That’s my whole point. Might things be a lot worse in a couple of years? Yes. Are things as bad as this article is all about saying they are right now? No, clearly not.

“The American democratic republic is in danger of dying” is true.

“The American democratic republic has died” is histrionics, and histrionics are particularly counterproductive at a time when what’s actually going on is so serious.

The U.S. is survived by a country of the same name, the United States of America, now a presidential dictatorship.

This gets an eye roll from me. The USA is certainly in a lot of danger but anyone who calls the current situation a dictatorship is ignorant of what a dictatorship is.

Here’s a hint for the author: you wouldn’t be getting an article like this one published in a dictatorship.

Trump destroyed with facts and logic at Pope’s funeral.

Here’s the broader situation: 30 percent of American households are classified by Pew as low income, and 19 percent are upper income. And yet a 2024 Gallup survey found that only 12 percent of Americans identified themselves as “lower class” and just 2 percent as “upper class.” In short: No one wants to be perceived as poor, and no one rich ever feels rich enough.

This is just nonsense. Being in the upper class doesn’t mean being in the top 19% of earners. Those 19% are middle class and they probably have never even interacted with anyone in the upper class. An upper-class person isn’t someone who earns a $100k a year or even $1000k a year. In fact, he probably doesn’t even have a job. CBS has a headline right now that says “Trump headlining $1 million a person super PAC dinner as stocks sink over tariffs”. The people at his dinner (or the ones who could come but choose not to) are in the upper class.

Edit: As for the rest of the article, it makes a good point about the disconnect between the working class and the middle class, but I’m not sure that this disconnect is bigger now than it used to be.

Edit 2: Part of the disconnect is due to different values rather than different incomes, and this should be emphasized because Trump is popular with the working class (and unpopular with the middle class) not because he doesn’t have much money but because he rejects middle-class values.

online information siloes

I’m not sure that’s possible because the Democratic platform doesn’t have the sort of populist appeal that Trump’s Republican platform does. Moderation can’t compete with extremism in this domain. I suppose that the Democrats could try to pivot to their own (presumably class-based) form of populism but, at least from my point of view, one very strong reason to support the Democrats is because they aren’t populist. Having one populist party versus another would be a lose/lose situation.

I don’t have an alternate proposal. It may actually be the case that social media will eventually force every serious political movement to pivot towards populism and create its own truth in order to be competitive, but then who would make the policy decisions in a world of meme warfare?

C++ style text streams are bad and a dead-end design and '\n'.

Get thee behind me, anything beyond extended ASCII.

deleted by creator

The programmer’s answer?

We don’t support that use case.

Mr. Trump and the mostly men he has appointed to office often behave as if rules did not apply to them. That has been part of his appeal.

They see it like a war. Even when your soldiers do something wrong, you’re not going to hope that the Germans win the battle because of it. You will, however, take every advantage if they make the same mistake.

the Trump team’s story is that no wrongdoing occurred

The point of the lies isn’t to convince anyone - supporters know or at least suspect that their leader is lying and they approve. The point is to cripple rules-based opposition, which constantly has to disprove the official story before it can do anything.

How do you disprove a story when your opponents are themselves lying about believing it? They already know it’s not true. Meanwhile, that story changes faster than you can respond. So what if this was illegal? It won’t even be in the news in a week, forgotten because of some new outrage.

A thorough summary of what’s going on. It’s up to the judiciary now. Will the Republican-appointed judges in the Supreme Court oppose him, either out of patriotism or pride? I’m quite concerned, because I didn’t expect the Republicans in Congress to give up that institution’s authority but they have done so. I don’t know if Congress will have any power left by the time the Democrats have a chance to gain the majority there in the midterms.

that series of keypresses is that exits vim

One of the great mysteries of the universe. However, I can confirm that my standard power button also exits vim.

I sometimes buy games just because I watch videos of other people playing them, in order to support the developers.

_{Yes, that will be believable…}

I don’t think that word means much beyond “bad guy who wants to oppress you” to the average American today, although using it to describe a political opponent would have been outrageous just a few presidential elections ago. Trump has been using it for a while without any backlash.

“Every time the radical left, Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I considered it a great badge of honor,” Mr. Trump said in February, and not for the last time.

Is there anyone whose mind isn’t already made up who will be swayed by the word “fascism”? That’s not a rhetorical question. So much of what I see from both parties sounds like preaching to the choir but I genuinely don’t know what they could say that wouldn’t sound like that.

One of the few Trump voters I know personally is really bothered by the fact that so many of Trump’s handpicked officials end up turning against him, because (according to this voter) it indicates that Trump is a poor judge of people.

That’s a good point. He does seem like he would probably write this sort of article as part of his political agenda regardless of what he sincerely believed. Thus the existence of the article provides almost no information about what conservative voters might actually be thinking.

That’s all correct, but wasn’t Harris’s goal to appeal to conservatives?

I didn’t find the article particularly convincing because there’s a clear answer to the question of why Harris defended Biden’s mental acuity, everyone knows it, but Harris can’t admit it explicitly. No one wanted to be the first person to say that the emperor had no clothes.

It seems like Harris is happy with how the interview went but I’m seeing negative coverage too. I wonder what viewers open to changing their minds actually thought.

Libre Office (at least Calc which is the one I use most) is usable but it has bizarre random slowdowns and crashes relatively frequently, whereas I have never once had issues like that with Microsoft Office. I still use Libre Office (on both Windows and Linux) because it’s free but I acknowledge that it has disadvantages.

You don’t mind their UI conventions? I suppose I could probably get used to them, but while I’m comfortable with Windows and Linux desktop environments, I find the Mac one to be quite unpleasant to use for some reason.