In my state, getting at least 2% of the vote for either Governor or President in a general election keeps the Party on the ballot for the next election.

Without hitting that 2% threshold, the party loses its official status and has to go back to petitioning status, which means resources are tied up both canvassing for tens of thousands of signatures and fighting in courts to get reinstated. So it’s a perpetual ground game and prevents the party from taking off.

The Libertarian Party has remained above that threshold for about a decade now, the only third party to do so consistently, and that’s pretty scary.

JC Penney decided to show the actual price on clothing instead of what clothing retailers usually do, which is a grossly inflated price and then a slash through it and another sticker that reads like 30% off and bullshit events like “store credit” and discount sales every weekend. It was called “Fair and Square Pricing” and was quite competitive price wise with other retailers.

It nearly bankrupted them because nobody wanted to shop at a place where they weren’t getting a deal.

https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/fair-square-pricing-thatll-never-work-jc-penney-we-being-794530

Yeah, I remember almost 20 years ago, an older dude telling me that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and giving me a copy of a movie called Zeitgeist on CD-R. That dude would be in his 60’s or late 50’s now.

Before that, people like Art Bell made a living on AM radio late at night with things like the Taos Hum and UFO’s and paranormal stuff.

Like, a lot of early US settlers got sent there because they were batshit crazy and a danger to society. The Puritans were kicked out of England, and then they were kicked out of the Netherlands of all places, how does that even happen, before they ran off to America and did a bunch of crazy shit. We think of the “Salem Witch Trials” with horror and then sing “Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride” without batting an eye, who do you even think the Pilgrims were?

So a bunch of criminals and wackos settled the United States, and when they got too crazy for their village, they just moved west, killed the native men, fucked a bunch of children, and made another crazy village. Pocahantas was like 12. And then if someone got kicked out of that village for being crazy, rinse and repeat until you get shit like Mormonism in Utah and Branch Davidians in Waco Texas and bombing the Olympics and speaking in tongues and sponsoring genocide through Biblical Tourism of the Holy Land.

America is a land of crazy people who have been rewarded for generations for being batshit crazy, and have an ability to not see things clearly in front of their face. This is really nothing new.

Zen browser does that.

Sisko was killed in TNG’s universe. Sisko survived in DS9’s universe due to the prophets saving him. The Trek universe diverged at Wolf 359.

The Dominion War has drastically different outcomes. Existential crisis in one universe where Sisko does a lot of meddling; barely mentioned in the other.

The biggest change to the cast is that Worf marries Jadzia Dax and becomes Ambassador to the Klingon Empire in one universe; in the other universe, he does a brief inconsequential stint at DS9 (without Sisko), never marries, then returns to the Enterprise E as pretty much the same character from TNG, and at some later point, he gets the Enterprise E destroyed.

The Picard timeline is set in the universe where Sisko died at Wolf 359.

“I hope that you will eat food, and not be eaten by food.”

-Sophon, Death’s End

I bought the OP12 and OP12R specifically because of the high frequency PWM (one for me, one for spouse). We have had issues with iPhone and Pixel pwm, where the text is unreadable because it wobbles on the screen at lower brightness, and eyestrain that comes with it.

I have not had any issues with the pwm flicker on the 12 and 12R. It’s the only OLED phone that I’ve been able to use.

I stopped distro hopping and started hopping around Mastodon instances instead.

I currently have two active accounts. One is more established but the server goes down for days at a time.

The other is pretty robust but I’m still establishing myself there.

I echo the sentiment that there aren’t a lot of Asian people on Mastodon. Although it seems that vivaldi.net is mostly Japanese people.

Monitors are starting to move in this direction. Samsung has a notorious 5k Apple Studio competitor that wants to connect to the Internet and uses the same interface as their Galaxy smartphones.

Standby. Winter is coming for monitors as well.

The movie Hackers.

I just don’t understand it. I see some people with $1000 car payments and nothing toward retirement. What ever happened to looking for good deals? We had a kind of “rugged ingenuity” thing growing up where you respected people who took care of their older stuff, and I guess that still holds true today. $1000 car payments, I would have paid off my car in under a year.

Honestly, I’m scared to spend. Which I guess is okay because I’m comfortable with how we live and sometimes you have to spend on life events out of your control.

Camry

Yeah, thanks. Between ThinkPads and system76 and Fairphone, it’s pretty easy to maintain. Monitor is a Dell U3014. It was over a thousand dollars new but these days it’s under $200 used and I’ve replaced the mainboard in it twice for about $145 each time. Everything was purchased slightly used so that saves a lot.

I kind of don’t really drive much. Between biking and living close to a lot of things, I’ve put about 40,000 miles on the car in 7 years. Car is in its third decade and has about 70k miles on it.

Live below my means, invest the rest.

I don’t dress or act like people in my pay range. My house is small and in a quiet neighborhood and cost less than my salary. Car is older but paid off and I know all the quirks and have the toolbox in the back to fix it. It is probably one of the top 5 most reliable cars in history. My work dress shoes are 10 years old and my around the house shoes were new in 2019.

I spend my money where I spend my time. So I have a nice phone, a very nice monitor and mechanical keyboard, and a good computer. And all with the right to repair philosophy. Same for my wife and kids. And also good running shoes, good exercise equipment.

The plan is to get to a point where I can just not work at all and maintain my lifestyle. Three percent rule and all that. And also help launch my kids.

Something about a 25 year roof and a Japanese shit box car in my fortress of solitude.

FWIW I grew up really really really poor like you wouldn’t believe so I’m okay with this.

No, you will be added to a list that gets sold around. Better to keep that data point private so you don’t become a target.

I’m pretty sure the pollsters aren’t cold calling or cold texting people any more. It is more likely than not, a scam.

The only poll that matters is election day.

–Gnome Web from Flathub

–Chromium in the Debian repo

–Chromium in the CalyxOS build

I would love to use Vivaldi and this is likely the best option left since it’s all the old Opera devs, but FFS just make it libre software guys. They seem to be financially stable with their team of like 30 people and run one of the largest Mastodon instances and have a great community.

Its got the best interface out of any of the Chrome reskins, especially with the left side tabs. They are trolling Mozilla right now with the whole, “we are the only browser not run by a marketing company or trying to build AI into the browser.”

But for me it being closed is a non-starter.

Like for fucks sake just make it libre software. Brave is open and literally nobody is building on top of it (morally bankrupt company though), what does Vivaldi have to lose by becoming libre software? They have nothing to lose and a competitive advantage to gain by becoming libre. There’s literally a community waiting to embrace you.

FWIW, I am kind of behind the curve. I used the Mozilla Suite from Milestone 18 all the way until it was SeaMonkey and didn’t switch until 2009 or so; then Firefox/Thunderbird until earlier this month. So if you have suggestions, I’m open.

Never heard of it.

Haha j/k, of course Safari too, good catch. Just a non-starter for me since I don’t use any of the platforms it’s on.

Geary from Flathub for all the day to day, manage my life and family and financial stuff.

And Alpine for my personal email account from 25 years ago.

Floorp and Zen are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome.

They provide a better UI and other features and strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the parent browser.

But fundamentally, Floorp and Zen and Vivaldi would not continue very long if the upstream decided to suddenly stop producing code, or altered their codebase in a significant manner. (This is what killed Palemoon and Seamonkey). This is always a threat.

So really, it’s a shit situation for browsers right now. Just choose a browser engine and then pick whatever UI you like the most on top of it.

I’m optimistic that Servo turns out to be the new Mozilla without repeating its mistakes. It should be the reference implementation browser upon which everything will rebase and it should remain non-profit. This was the original goal of open source Mozilla 25 years ago but then the techbro crew rolled in and started grifting.

(I’m also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).

Today the Mozilla Corporation is just a place for the already wealthy to funnel money into their golden parachutes. It’s a grift. Personally I think it’s time to move on. Last week I pulled the plug, deleted my ~/.mozilla directory, so for the first time in a quarter century I don’t have anything Mozilla-related installed.