My parents ran a business named my last name and owned the respective reyalilastname.com domain. In the late 90s, my dad had a page on his site with widgets of the top 6 or so search engines. It was a great place to easily jump between Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, etc.

I was in the computer lab with my 6th-grade class kicking off some research project and recommended this page to my teacher who suggested it to all the students. That’s when I learned some classmates didn’t know how to spell my last name, and that removing 1 letter from my last name went to a porn site.

My name is nowhere near anything profane. It would be like McKenzie > McKenie or Saunders > Sanders. Literally nothing that would make you think ‘porn.’

The teachers didn’t notice, but several classmates asked me wtf my parents did. I was an awkward, nerdy kid who hadn’t accepted yet that I would never be popular and I believed providing a really good tool like that would help me achieve the popularity I craved (yeah, helping people do better on their class assignments was what I thought would make me cool—no wonder I wasn’t popular!). I remember feeling that hope just draining from my body as the misspelled page started popping up all over the computer lab.

I was in NC and remember the energy in 2008 (tbf, I was in college so my bubble was definitely all-in for Obama).

I was also in NC in 2012 when the state voted to pass Amendment 1, making gay marriage illegal in the state’s constitution. Everyone I knew was against it, but because that was true for them too, no one could imagine it passing and so they didn’t even bother to vote. 35% turnout with 61% voting for bigotry.

All that to say, if you’re in North Carolina, go fucking vote. It doesn’t matter if your district is gerrymandered to hell and there’s no chance of it going blue; don’t let that make you apathetic. Your vote matters for how the state assigns its electoral college votes!

I’m friends with two siblings who frequently refer to any/all of their friends as ‘habibi’ and it makes me feel warm fuzzies every time.

Sociopathy is the inability to feel empathy. This is not inherently a bad thing, it’s only bad when people use that to harm others.

A common trait for sociopaths is seeking success, which is defined differently in different cultures. In the US, success is usually defined by fame, money, or power, so we see a lot of sociopaths in government, C-suites, and Hollywood. However, in India, success is more defined around family involvement, and so sociopaths there are often seen establishing those strong family ties and working to fit in.

Some studies suggest that 4% of the population have the brain profile of sociopathy. That doesn’t mean 1/25 people is evil. But when someone who is sociopathic uses that lack of empathy to harm people, that’s when they become a danger and should be called out for it.

Source: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, Ph.D (and my memory thereof)

It wasn’t good phrasing, but I think their point is she needs to take action on day 1, not start researching/planning on day 1. “Trying to find out” being the operative words, versus, “now that I’m in office, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.”

Ok, it’s worse than I thought. I expect Trump to make comments about it being rigged, that’s normal enough.

What I didn’t expect, even despite the title here, is that he’d claim the White House pushed Facebook to suppress content in 2020, making it a rigged election. But he was the White House at the time!

Zuckerberg also referenced a now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop article in the New York Post. Zuckerberg writes in his letter, "the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election."

Trump writes: "Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee."

Women are not allowed in this world anymore because they don’t want their husbands and children in this country.

Hmmm.

Great examples. The most valuable use for me has been writing SQL queries. SQL is not a part of my job description, but data informs choices I make. I used to have to ask a developer on my team all the questions I had and pull them off their core work to get answers for me, then I had to guess at interpreting the data and inevitably bug them again with all my follow-up questions.

I convinced the manager to get me read access to the databases. I can now do that stuff myself. I had very basic understanding of SQL before, enough to navigate the tables and make some sense of reading queries, but writing queries would have taken HOURS of learning.

As it is, I type in basics about the table structure and ask my questions. It spits out queries, and I run them and tweak as needed. Without AI, I probably would have used my SQL access twice in the past year and been annoyed at how little I was able to get, but as it is I’ve used it dozens of times and been able to make better informed decisions because of it.

Have you seen the panda that was raised by zookeepers? The zookeepers had to teach it to break bamboo, which was hard for them so they often grimaced while doing so. The panda learned to make a similar face, seeing it as part of the process. They’ve even caught the panda making the grimace after breaking the bamboo, like it realized that it forgot to do the thing and had to make up for skipping that step.

That’s a good one. A few others that help with my executive dysfunction are:

• “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” (It’s better to do something than to obsess over trying for the impossible goal of ‘perfection’.)
• “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” (This one helps especially with art and things I enjoy but struggle to do if I’m not instantly great at them.)
• “Laziness does not exist.” (This was inspired by a Medium article I read years ago which explained there is always an underlying cause of procrastination. Mental or physical ill health issues, uncertainty about the task, fear of failure, etc. When I am struggling to move forward, I now look for that reason and can begin to remove the barrier.)

HR response isn’t the only thing though. A number of years ago, my (F) partner (M) was sexually harassed by his female boss. He didn’t report it to HR, but he did sometimes bring it up around his friends. He had multiple people who base a lot of their identity on their feminism/acceptance/equality views tell him it wasn’t possible for him to be a victim of sexual harassment.

And then if he brought it up around more normie people, especially guys, the most frequent first question was, “Is she hot?”

The responses he got from so many people were part of why he never took it to HR. The other part was that she was smart enough to never do it in writing, so it would have been he-said-she-said. It was just easier to get a new job.

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

Texas is also a voter apathy state. A lot of the apathy comes from gerrymandering, which I’d call a form of voter suppression, so your point still stands.

Also reminder for every state except Maine and Nebraska: your voting district has NO effect on who gets the electoral college vote for your state. Even if your state is gerrymandered to all hell and there’s no chance your district will go blue, that has literally zero affect on whether your vote is counted for president.

So go vote, even if it’s hopeless for the local races. Your vote can help flip a state!

The blonde girl with a ponytail in the top right and bottom right look like real photos from a rally. The other photos of groups of people with the “Swifties for Trump” shirts all have the plastic sheen and soft background that’s indicative of AI. If you start zooming in there are little oddities here and there that also make them look generated.

So I’ll buy there is one girl out there with her own shirt who got photographed twice at the same event, but I don’t believe any of these other photos for a second.

That sounds a lot like advice I read in some book (maybe Atomic Habits?). What I remember of the point was that your habits will follow your identity. If you’re a “former smoker,” you’re a small step away from becoming a smoker again. If you’re “not a smoker,” you have to consciously defy your identity to pick up cigarettes again, and it is hard for people to change their foundational perceptions of their identity.

I thought it an interesting premise. It seems in some ways opposite to the guidance of Alcoholics Anonymous, which as I understand it is that everyone there identifies as an alcoholic, no matter how long it’s been since they imbibed. That’s supposed to keep them conscious of the choice to not drink (though it might also be intentional to drive the community mindset and participation that’s also foundational to AA…)

Do you not remember all the leaks showing extreme bias towards Clinton, derision of Sanders, and even deals between Clinton and the DNC?

The emails and documents showed that the Democratic Party's national committee favored Clinton over … Bernie. … The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership's publicly stated neutrality, as several DNC operatives openly derided Sanders's campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton's nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. source

Or that DNC leaders argued in court that they didn’t need to hold impartial primaries and could select whatever candidate they wanted?

… DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate. source

For their part, the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise—political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts. The Court does not accept this trivialization of the DNC’s governing principles. While it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way, the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle. source

At the end of the day, yes, Bernie got fewer votes. But that is a small part of the iceberg, ignoring all the things that led up to it and all the biases at play in the organization putting the vote on in what I would (and did) call a “rigged” primary.

I agree with everything you said, except worrying about November. Stay worried, stay motivated to vote, and motivate others. Too often right-wing policies or candidates have gotten voted in because the left thought they had it in the bag and didn’t bother to vote.

I threw an idea out in response to a comment here right after Biden backed out and the more I think about, the more it seems likely to be right.

My theory is that the DNC likely timed Biden stepping aside so it would be late enough they couldn’t hold primaries for the nominee. It came out in 2016 that the DNC was basically rigged for Clinton to win, regardless of what voters wanted. The 2016 primaries caused dissension with voters leading to lower turnout, and I think that was also somewhat true in 2020. By waiting as long as he did to back out, Biden took voter choice out of it and helped rally everyone behind Harris.

I could absolutely be wrong, but every time I run it through my head it feels more likely to be true. And if I’m right, it is a bit sleazy. However, I have to admit I’m surprised and impressed by how it’s turned out. I didn’t expect people to rally so strongly behind Kamala, and I’m excited to be a part of it!

THIS! My cardiologist has instructed me to eat 7-10 grams of salt a day. He literally encouraged me to eat things like chips, pretzels, pickles, salted nuts, and ramen to get more.

I supplement with electrolyte mixes with 1g sodium. They cost over $1 each and I am supposed to drink 2-3 a day. I still don’t get enough salt to feel my best.

It’s fucking obnoxious to have health conditions that mean I need a thing that so much of the world tells me is bad, and everyone else is trying to get rid of.

That’s when it becomes Rita as opposed to “heat Katrina”.

For folks who don’t remember/know about Rita because they didn’t live through it, less than a month after Katrina a record-breaking cat 5 hurricane was heading for Texas. Everyone still had Katrina on their minds and panicked. Millions of people (literally estimated as 2.5–3.7 million) evacuated, or tried.

The highways out of Houston came to a total standstill. About 100 people died before the storm even hit land because of the evacuation. And then the hurricane itself was nbd; the evacuation was literally the worst part.

My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.

Maybe it’s just the low quality image, but that looked to me like the part of the ear protection that goes over the head (is there a name for that? It’s not a strap, but that’s the closest I could think of), like it was just pulled down over her forehead instead of sitting on top of her head. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

I saw the guy get attention because he doesn’t use a bunch of fancy gear. Looks like the woman doesn’t either, yet this is the first time I learned meme man was even on a team.

She has bigger ear protection and it looks like she’s pulled it in a way that shields her eyes from the light. Still not all the high tech fancy gear they were competing against. So leaving her out of every post made about him not using a ton of gear definitely sounds like what this meme is saying.

Age 79 and up. They make up almost 5% of the US population. Source (Btw, 0.13% of the population is in the generation before the Silent Generation!

However, the 5% goes up to about 6% of the voting population. (Math: Using the source above, we can take out 12.76% for all of Gen Alpha. We can probably drop Gen Z to 15% total under the premise that if the same number of people were born every year, ~70-75% of them would be too young.)

6% still sounds fairly small, but that is over 16 million people.

Yes, there’s physical and mental decline at that point, but most of them still probably have the facilities to vote. Fuck, the current sitting president is in the Silent Generation and yeah, obviously there are questions about his capacity to continue for another 4 years, but he’s definitely capable enough to vote. There’s also mail-in voting that’s heavily used by these demographic groups.

It’s probably because it’s a city that has a large enough venue to host nearby rural folks who are his target demographic. If I had to guess, it will have low local attendance and the audience will largely be made up of people whining about Asheville and its residents.

Hey, I just made a post about this the other day! https://lemm.ee/post/39037973

TL;DR: in every state except Nebraska and Maine, the popular vote determines the electoral college vote for the state. So no matter how badly gerrymandered the districts are, the presidential candidate elected by the state is NOT affected!

FWIW, I definitely read this as a joke even before getting to the edits. It seemed over the top enough (especially the mention of The Beatles) that the /s came through without the tag.

I suspect the problem is that Trump does have a history of saying such extremely nonsensical things and his fans have a history of supporting and writing off anything that looks bad, that this read as just possible enough for a rabid DJT fanboy to write in actual defense of him.

I want to know this answer too…

To clarify for anyone else who might be unaware: It’s not a toilet; it’s a bidet. It’s like a wash station for your underside, so you still do your business in the toilet but then come over here to wash. So, much like there’s no flush in a sink, there’s no flush on this.

Clover reminds me so much of my childhood cat, Boots! This picture of him is from 2005 and he was put down 3/1/07 when he was about 15-16 years old. He was a good boy.

You make a good point, and yet I wouldn’t be shocked if many people were still rabid fans even if he sold it at their expense. There’s a lot of weird idolization around him, and seems like the kind of thing many of his fans would laud as his great business acumen, ignoring the negative impacts it had on them.

Not the point of the graphic at all, but this is the second time recently I saw the spelling “Turkiye” and was wondering the context behind that change, wondering if it was anything like the change in the spelling of Kyiv (which has now been so engrained in my head that I had to go look up the Russian spelling “Kiev”).

I looked it up and it appears Türkiye has been their own spelling for over 100 years, and they just petitioned the UN to update the spelling of the country’s name in 2021.

Cool, so Türkiye it is! (Plus my phone automatically adds the umlaut, so that’s handy!)

Also in Türkiye they don’t own cats, the cats own them.

Thanks for the clarification on your intent. I understand (and appreciate) skepticism; however, I took your original comment to be a dig rather than helpful criticism, but your clarification here helps me read it more positively.

Someone else commented and used words that aligned with my intent behind the comment, which was just to leave open the door that there are nuances I may be uninformed about. But I recognize I could have been more explicit about what research I had done to maybe establish a little more credibility.

Thanks for responding with such a level head!

Ah yeah, in both cases I’m referring to they were saying the gerrymandered districts meant their blue votes for president didn’t count. I agree that the apathy strongly affects the overall outcome!

In one case, I tried to correct the perception by saying basically when I said here (popular vote determines the state’s allocation of electoral college votes), and I was “corrected” by my acquaintance that the president race is determined by electoral vote, not popular vote. 🤦🏻‍♀️

True, some states are too extreme to ever flip. Then other states like Texas or North Carolina are perceived as firmly in one camp, but they might not be if everyone actually voted.

Exactly what I’m trying to help counter! In just 24 hours I heard two people I know from Texas mention that the presidential vote was affected by gerrymandering. I did my research to confirm that was wrong and have been trying to help fix that false belief since then.

And what you’re saying now is, “What you said doesn’t align to what I think, so I’m sure you’re wrong.”

So here’s proof:

Of the 50 states, all but two award all of their presidential electors to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in the state (Maine and Nebraska each award two of their electors to the candidate who wins a plurality of the statewide vote; the remaining electors are allocated to the winners of the plurality vote in the states' congressional districts). (source)

Ok, fair point, lol.