As much as I enjoy shitting on McDonald’s

So you are behind the outbreak!

Hitler has only got one ball…

And that should be an easy choice," Trump added.

I find myself agreeing with Trump for once.

I think the nut job aspect would be leaping to the conclusion they would be forcing people to quarter these folks, as opposed to arranging long term hotels/rentals or maybe voluntary hosts. Employers do this all the time and people don’t presume a constitutional crisis.

Still seems stupid, shouldn’t need that much manpower to help canvas.

Oh, I’m sure they could deploy in a way that has acceptable optics for those folks. They would see a strong violent force there to enforce their interests over those pesky desperate poors.

If 9/10 were already voluntarily coming into the office every day, I could see it. Of course it would only be 9/10 of the people he bothered to speak to it about, and maybe he only spoke to people that were already there.

As to why they would care if they were already there, well one guy in my team goes in every day of his own accord. He applies pressure to everyone on my team to be there with him every day, in spite of the stated WFH policy. So everyone but me goes in every day because I’m the only one that is willing to disappoint him. I’m reasonably certain that guy would love a forced into the office every day mandate, to force me to be there too. Then he could stop making passive aggressive comments about how people who didn’t come in must not care about the work as much as they should at every opportunity.

I’ve seen some analysis correlating the shift in those odds not to any political news or polls, but to things like Elon Musk telling folks to go bet on Trump…

There are signs of three distinct interpretations in the result:

• On topic, the concept of cleaning a wild bird you are trying to save
• Preparing a store bought Turkey (removing a label)
• Preparing a wild bird that is caught

It’s actually a pretty good illustration of how AI assembles “information shaped text” and how smooth it can look and yet how dumb it can be about it. Unfortunately advocates will just say “I can’t get this specific thing wrong when I ask it or another LLM, so there’s no problem”, even as it gets other stuff wrong. It’s weird as you better be able to second guess the result, meaning you can never be confident in an answer you didn’t already know, but when that’s the case, it’s not that great for factual stuff.

For “doesn’t matter” content, it may do fine (generated alternatives to stock photography, silly meme pictures, random prattle from background NPCs in a game), but for “stuff that matters”, Generative AI is frequently more of a headache than a help.

I mean, not one a human would ever make.

First off, the word “rescued” would have immediately made the context of “protect the pigeon” clear.

Second, a “rescued pigeon” wouldn’t have a label on it, so it’s clearly mixing in something from likely a store bought turkey, but then the other steps don’t make sense either as those don’t apply either.

A traditional search approach would not have made the mistake either. It would either have failed to find anything or found actual on topic results. It’s “clever” enough to genericize “pigeon” to “birds” and hit upon text related to birds from a grocery store and birds that you hunted and mix all that together in a coherent language but with content that is nonsense.

In this case, hilarious, in other day to day situations, it’s maddening, as some professional colleague gets the same sort of nonsense but lacks knowledge to correct it and relays it as fact. Then when called out on the data was in fact so bad it wasted time, they just say ‘oh, lol, AI’ (they wanted to take credit for it if it worked, but can hide behind AI when it doesn’t).

Some sites only allow one public key per account…

I am saying there is no electoral path to Socialism.

That smells of voter suppression, like you are trying to talk people out of even trying to exercise their voice in the political system. The refusal to specifically spell out which described path you advocate for suggests you want violent insurrection, which is absurd, either doomed to be outgunned or doomed to be exploited by leaders with ulterior motives. If you can’t get the votes to your position, then things are going to be very bad if you try to get your way.

None of your examples started from a vaguely functional democratic state. For all the fawning over Cuba, somehow they are a big source of refugees. The Soviet Union fell apart under well understood conditions that their flavor of ‘communism’ did not fix. China has an awful lot of forced labor, laborers stuck dorming in factories, and capitalist billionaires for a ‘communist’ state, and they have an ethno state with some other problematic human rights behaviors. While they may have been better than prior regimes in their contexts, I don’t think the end state in any of those is better than the current state of affairs in the US.

You advocate for letting others chose the government while just sitting out and protesting and hoping the people formally being given power by the voting system you say not to meaningfully participate in would heed those protests?

Or are you saying that such groups shall go beyond their stated methods and go to violent revolution, in which scenario I’d ask for a single example of “socialism” achieved through such ends that didn’t install a pretty terrible authitarian regime that merely took advantage of social unrest to seize power?

The problem is when misrepresentations run wild, the other side can highlight examples and say “see, the left is out there lying and twisting the obvious truth”, and destroy the credibility of all the other material.

Like when Fox News would bash Obama for wearing a Tan suit or fist bumping someone. Any potential legitimate criticism they could relate is undermined by being a laughing stock over such stupid stuff.

With Obama, I suppose I could get it as a strategy because he didn’t supply enough “juicy” material to be substantive, so they didn’t have much alternative but to try to generate stupid outrage. With Trump, he is constantly blatantly showing maliciousness or incompetence, why bother undermining credibility by wasting time highlighting and trying to distort a rare occurrence of him not being incompetent?

The thing is there is nothing actionable at all in that rhetoric. There’s a lot of Marxist jargon and a lament that voting can never work, but the only guidance is “establish socialism” with no suggested actionable moves because we can’t just wave a wand and make that the case. If you can’t envision and recommend a democratic strategy to get there, you aren’t going to get anywhere near your objectives.

I generally hear them water down the gun control, like a handgun with a stock number of bullets is generally ok. Or a rifle or shot gun. Unless you have some red flags, which you probably don’t have. Even in some of the stricter nations of gun control, there’s frequently some path for rural folks to at least have long guns.

Somehow Spock returned

People voted against however things were because of the pandemic. Trump was in charge, so he caught the general dissatfication with everything.

Now the sting of inflation last year likely has a lot of those same people again upset at how things are and vote for change again, whoever it will be.

Also, 2020 was the most accessible election in history, with so much flexibility for remote voting and so many people not stuck at work unable to find time to vote. The gop has been changing that, locking down absentee voting more, successfully getting voting id laws passed, and reducing early voting sites and hours. People are too busy working at their workplace again, and access to voting is reduced.

Because money means influence. Whether it’s the nation to benefit or the myriad of US tech companies that want it to stay, or other international interests, it’s way too much potential influence and I suspect cannot be ignored for some strict adherence to rules that no one really would care to defend.

Note that a lot of the people that are in trouble this time are hundreds of miles inland in mountains… .

The shockingly high number of people with high end phones are still, by global standards, pretty damn rich.