or yadda yadda yadda”. But the hair cut is the one place where with my own eyes I witness the full body of labor occur and see who does it. That person deserves the value that their labor produced, not some owner sitting off in their beach house doing plenty I’m sure but one thing I’m damn sure they aren’t doing is cutting my fucking hair.

I remember back in 2015 people were saying that trump was saying that he would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it. I thought, “I wonder what he actually said that got chopped up and editorialized this way?”

Every day after that has been me realizing that if you dig any deeper on the stupid shit it just gets stupider. We will kill off the planet because one time trump bought a cheap led bulb that didn’t flatter his natural orange glow quite enough and now we can only have coal fired power plants. Every stupid thing he says has an even stupider story behind it which itself probably has an even stupider story behind that and on and on. It’s truly astounding

Or that people prone to fear of others would self select living in areas that provide them with fewer others

Rush Week might be a good match

I get the frustration and there’s a lot of free software that is so vital to our modern way of life that it’s crazy that it’s always one dude in Nebraska maintaining it for the last 60 years for free as a hobby.

That said, I think you should consider the great landscape of dependencies and who the competition is.

For example, I’ve open sourced a bunch of things in my life and I have a library used to make testing more ergonomic. I worked very hard on it and I like it. There are other libraries that solve this problem to, I’m biased, but I like mine the best. I like when I can help people write higher quality software with nicer tests.

My “competition” isn’t commercial offerings it’s other free offerings. Now in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever uses the thing I wrote, but since I wrote it and put it out into the world I get to decide how I want to interact with the wider community of people that use it or might think about using it.

If I take a hardline stance, everyone has to be committed, but the right quality bars, do things the right way, etc. I’m free to do that. The most likely outcomes are two fold. One, I’ll have a very high quality thing to my standard. Two, probably not a lot of people are going to be using it because I’ve made it too hard to participate and they will go off and use an inferior solution. Again, if it solves my problem no big deal. But I might be missing out on someone that, if they had been allowed to participate more easily, could have made my thing better, faster, more secure.

So that’s the bargain. Do you have strict controls and limit your exposure to the good and bad out there in the open source community. Do you have lax controls and expose yourself to all the good and bad. Most maintainers end up shooting for the middle, open enough that good contributors can come and flourish but strict enough to keep bad contributors out. It’s a spectacularly difficult problem though, so I’m always happy to hear how other people think about it.

This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.

I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.

The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.

A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.

People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.

The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.

RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.

I think this is the main disconnect for people.

What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.

Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.

It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.

A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.

This is also what the Muni does in San Francisco. Random ticket inspection on the light rail with a decent fine if you didn’t pay.

BART, the Bay Area subway system is spending a bunch to install new fare gates that you can’t push past which the news is reporting is going well, so that seems like another viable option.

I think I initially misread your post as Biden voters owning and overcoming it, but I think you were more saying for Biden to do that.

I think he’s trying to some extent, I saw him on Seth Meyers the other night and he seemed like any other old man politician. I think the problem is that he is old, there’s not much he can do about that, if he goes out and acts young… well nothing seems older than an old person acting young.

His talking points do often include actual accomplishments, I think the problem is that the accomplishments don’t feel good. One he cited on that Seth Meyers appearance is that coming out of the post pandemic inflation the US is doing best of the developed nations. Let’s say this is true, this is still hard to run on. Everyone is experiencing inflation but our policies made it so we experienced it the least. This is so abstract to your average voter, where the idea “Biden made prices go up” is wrong (if it were just Biden, other nations wouldn’t also experience inflation too) but easily grasped.

Overall, I think the big mistake is the party letting him run again. But the Democratic Party being dog shit at election strategy is par for the course

“Own it and overcome it”

How exactly? The Democratic Party isn’t exactly soliciting recommendations from the general public. The primaries are where you would vote for a more viable candidate but without backing from one of the major parties there are no realistic viable alternatives.

The best anyone can do right now is not vote for Biden in the primary (or vote for a non viable candidate) and that just creates a narrative that Biden doesn’t have support.

What concrete thing do you want people to do?

Eventually they do need to pay back the loan, the low interest rates just make it so that they can choose to sell their stocks in the most favorable way.

This is why it makes sense for the financial institute to give out the loan in the first place.

So here’s the scenario. Let’s say you wake up tomorrow and somehow find yourself with $200M worth of stock. You are now “worth” $200M so you’d like to start living like it! You want to go buy a mansion and a nice new car and a private chef. Problem is, none of those people take stock, they all want money.

Goldman Sachs goes, “hey, I’ll loan you the money really cheap, you have to pay me back with interest, but since you have $200M in stock you can sell some of that later and pay me back”

This is great for you because you get to enjoy the mansion and new car and private chef right now. If you sold the stock right now you’d get taxed as if it were income at 38% but if you hold the stock for a few years when you sell it it will be considered capital gains and only taxed at 10% (or 15%, whichever the rate is). In addition, you don’t have to go to the stock market and sell for whatever they want right now, you can wait until the value of your stock is really high and selling is very advantageous for you.

So you do have to pay back the money, but this is still a really sweet deal because you can enjoy all the nice things right now and you get to avoid that extra ~30% you would pay in taxes if you sold it right now.

As long as the amount you saved in taxes outweighs the amount you pay in interest, this is a great deal for you. And for the financial institute it’s low risk (they extended you $10M backed by $200M in assets) and when you repay they make back enough in interest to make it worthwhile.

You get more money in your pocket, the bank gets more money in its pocket, from their point of view this was a win win. The losers are the market suffering a higher price for the stock because the supply was artificially constrained by you having access to this credit (otherwise you’d have sold shares to buy a mansion and nice car and private chef) and the taxpayer who was to shoulder a heavy tax burden because you converted your income into capital gains.

The one thing that definitely isn’t happening is Bezos or Musk or any of these other “they are only rich on paper” people clipping coupons to make ends meet. They live like rich people because the have access to plenty of money secured by their less liquid assets