nednobbins

joined 2 years ago
[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Wasn’t she picked to replace a white guy with a cock because it was obvious to everyone that he wasn’t gonna be president?

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 23 points 2 days ago (1 children)

As a multi-national, multi-ethnic, mutt, I am too.

Given that part of my mutt-makeup is Austrian, I'm offended that Austria and our northern neighbor have greatly contributed to this. Our deserved guilt over the Holocaust blinded us to decade after decade of human rights abuses by Israel.

We've seen this coming for a long time and, as a taxpaying contributor to the biggest funder of Israel, I'm ashamed.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

There isn't. There's also no point in continuing a strategy that clearly favors Russia (they're the ones steadily gaining ground every month).

The better strategy (which Trump almost certainly won't entertain) is to negotiate a peace now and use that time to build a robust defense-in-depth at the current border.

It will be ugly because it will turn miles of border into a dangerous DMZ. But Russia already demonstrated that it works. Dig a crap ton of trenches. Build out bunkers and anti-tank traps. Ignore Geneva a bit and mine the crap out of the area. Lots of surveillance. Probably some experimental infrastructure to make it easier to deploy drones.

That would also need to be coupled with commitments to build out munitions plants in Western Ukraine; primarily artillery shells and drones.

This will work because it dramatically raises the cost of each meter of ground gained by opposing forces. Ukraine can get defensive infrastructure that they can cheaply operate, without significant external assistance.

The downside is that Ukraine would loose parts of its territory. The upside is that it has a far better chance of keeping the territory it still has.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Maybe. "Allowed" suggested that they wanted or welcomed it.

A bunch of formerly powerful people in the Republican party are now much less powerful. Many of them have been sidelined in the Republican party and replaced. Several prominent former Republicans have effectively switched to the Democrats.

The Republicans and Democrats have differences in how they structure their organizations but neither one wants to intentionally allow outsiders to take over.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe. I think it's more likely that she truly believed that her milquetoast approach was actually the safer option. I'm not even sure Harris was exceptionally cowardly.

Many other people would likely have folded and taken that "safe" option.

The problem is that we needed someone who went well beyond just "not cowardice". We needed an actual hero. We needed a candidate who was willing to boldly face down big money interests, even when it seemed unwise and hopeless. Harris definitely wasn't that hero.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with "de-duping" as a database operation either.

The main components would probably be:

  1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
  2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that's where existing duplicates would get removed)
  3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn't valid any more.
  4. Decide when you're going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

There's a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on "de-duped" databases.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The Democratic party, as it stands, is dead and the Greens are stillborn.

There's nothing but hopes and prayers to support the idea that the Greens will ever get anywhere in the US. They have neither a policy platform nor any individuals who inspire broad support.

It is absolutely possible to take over parties from within though. We've seen it happen twice with the Republicans. They tried, and failed, to keep the Tea Party from taking over. Then they tried, and failed, to keep Trump from taking over.

History suggests we have a better chance getting AOC to take over and clean house with the Democrats than we do waiting for the Greens to make any headway.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 1 week ago

I agree. Her speech on the Monday after she got picked was great. She came out of the gate swinging. She laid out a solid initial vision with a realistic warning that it was going to be a hard fight.

Then she didn't.

Somewhere along the line she got cold feet and decided that not rocking the boat would be a safe option. She thought that pushing too hard would galvanize her opponents. Instead she tried to play nice with them and alienated large chunks of her base.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Harris raised 50% more than Trump. It’s hard to pin this one solely on big money influence.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 29 points 1 week ago (7 children)

I think that’s the point of this tour. He isn’t running for president. He’s trying to build a support base for a real alternative.

That’s presumably AOC but it’s still too early.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.

“De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.

It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.

It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.

A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.

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