Hotspur

Was gonna say this shirt really isn’t that bracing, but technically it slides in under the “shirt about a thing that can go hard” loophole, so ok.

I haven’t used competing apps to know, but as a forced teams user it is very sluggish, seems to break other ms apps half the time and has some strange and persistent design choices that irk me. It also crashes on its own, when I’m not using it 2-3 times a day.

It has improved in terms of features lately, but still feels very bloated and WIP most of the time. It still won’t let me control where video windows are, and I’ll never understand this.

This is our replacement for Skype, which was obviously feature deficient and getting old, but does what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t cause problems.

Not sure if there’s a good competing app in terms of video and slack functionality, integration into outlook and onedrive (both of which also annoy me and seem to be performing worse-over-time, but are unavoidable and sometimes useful.)

Was gonna say, pretty sure it’s just an oil and gas conference now, no?

Daaamn, he is literally doing that emoji

It’s a real fear, but they can’t outright fire most federal employees. It’s why they’re so into the schedule f thing, because it allows them to reclassify a ton of jobs as at-will appointment jobs and that would allow them to summarily terminate and replace those positions.

It’s why they’re planning so many other moves like arbitrary relocation (they say ok your agency is now gonna be based out of Iowa, you can move or quit) blocking and cutting funding so that hiring is impossible and people don’t get raises, can’t find projects, etc.

But based on the rhetoric I would agree that there are some very nasty things brewing, and being reclassified and then terminated for being a democrat isn’t a crazy outcome, which is bad.

I have read that at first they’re gonna tread lightly, because if you outright destroy major agencies it causes huge visible blowback. So it may be slow at first. But on the other hand, it’s pretty clear after this election that no one cares about what people want, and they may be assuming that there won’t be more elections that they can’t fake so they don’t have to worry about people being pissed off after they get rid of all the agencies that work to keep things functional.

He’s got such a genuine smile.

Yeah I’ve enjoyed this guys commentary in the past. Also he’s so… calm and soothing in how he speaks, which is always a nice find in a content creator.

Half the country didn’t vote. 70 million people directly voted for this outcome. If you want to rage at something, it would be appropriate to send it that way.

Consider how self-righteous and smug posts serve to dampen enthusiasm and cause people vote in contrarian ways. When dems and their dedicated supporters stopped trying to earn votes and instead switched to the current hostage-negotiation method of campaigning, they also ceased telling any kind of story about the future. The message became “it’s gonna be bad, but possibly less bad than if we let the evil man win” The margins were so bad it can’t be lazily pinned on antifa super soldiers. Something didn’t sell to a huge number of people.

The call is coming from inside the house, and lockstep supporters who refuse to question anything are the reason the DNC felt comfortable running the same losing strategy they’ve run over, and over and over again. To support this is to ensure it will keep happening. The DNC and their apparatus are completely to blame for their poor performance, and trying to externalize the blame simply covers for them and lays the ground work for more poor performance and weak results.

At this point the DNC would probably perform better if it dropped all the consultants and just randomly picked people off the street in different states.

But honestly, this is assuming the DNC fucked up, but they really do seem more comfortable with a fascist being in power than a candidate who might threaten corporate power, so possibly this is just the system functioning as intended.

If I lived in a swing state, I suspect I would have voted Harris based on harm reduction, but it would have pissed me off. They’ve indirectly told me they don’t want, and don’t need my vote throughout the campaign.

Colder war was what got me interested in him, great short story.

They’re pretty fun little books, fairly unique little setup.

Is that the same Charlie Stross that writes the James-bond-meets-Cthulhu-IT-worker books?

Unless we get a blow-out for either candidate that cannot be challenged, which does not seem likely based on the polls and battle lines, even if we have a Biden-esque victory for Harris, I’m fairly unsure of what will happen next. I personally doubt full on Civil War like in the Garland movie, or the actual civil war, but I would expect all kinds of shitty legal tricks, possible Supreme Court involvement and of course, stochastic and targeted violence, particularly towards immigrants and minorities. In other words, win or lose, I think the US may be in for a bad time. Hopefully I’m working in my assumptions here and it is somewhat more boring.

To better answer your question though, assuming things don’t completely fall apart: the two sides already don’t mix much, which is part of the problem in the first place. We’ll get more govt inaction due to gridlocked congress, probably more defense spending and some states, in the absence of federal legislating, will continue to take a larger role as they have been doing already in the recent era.

So basically more of the same, on a not-great trend line. Something has to give at some point, it’s hard to imagine how you could put the genie back in the bottle now, particularly with overall conditions in the world due to late-stage capitalism and climate change constricting each year.