When I hear ‘government bloat’, I think $500 hammers and fat cat contracts where big companies get huge contracts that mostly go in the pockets of a handful of rich owners while little goes to the actual project.

I do NOT think it means randomly removing workers. Salaries cost little and are the support structure of the government. I might not want to buy a ‘bridge to nowhere’ but I certainly don’t want to take out 10% of the supports on each bridge.

Everything DOGE has done seems destructive and none of it seems to reduce government waste. In fact, the opposite. p.s. I know there’s more to the hammer story, but – like transgendered instead of transgenic mice – the public mostly only heard the price tag.

The vast army of Georgia poll workers report for duty only about three days a year and get paid about $7.25 an hour. Every time we come in, the rules have changed, so we train for eight hours to learn the new protocols. Election day itself, including set-up and break-down, starts at 5:30 am and ends at 9:00 pm, two hours later if you’re a manager delivering the ballots to the regional office. Most of us are retired, and many are elderly (read: not tech-forward).

And poll workers are not perfect. One of them puts on a sweater and inadvertently obscures her name tag (not allowed). Another shows a new person how to work the check-in station (not allowed). Another tells a nonprofit they can set up their food hand-outs inside the building so as to stay out of the rain (not allowed). And at some point during the 15 hour work day, all of you find yourself accidentally socializing with one another (also not allowed). Likewise, the clerks are socializing with the voters (you guessed it: not allowed), which, worst case, is akin to being smothered in grandmas.

This sounds very like my experience back when I used to work the polls. We all did the best we could and we all knew a fair chunk of the voters, so chatting was frequent.

I’m going to be repeating this whenever this ad blitz is mentioned because it is MUCH WORSE than you think. America PAC is partially funded by Musk and his old pals at Palantir. They sell data and analyses of it. You might get registered to vote if your state is a solid red or blue, but CNBC reports (archive):

[…] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”

The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.

They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk’s political confidants – which is interesting because he’s at Palantir which was you’d think of as his buddy Peter Theil’s gig. Again, Palantir sells information, so in all likelihood they are going to take that input to figure out exactly how to target people to ‘vote Trump’ using the very information the public gave them for free!

Look, I don’t know if JD Vance had sex with a couch. I don’t even know if JD Vance had sex with couch cushions. But yes, I’ve heard that JD Vance did not WRITE that he had sex with a couch in his book. I don’t know if JD Vance wrote he had sex with a couch somewhere else, though.

John Oliver called Vance’s staff to ask and they hung up on Oliver, which was reported as ‘not a “no”’, so I had been thinking, ‘ya know? maybe that JD Vance guy really is a couchfucker, who knows?’ But here you’re saying he’s denied it? Or partially denied it? Well I don’t know what to think now, but I guess it is safer to presume JD Vance having sex with a couch is probably more legend than fact. Certainly, JD Vance having sex with a couch isn’t something you’d want to discuss in polite society or political debate because we’ve no proof and a possible denial.

The premise is suspect.

First, there are lots of (mostly) monogamous animals (‘cheating’ in monogamous pair bonds gets a fair amount of study).

Second, which gorillas? Are you talking about the ones that form alliances with several males and maintain friendly relationships, groom one another, and fight together against common enemies?

Third, monogamy (even with cheating) seems to have an advantage for species where females forage on their own rather than in groups/herds. There’s more to it, though.

This is from a pre-print study, so should be viewed with some suspicion, but it at least describes the current state of investigations:

Since phylogenetic inertia is not a realistic explanation given that four very distantly related lineages are monogamous, the implication is that monogamy has alternative fitness advantages for males. These benefits must also be advantageous for the female, otherwise she would be not willing to tolerate the male’s continued presence – and, perhaps more importantly, would not be willing to undergo the evolution of the expensive cognitive and behavioural traits associated with pairbonding (Dunbar & Shultz 2021).

the fact that primates, in particular, have a long period of offspring dependency suggests that the problem is more likely to be associated with offspring survival.

For human-specific stuff, here’s a piece on promiscuity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3210680/

And one on the ideology of female ‘honor’ and predictors of who will feel what and how strongly : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10563489/

The latest pluralistic article starts with a long rant about “rent” and what’s wrong with it (then explains how Intellectual Property rights are basically the same thing and talks about software). Anyway, you might like the rent part: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/

The headline is false. There are authors of 2025 that may want to ban IVF and the like, but they did NOT put that into the text. Surrogacy is questionable. Given that it states that human life begins at conception, its call for ending ‘abortion drugs’ can immediately be presumed to include typical contraceptive pills (but probably not condoms).

From: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/jul/24/kamala-harris/fact-checking-kamala-harris-on-project-2025-limiti/

PolitiFact did not find any mention of IVF throughout the document, or specific recommendations to curtail the practice in the U.S. The manual doesn’t outright call for restricting standard contraceptive methods, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices, known as IUDs. Project 2025 pointed out the same.

However, it does recommend restricting some emergency contraceptives from certain no-cost insurance coverage.

Project 2025 DOES have this worrying language:

p. 450

From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.

p. 451

Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.

p. 457

Abortion Pills. Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.

It then goes on to detail how to end abortion pills. While the document specifically mentions mifepristone and misoprostol, the early language about life beginning at conception, it is not unreasonable to presume the practical end point might be ending birth control as well.

For folks who don’t get to the page until it is scrubbed (which might not happen, but I expect it will), you are quoting from the “Editorial Reviews” section a quote by “Senator JD Vance”! 🫢

Everybody screenshot and archive that amazon page before they edit it!

Edit: I couldn’t archive.org to capture it, but this should work: https://archive.ph/pqXje

Tell people 2025 would do this. No federal weather means local counties would have to pay Big Business for tornado/hurricane warnings. We’d pay more for fish because fishermen can’t get data unless they pay. Plane schedules become even less reliable AND cost more because the government stops tracking upper level wind speeds.

Look: we want people who get a salary for doing accurate work rather than people who get paid to say whatever the bossman want to hear. Ask people to imagine how it would work if Google, NBC, Amazon, and Fox each sunk the money for trying to replicate the existing infrastructure and then sold pieces of it to paying customers – such as Allstate, CBS, and Delta Airlines. Everyone else would have to HOPE they were getting complete data and have to wonder what was missing. Noticing record highs and lows would become proprietary and forbidden from broadcast in a way akin to being disallowed from referencing “The Superbowl” unless you pay for a license. How’s any of that going to make things better?

P.S. This article is posted to several communities, so I’m reiterating this post repeatedly.

https://archive.is/MaxAY – thanks to mox@lemmy.sdf.org for the link

It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

do we want flood-risk predictions sponsored by a flood-insurance company, or heat advisories from an air-conditioning conglomerate?

The agency is home to one of the most significant repositories of climate data on Earth, which includes information on shifting atmospheric conditions and the health of coastal fisheries, plus hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of ice-core and tree-ring data.

Eliminating or privatizing climate information won’t eliminate the effects of climate change. It will only make them more deadly.

Tell people 2025 would do this. No federal weather means local counties would have to pay Big Business for tornado/hurricane warnings. We’d pay more for fish because fishermen can’t get data unless they pay. Plane schedules become even less reliable AND cost more because the government stops tracking upper level wind speeds.

Look: we want people who get a salary for doing accurate work rather than people who get paid to say whatever the bossman want to hear. Ask people to imagine how it would work if Google, NBC, Amazon, and Fox each sunk the money for trying to replicate the existing infrastructure and then sold pieces of it to paying customers – such as Allstate, CBS, and Delta Airlines. Everyone else would have to HOPE they were getting complete data and have to wonder what was missing. Noticing record highs and lows would become proprietary and forbidden from broadcast in a way akin to being disallowed from referencing “The Superbowl” unless you pay for a license. How’s any of that going to make things better?

P.S. This article is posted to several communities, so I’m reiterating this post repeatedly.

I was going to suggest this first blog post to give you an idea about some basic types, but it linked to the second blog and I thought you might like that, too. Mostly, they give you an idea of the terms and language used to describe keyboard stuff. There are other sources, sure, but the first blog post seemed like a fair write-up for a beginner, so I stuck with hiros even though their main goal is selling products (but hey, they are kinda cool artsy products).

• https://hirosarts.com/blog/are-red-switches-good-for-typing/
• https://hirosarts.com/blog/best-key-switches-for-gaming/
• https://hirosarts.com/blog/are-keycaps-universal/

haven’t got a clue about mechanical keyboards, but I have strong tastes in terms of aesthetics

My quick take is that if you can afford to get a second keyboard if you don’t like this one, get this one simply because you like the look.

It isn’t clear from the image on the ATK page you linked, but I believe those keys display what they are (Esc, tab, qwerty) on the side facing the user rather than the top.

From the videos you’ve seen, you’re probably aware that there are several different ways for the keys to feel and sound. This might be a perfect fit for you, or maybe you decide you miss something about your current keyboard. If you haven’t tried a couple different styles, it can be hard to pin down exactly what you want.

As far as the software goes, the keyboard will almost certainly function without software, but you might not be able to control the lights/illumination display.

I blame the defunding of reliable curators. The good gets lost in the torrent of mediocre content. This isn’t just music, but videos, news, art, and so on. Most anything that both craftsmen and amateurs can produce is now easily accessible to everyone everywhere. In addition to the old method of producing albums where the band had to go to some location and work on it as a regular job, and with the label sending in extra musicians, equipment, professionals and such, there used to be trusted critics.

Historically, we had a short list of vetted reviewers who could point us towards the best stuff without the need to wade through the rest. Even if it turned out that your aesthetics did not match that of a given critic, you could probably see why such critics held their opinions and could quickly locate a critic whose tastes did align with yours. Now we have a billion fake review sites run by the companies and/or families of those being reviewed. They are not trustworthy. A person is left to try everything on their own and we often run out of time looking for ‘good’ and settle on ‘good enough’.

Whoooosh!

I love Amy Good, I love Democracy NOW! That said, Russian disinformation in the US is always going to be different from US disinformation in the US. At the very least, when the US does it, it’ll benefit a rich American rather than a rich Russian.

I’m interested in Growbot. :-)

Too soon

me, reads: Lemmy (from Motorhead) offers Top of the Pops a two F-k-All option

me visualizes the 2-fingered bird getting offered to the old music show