HarkMahlberg

He might be popular here on left-wing Internet forums, but his voters don’t turn out.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/sanders-banked-on-young-voters-heres-how-the-numbers-have-played-out

Bernie and Warren are great at pushing progressive policies into the public consciousness, don’t get me wrong.

I think you got the wrong takeaway from that story… The character of God rebukes the dead man for not accepting the practical help of other people. It’s just framed as though God sent the rescuers to convince the “believes in miracles” crowd that no such things exist.

Consider a simple rewording: instead of “I sent you two boats and a helicopter” you read “Two boats and a helicopter came to save you.” This solves your only hangup and doesn’t even change the story. Your beef is with the aesthetic component, not the meaning of the story.

Not even remotely.

Thanks for the headsup.

Neato, ty ty

Do you have further reading about this?

Yeah there goes verdantbanana, right on schedule.

These aren’t facts. You’re laundering a broken dog whistle through a couple Wikipedia links. Crawl back into your cave you troglodyte.

Which is still weird.

Alexander Sawchuk, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California … along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague’s conference paper. … Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy. The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Everything about the story sounds like it was a rush job, a decision made on a whim, after exhausting their existing catalog of test images. And who bring a Playboy mag to their university’s computer lab, and advertises their possession? They don’t even say who it was, probably to protect them from any embarrassing professional consequences. To me, that’s probably the strongest reason to retire it: it’s unprofessional.

Well said.

I would say that the “positive vibes only” trait is part of it, but the far bigger problem was the character limit. Even when it was double from 140 to 280, that still doesn’t not leave room for nuanced opinions. And then, the least nuanced opinions also become the most easily spreadable. Both traits really reward our worst instincts.

Incorporated in February 2021, Trump Media & Technology Group intended to use a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to facilitate its becoming a publicly traded company. On October 20, 2021, TMTG and Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), a publicly traded SPAC founded in September 2021 by Miami-based, former Deutsche Bank and Wall Street banker Patrick Orlando, announced that they had entered into a merger agreement that would combine the two entities, allowing TMTG to become a publicly traded company. DWAC was created with the help of ARC Capital, a Shanghai-based firm specializing in listing Chinese companies on American stock markets that had been a target of SEC investigations for misrepresenting shell corporations. In 2021, the DWAC Trump venture was linked with another company, China Yunhong Holdings based in Wuhan, Hubei, until its lead banker who was running the merger promised to sever ties with China in December 2021, stating Yunhong was to “dissolve and liquidate”. In February 2022, Reuters reported that the connection between Shanghai-based ARC Capital and Digital World was more extensive than thought, with ARC having offered money to get the SPAC off the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Media_%26_Technology_Group

TLDR: Despite all his rhetoric, Trump is heavily in bed with China, and Truth Social is big part of that relationship. Becoming publicly traded was always the plan, and it’s now coming to fruition.

the Dems vote to keep him in office as long as he stops obstructing the most critical stuff, specifically Ukraine aid.

He’ll agree, then backstab the Democrats the moment they try to get anything done. You can’t trust that filthy fuck.

they need only find three moderate / retiring Republicans willing to pick a more reasonable speaker.

I think this is both a better strategy for Democrats and a more likely outcome than Johnson keeping his word.

Wouldn’t this enable, for example, Trump claiming he didn’t make the “bloodbath” comment, calling it a deepfake, and telling Youtube to remove all the new coverage of it? I mean, more generally, what stops someone from abusing this system?

!meanwhileongrad

Even the social aspect of driving eludes him. You and another driver come up to a 4 way stop at the same time, crossing paths. They wave you on to be polite. You wave back and go first. How and when does he plan to handle that behavior?