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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • That’ll teach her! Way to go - you really stuck it to that horrible excuse of a candidate.

    It’s not like she had better labor policies (or practices) than that other guy (or did she?)

    It’s not like that other guy was (allegedly) working with an (alleged) war criminal to rebuff US efforts to make a ceasefire deal (or was he?)

    And finally, it’s not like AIPAC can literally thumbs up or down damn near any politician in the US like Julius H. Fucking, Ceasar and an almost universal bloc of voters will carry out their direction. Oh, wait, they will.

    The thing that pisses me off is that yeah, maybe she’s fine in Cali or Hawaii or wherever. But there’s gonna be a fuck of a lot more death and misery in the world if fascists get control of the United States in the form of Donald Trump, and in those few states that matter (because of the fucked up electoral college) that attitude , which I perceive as smug self-righteousness, could be the deciding factor.

    That simple worldview, unburdened with the whole idea of “you can’t make change if you’re not elected” must really be comfortable.

    But you sure showed Harris.

    I’d love to expound on this thought, but I have a fussy infant daughter that needs attending. BTW, it would be really cool if she FUCKING DIDN’T have to grow up in some goddamned Handmaid’s Tale dystopia.




  • I’d like to see that source. The voter information should be limited to their registered address and what primary or caucus they voted in - not their individual votes, which are anonymized. At most, a PAC should only be able to infer (from the voter information alone) a likelihood of which political party the voter is associated with. Now, if they take that voters info and combine it with open source intelligence, social media, advertising intelligence/marketing data, they can make much better assumptions.

    At the locality level, the voter is issued a serialized ballot. The local township, city, whatever keeps a log that “voter x received ballot Y”, but that’s where the association ends. Before being tabulated (read by the optical scanning machine and dropped into a sealed chamber), an election official removes to perforated strip containing the serial number, and the voter deposits the ballot (deserialized) into the tabulator. There is no input to the tabulator to indicate which ballot, or which voter was just processed.

    The registration receipts and ballots (without serial numbers) are kept by the locality under seal for a designated retention period.

    Source: local election official





  • That would be the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates’ false claims that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are 1) illegal, 2) causing mass crime, and 3) eating the townsfolk’s pets. All of these have been debunked. That has not stopped bomb threats, school and business closings, and rantings by other right-wing nutjob clingers-on to the same effect, denigrating a full 20% of this Midwestern town.

    Several area Republicans have come out pleading for the rhetoric to stop, but because the hate is a feature, not a bug, the VP candidate came out and said: “if I have to make stories up to get the media’s attention I will and won’t feel bad”, and has doubled down on these lies.





  • I manage the IT for a SMB in the non-profit mental health space, and am connected through another role to our state’s cybersecurity fusion center. My small, insignificant network has scanning attempts run on it a few thousand times a day. Several hundred times a day we will log attacks from various vectors. Looking at the stats every month, going back a decade, the source of all of these is: #1) Russia, #2) China. Every. Time. We present a fat ransomware target, but have no IP to steal, so why the interest? A couple of reasons, courtesy of the fusion center and the local FBI office: first, supply chain attacks: we are partnered with larger medical groups, insurance companies, the state government, and research universities, and using trusted connections to get into those upstream entities is sometimes easier than attacking the front door. I have a small security budget comparatively. Second: botnets/zombies: taking over systems from within the US and making your traffic domestic, or even local to your target helps obfuscate the source of the attack, and ultimately why everyone should care. Not just about China, but about security in general - unpatched home PCs have been used to host and distribute malware, spam and even CP. I certainly wouldn’t want that on my home network. Even if someone didn’t care about that, Americans can be trusted to fall back on: “they’re taking something of yours” - they’re using your bandwidth and you’re paying for it. I believe the Chinese citizens just want the same things American, German, Bulgarian, and East Elbonian citizens want - to live life and be happy (in our parlance; “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”). But the Chinese government however, has a 100-year plan to be the sole economic power in the world, and the way they’re trying to get there isn’t playing nicely in the sandbox.





  • I looked for a replacement for my Chrysler minivan for quite a while. (I’ve driven them since 2000, so I was a bit out of the loop). I wanted awd, and ideally seating for 7. But I also had a love for the grand Cherokee. Well, the pre-current-body-style models; they’re fuck-ugly now. Drove a bunch of different suv’s and finally settled on the Subaru Ascent Limited. Technically 7-passenger if you really don’t like 3 people, but I plan on leaving the back row stowed most of the time, giving me almost as much room as my old van behind the 2nd row seats. Wonderful to drive.

    I’d suggest the Chrysler Pacifica as a possibility, but don’t want to make an enemy of anyone. :P