Definitely that time the Secret Service showed up to my childhood home.

This happened when I had already moved out to go to college. I grew up in Iowa, home to the Iowa caucus. Part of living in Iowa is every four years you get bombarded by political messages, polls, people wanting you to donate and attend rallies, etc. I know this occurs to some degree everywhere, but it’s a different beast in Iowa.

The 2008 Iowa Caucus season was in full swing. Ads were everywhere. Phone calls were numerous. One day my 13 year old youngest brother, with poor impulse control and developing mental health issues, happened to pick up the phone.

It’s the Hillary Clinton campaign. They give the spiel, asking for a vote, maybe conducting a poll. He humors them and listens, frustrated though he is with politics. Finally, at the end, they say something like, “oh, and she’s having a rally tonight. Will you be able to attend?”

He replies, “yes, and I’ll bring my gun.” And then hangs up the phone.

And that is how my poor mother, the nicest woman you ever meet, mother of 6 children, with 4 still living at home, ended having to answer the door to two Secret Service agents standing on her stoop.

My youngest brother didn’t face any criminal consequences for that day. It probably helped that he had no criminal record then, was just a kid, and there were no firearms in the house. He got the sternest talking to of his life, and I’m sure there’s still a record of him somewhere in the Secret Service archives.

I suppose it was an early sign of things to come. His life didn’t get easier after that. He struggled through the rest of his schooling, never made a serious attempt at college. Was diagnosed with bipolar and used a lot of substances to self medicate. Stole a lot from friends and family, lived on the street for awhile. Served several years in prison for a completely pointless robbery of a liquor store. Drifted from job to job and never really got any traction in life. OD’d at 27, just another victim of the opioid crisis.

Miss you little brother, despite everything you did. Hope you’re in a better place. At least you never had to see the world as it is now.

Fuck ICE. At this point, any ICE agent with a soul would resign. I pray they each have a heart attack.

Release the data on the public internet in an encrypted form. With the data, include a message openly admitting you’re a time traveler. Include predictions of events that are relatively resistant to the butterfly effect and will have little effect on the time stream. For example, I would include a long list of future supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena. Such data would accelerate the field of astronomy a bit, but it wouldn’t really affect life on Earth much. And it would prove that you’re either a time traveler or someone with access to FTL travel technology. In your message, tell people the data is of vital importance to the future of humanity and that it will be needed in a crucial hour.

There will be enough people who preserve a copy of the data and pass it along to their children and grandchildren. Forget relying on technical solutions. This is one you can rely on people for. Unless there’s some complete collapse of technological society, the data will be preserved.

It wouldn’t matter in this case. If someone violates courts enough, they can be actually indicted and charged with crimes for that. If someone was convicted on a charge of obstruction of justice, then the president could pardon them of that conviction.

But I’m not talking about charging people with obstruction of justice. Judges can’t even indict people on their own without the cooperation of the executive. What I’m talking about is the enforcement powers courts have outside of convictions, the powers of contempt of court.

For example, let’s say you come in for a traffic ticket in your local county courthouse. When your case comes up, you don’t even try to engage with the judge. You just start calling the judge every name and curse word in the book, and you threaten to kill him and his family. The judge at that point can simply throw you in the court’s jail cell. He doesn’t need to convict you of anything. He can just say, “you know what, I’m going to hold you until you respect this court and agree to engage with the process.” That kind of holding can’t be pardoned. You can’t be pardoned for that, because you haven’t been charged or convicted of anything. This kind of hold is constitutional because you hold the keys to your own cell. All you have to do to get out is to stop being a jackass to the judge. A judge holding you in contempt of court can’t be pardoned by the governor or president.

That is what I’m suggesting the courts do on a large scale. You don’t try and convict Musk and his goons of anything. If they continue to violate court orders, you just round them all up and lock them up on contempt of court until they agree to abide by court orders. And again, this is constitutional because they can get out at any time, as long as they follow the orders of the court.

You might need to hold a large number of people this way, but so be it. Be creative. I’m sure the judges can work something out. Maybe the governors of Maryland or Virginia would be willing to offer spaces in their state jails to hold prisoners being held by federal judges on contempt of court charges.

Courts can deputize bailiffs. You ever see an Old West movie where a judge appoints a posse to round up a criminal? That’s something courts can do. I’m sure there are no shortage of currently out of work federal employees who would be more than willing to volunteer for the job. And I’m sure you would have no problem finding people willing to donate firearms to arm these bailiffs as necessary.

The only reason we haven’t seen violence already is that people are afraid of being arrested and thrown in prison themselves. The fed workers know full well that what Musk is doing is incredibly illegal. The only reason he hasn’t been lynched by a gang of angry fed employees is that no one wants to go to jail forever. But if they are simply enforcing court orders, and are legally empowered to use force to stop these people? Well now they have the full power of the law behind them, and they aren’t facing personal criminal liability. The courts need to deputize large numbers of bailiffs and haul Musk and his goons into court, at bayonet point if necessary.

Yes, but that’s completely orthogonal to my point. Do less of your writing using LLMs. It is interfering with your reading comprehension.

Ah. AI slop. It is not a god. It is not a human being. It is an image generator It does not have the ability to generate things far outside of the space of visuals that already exist in its data set. And there simply aren’t enough simply aren’t enough of these visuals in its training data to create another one. It can’t create anything new. It can only create from the average.

What are you trying to explain to people exactly? If you’re just trying how centrifugal gravity works, keep it simple stupid. It’s just a great big rotor ride.

Lemmy works on vampire rules. When an instance shuts down, its 100 most prominent users turn to dust and blow away IRL.

Truly. The guy never really escaped the 80s.

His new brilliant plan? Instead of 5000 nuclear bombs, we’ll just have one big one! The mother of all nukes launched inside a Starship.

So you’re telling me the NSA isn’t allowed to archive any communications with those banned words in them? If I’m a terrorist group, can I develop a communications protocol using those words and thus make my communications utterly untraceable by the NSA? 27 banned words. Map 26 of them to letters. Boom. Now you can send untraceable messages!

YOU do not seem to know how elections work beyond a single cycle. You view each election as singular isolated event, and you have zero perspective of the grander game that’s played between cycles.

What exactly do you think would happen if 100% of Dem voters always “voted blue no matter who?” If every Dem vote is already locked in from day one, what incentive does the party have to do anything to actually represent them? This is why the Dems worked so hard to court Republicans to vote for Harris. They figured that the Dem base was so scared of Trump that their votes were already locked in.

If you want a party to actually represent your beliefs, there have to be some people on your side willing to walk away if the party drifts too far out of line. If no Democratic voters are ever willing to abandon a Democrat for being too conservative, then the Dem candidates will drift further and further right each cycle.

Yes, there’s the idea of democracy being on the line, but when is democracy NOT going to be on the line? And truthfully, the Democratic leaders proved that they were not reliable stewards of Democracy. The party that nominated Garland had zero ability to argue that they would defend democracy. Just look at how limp-wristed the Democrats in Congress have been in responding to Trump’s lawlessness. These people are not capable of defending democracy. Trump should have been thrown in Gitmo on day one of the Biden administration. Instead Biden nominated a Republican to be his attorney general, and the rest is history.

I voted for Harris, but I also recognize the great value of people refusing to vote for a Democratic candidate when they move too far to the right. If there is no consequence for drifting right, the candidates will continue to do so.

The whole “preserve democracy” thing sounds good if you don’t think about it too hard, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The Biden/Harris team proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they weren’t capable of defending democracy. Nominating Garland proved that. The dems pathetic response to Trump’s current lawlessness has proven that.

You can’t “defend democracy” just by saying the words “defend democracy.” You actually have to do it. And they proved that they were either unwilling or incapable of actually defending democracy. That’s why that talking point so fell flat.

I hope you look forward to voting for Ted Cruz, the Democratic candidate for president in 2028. After all, he’ll in theory be a little better than Trump running for his third term, so logically it’s our duty to support Mr. Cruz for president. The only criteria any Democrat is allowed to use is whether the Democratic candidate is a tiny bit better than the Republican.

If you refuse to vote for President Cruz, you will be fully morally responsible for any of Trump’s actions in his third term. After all, there’s no magical third candidate with a prospect of winning.

This is the moral hazard of the “vote blue no matter who” crowd. If the Democratic base is already locked in no matter what, then there’s no need for the party to work to actually reflect Democratic values. The people running the party only care about winning for the sake of winning. They don’t actually believe in anything; they’re just shameless power chasers. And if the Dem base will vote for literally anyone the Dems nominate, then Dems might as well just nominate Ted Cruz, Liz Cheney, or some other Republican. What better way to appeal to suburban Republican voters than by nominating an actual Republican?

The truth is that in order for the Democratic Party to actually mean anything, there have to be some people on the left side of the spectrum willing to walk away if the party moves too far to the right. If there’s no consequence to drifting to the right, the party will just become a duplicate of the Republican Party. Eventually we’ll just end up with an election between the KKK candidate and the skinhead candidate. That would literally be the outcome if every Democratic voter blindly “voted blue no matter who.”

Obviously, there’s the argument of voting to defend democracy. But the sad truth is that centrist dems have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are actually incapable of defending democracy. You can’t run on something that you’ve proven yourself utterly incapable of doing. The party that appointed Merrick Garland could not credibly argue that they were going to vigorously defend democracy. Even now, their pathetic response to Trump’s lawlessness shows that they are incapable of fighting for democracy.

Bidens suggestion was explicitly about allowing Palestinians to flee into Egypt short term

Just how gullible are you? When has any expulsion or relocation of Palestinians out of a territory ever been temporary? Biden isn’t a complete moron. He would know as well as anyone that there is no such thing as a temporary relocation of Palestinians.

Didn’t watch it. At the time, I was in the shop working on a two of my current projects, a chest and a wooden step stool.

Add to this a record of any student loans you have or have ever had. You can log in to studentaid.gov and export a full record of your previous loans, your payments and balance over time, and any forgiveness you’ve received.

As Musk and his goons fucks with the Department of Education, it’s unlikely that your student loan balance will go “poof.” But records of your payments or any forgiveness you received just might.

And really, individuals should now archive local records of any interactions they’ve had with the federal government. The federal government can no longer be considered a reliable steward of records.

Wait til these idiots try to abolish the FDIC.

People know that banks engage in all sorts of complex, stupid, and risky financial derivatives engineering. The only reason anyone has confidence in the banks is due to FDIC insurance. If they fuck with that, it will trigger a run on every bank in the country. I imagine Congress would step in to stabilize things, but it could be quite hairy for awhile.

Honestly, right now, for those who are able, keeping a decent chunk of cash in your mattress is no longer the game of cranks and weirdos.

It would definitely have to be a MMORPG of some sort. Your biggest problem in this system will invariably be loneliness, and interacting 24/7 with NPCs will quickly show their cracks. You need a way of continually interacting with large numbers of real people.