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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Not quite the same. The US has a method for territories to become a State, although it requires the US Congress to agree, and we all know how that shit show is currently.

    Puerto Rico in particular has had 6 referendums on whether to petition to become a State, keep the status quo or independence. While the US Congress has sometimes stood in the way a bit (largely because of the two sided political bullshit we all deal with), the PR referendums historically have been very split, often due to confusing language.

    It’s not as simple as the US outright preventing these territories from even looking at making their own decisions like with the American Colonies and British Empire.




  • That’s exactly why Google Search has gone so far downhill that it’s pushing people elsewhere. Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising. It’s why Google has been scraping data for years to build their own internal responses to easy queries like simple calculations, definitions, basic wiki results, etc. since you never even need to leave their site. Can’t get faster than that, until those results can no longer be trusted.

    Now those quick results can’t be trusted, thanks largely to their blind AI fixation. That trust can never be earned back, it is lost permanently. Many users will instead start looking for alternatives that don’t feed them bullshit responses and instead just give them the links to good info, like Google used to.


  • I just went through training last week and registered with the State of AZ for collecting signatures. There are a ton of ways to accidentally invalidate signatures even if people wanted to sign without being lied to. Those petitions often need almost twice the minimum signatures simply to get past that threshold since so many are invalidated.

    First, only registered voters can sign. Each page of signatures is for a specific county and the signature must be on a page for the county where they are registered to vote, not necessarily where the signature is made. A misspelled address will invalidate a signature. Writing or signing outside the boxes will invalidate a signature. And the paperwork needs to be filled out correctly by the collector, or the entire page of signatures is useless. Every page has the ID of the registered petition collector, and if they are with a group, that is tied to the specific group and petition.

    I’m sure Nebraska has similar requirements. Some states have even thrown away entire groups of signatures for similar issues like the article. If a collection group is confirmed to have been lying to voters about the petition, all of their collected signatures can be tossed out.


  • Are these actually counterfeit, or just the extra produced past what is contractually required at the original factory?

    Many Chinese factories will be contracted for say 18 hours of production, but stay open for 24 hours, and the extra is sold on the grey market. Or the product that doesn’t make it through contracted quality control will be sent to the grey market.

    I can’t believe the actual market for these is large enough to actually justify a second factory spitting out duplicates when the original factory can just make extra beyond what’s contracted. More likely the original factory made like 5,000 pairs instead of the 1,000 Trump sold officially, and those are on the grey market as “counterfeits” despite being exactly the same, just not official.



  • That’s an entirely different situation voters would be responding to, and they would only be doing it because they would have no other option. Even then, it 100% would end up being Kamala Harris and a running mate they scramble to find, only because they need the name recognition. Those are totally different circumstances, extremely obvious and avoidable, but still technically not under their direct control like the entire cycle up to now.

    What we have now is the party’s unwillingness to accept that Biden needed to be told not to run again, so we could get a real primary and voters actually deciding. They are only now starting to question the shitty decision when it’s becoming glaringly obvious that an 80+ year old shouldn’t be running again and younger blood is needed.

    The party is run by the old fucks though, and they don’t want to give up what they have to the younger generations. Look at AOC’s seat, it’s the perfect encapsulation of the DNC’s belief that the old fucks should be running everything.

    AOC handily beat Joseph Crowley in the primary with 57% of the vote (against the #3 Dem at the time, a 20 year Congressional veteran, it’s unprecedented), and he still refused to drop out. Instead he stayed on the ballot under a third party where he again lost, with only 7% of the vote. 7% despite being the “safe” politician, with 20 years experience, #3 in the party, the incumbent with all the name recognition in the world, being challenged by an upstart young female “bartender”. The old fucks don’t want to give it up, and will do anything to prevent that, even losing the election entirely to the Republicans, because they aren’t doing it for the country, they’re running for themselves.









  • The rule is there to prevent them from releasing info the NTSB hasn’t done a full analysis on, but that’s not the case here. However, the info was already made public by the NTSB, to the Senate nonetheless.

    In what world does it make sense that Boeing can’t repeat the same thing when talking about it? Boeing isn’t even allowed to repeat what the NTSB as publicly said? That’s insane.

    A judge would throw this out of court if it came before them, as a ridiculous waste of the court’s time.