Eccitaze

The reason I know I'd fail as a politician is because the instant I get asked anything about Israel / Palestine, I'd either run away screaming or I'd throw my hands up and say "I'm not touching this with a ten foot pole, they both suck and everyone except the civilians caught in the crossfire deserve whatever they get."

This whole conflict isn't black and white morality, or even black and gray morality. It barely qualifies as black and slightly-less-black-if-you-squint morality. It's like Luke trying to blow up the Death Star, if the Death Star was populated mostly with families, children, and puppies, and Luke ate a baby while he was rescuing the princess.

Advertising is largely a cargo cult, with the "advertising/marketing is the most important thing" mindset being pushed by people with a vested interest in getting you to spend money on advertising. Actual, real businesses buying actual, real advertisements have said they saw basically no difference in revenue before and after buying the ad.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like there's no point in advertising--small businesses need it to jumpstart their client base, and medium/large businesses use it to make sure their products maintain mindshare so that a customer is more likely to think "I want a Coke" instead of "I want a soda." But in terms of directly influencing customer purchasing decisions, the biggest influence is old-fashioned word of mouth and direct customer experience, not advertising.

I daily drive it at work and it's perfectly solid, but I also don't do anything cuhRAAAAZY because it's a workstation. 99% of the time I'm just running Flameshot to take screenshots, a few Firefox windows with one or two dozen tabs total, a company chat program, and on rare occasions I'll use LibreOffice to open a file or do some very light image editing.

Linux is pretty much universally free, with the exception of a few select distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and even then, there's variants of RHEL that are free like CentOS and Fedora, the main attraction for RHEL is paid support).

Most distributions are fairly similar, these days, with the main differences being the desktop environment (i.e. how the UI looks and feels), the update cadence (some distros are much more aggressive about deploying updates to the software and utilities underlying the distro, which gives new features faster at the cost of breaking things more often, while other distros prefer to stay on older, known-stable versions longer, at the cost of being slower to deploy new features that sometimes a program needs to run), and the methods used to configure settings (some distros go out of their way to make as much configureable in the GUI as possible, while others are primarily configured through console commands, and others like Gentoo expect you to manually compile pretty much all the software yourself--this makes it extremely customizable, but extremely difficult), and the default file format for package installation (rpm, deb, flatpaks, snaps, etc).

My personal recommendation is to check out a few of these:

• Ubuntu

• Linux Mint (or Cinnamon)

• EndeavorOS

• Pop!OS

I also recommend that when you first format the disk, you make two partitions: one smaller 50-100 GB partition for the root partition (where Linux stores its system files and software), and a larger partition for /home, which is where all your personal files are stored. This way, you can easily swap between different distros without needing to really worry about losing your files.

The point you seem to be missing is that the ADA currently has a relatively limited mechanism for direct government enforcement, because the current mechanisms were designed under the assumption that individuals could also sue to enforce the ADA. Most of the government agencies currently enforcing the ADA only produce guidelines and issue regulations, with relatively few lawsuits originating directly from the government. Enhancing the government's ability to enforce the ADA requires passing an amendment to the law through Congress to potentially create a new office with enforcement authority (or grant additional enforcement authority to an existing office), and to provide adequate funding so it can keep up with the additional workload. The odds of this amendment being passed on its own are infinitesimal; even if it passed the GOP-controlled House (who would almost certainly oppose it on principle, and even the reps who didn't oppose it would have far more important issues to spend political capital on), it would almost certainly be filibustered in the Senate, where it would die.

The only way it would possibly pass is if it was attached to a must-pass bill, such as one to address the debt limit or avoid another government shutdown. Even then, it'd be vulnerable to negotiations--it may be included initially, but underfunded or dropped entirely in order to accommodate other, more important goals. Even if by some miracle it did survive negotiations intact, it would then be a constant target for defunding or dissolvement by conservative legislators looking to deliver red meat to their base.

Yeah, in an ideal world, it would be nice if the government took care of enforcing the law. But this isn't an ideal world. Getting rid of individual enforcement trades a system that produces mostly desirable outcomes and ensures compliance with the law even when exploited by bad faith actors and replaces it with a system that is much slower due to the additional bureaucracy and the inevitable backlog piling up from underfunded and overworked agents, and is also vulnerable to the whims of a handful of extremists, placing the quality of life for millions of disabled people at risk.

That's why I say the ADA will be feckless without an individual avenue to force compliance: even if the government does take over all the enforcement work previously done by individuals, it'll be much slower, and the government will be strongly incentivized to focus on large, wide-ranging cases over smaller, individual violations, leaving them unaddressed for years (or even ignoring them outright so they don't get accused of being "hostile to small business")

And others replied: how? The government has an atrocious record of enforcing laws like this. For fuck's sake, we can barely get the various levels of government to enforce issues that are way more serious like workplace safety laws, wage theft, or food safety laws, despite there supposedly being an avenue to actually report these violations, and despite those violations carrying fines that should incentivize government enforcement. Do we really expect the federal government, with all of its deadlocks and stalemates, to fund a new office (or provide funding for an existing department) to accept complaints, process, investigate, and enforce ADA compliance?

Without an individual avenue to force compliance, the ADA will be rendered utterly feckless. At best the landscape for disabled people will fracture into yet another red-state/blue-state scenario where blue states are forced to craft and pass state-level mirrors of the ADA that includes a private avenue for enforcement (or funds enforcement at the state level), further complicating the legal landscape for regional/national companies who now have to comply with 20+ different laws instead of one. Meanwhile, red states will do nothing, leaving disabled people stuck without any realistic avenue to enforce compliance and address discrimination.

Thank you. It's critically important to recognize that each party does do similar things sometimes, but it's also crucial to recognize the difference in motivation behind those similar actions, and to acknowledge that the motivation is sometimes just as important as the action that results from the motivation.

He offered the Democrats no concessions to vote for him, and reneged on a deal he personally negotiated in May during the debt ceiling ~~hostage crisis~~ negotiations. Why in the world would democrats vote to keep someone who actively betrayed them in power without major, binding concessions?

I've had the car in the shop for repairs precisely zero times, and the one actual problem I've had was mostly my own damn fault and once I figured out what was going wrong it was a literal 5 minute fix. I'd call that zero issues.

And the air cooled battery is literally not an issue unless you fast charge it multiple times in a day. The number of times I fell under that scenario in 4 years of ownership was precisely once, when I going on a weekend road trip for my birthday, and I opted to rent a hybrid for that instead. I consider something that covers literally 99.999% of my driving needs, has needed zero shop time beyond routine maintenance, and has saved me literally thousands of dollars in gas money to be a pretty good deal.

Now, to be 100% fair, I wouldn't recommend someone buy a Leaf today because its CHAdeMO fast charger is obsolete. But the car itself is perfectly fine.

My understanding is that filling the seats in the various committees left vacant by Feinstein's death requires a vote by the full Senate. Which can be filibustered. Because of course it fucking can.

Huh? I've had a 2018 base model Leaf for over 4 years, and here's the sum total of my issues:

• Car didn't recognize the door was closed at one point, preventing me from shifting out of park (issue was due to dents in frame caused by occasionally closing the door on the seat belt buckle, which was positioned at the same height as the sensor switch built into the door that gets depressed when door is closed. Fixed in 5 minutes by wadding up a small ball of packing tape and taping it to the frame where it comes in contact with the sensor switch)

• It occasionally doesn't load the Bluetooth module properly, fixed by restarting the car

That's literally it. It's been rock solid otherwise, and it gets driven literally every day.

Ok, so there's a lot going on here.

Democrats are voting no on all the proposals in the House, because they're a divergence from the spending levels McCarthy himself negotiated in May to avoid hitting the debt ceiling. Hard-line Republicans are voting no on the budget proposals from the House and Senate because they're not enough of a divergence and only gives them some of what they asked for (even though what they're already getting is a non-starter in the Democrat-controlled Senate).

McCarthy could present the stopgap bill from the Senate, or a bill that adheres to the previously negotiated spending limits, and they would almost 100% pass with support from moderate Democrats and Republicans overriding the no votes from the freedom caucus and a few progressive Democrats, but McCarthy is afraid to do that because the wing nuts are threatening to oust him from the speakership if he doesn't cave to their demands.

Making matters worse, House Democrats are pissed about McCarthy opening an impeachment inquiry into Biden over baseless allegations, so they have even less desire then normal to accommodate McCarthy in his efforts to renege on the very deal he negotiated less than 5 months ago.

The Democrats have zero responsibility for this mess, and zero desire to rescue a feckless and ineffective speaker from the consequences of his own dumb choices. And make no mistake: the only way this ends is McCarthy growing the balls to tell the wing nuts to get fucked, or the house bypassing him entirely with a discharge petition. The only variable is whether that happens before or after a government shutdown, and it looks like that's going to be after at this point.