Are you suggesting that the primary structures came into existence without the support of the parties? Or that the people can somehow rise up and rewrite election rules over the objection of party incumbents? I thought we were having a serious discussion.

US primaries aren’t like France’s two round election system, even in open primary states. California, Washington and Nebraska have a single-ballot “jungle” primary system that’s kind of close (although Nebraska is kind of special because it’s only for non-partisan state legislature races), but most open primaries still list only the candidates of one party - you can’t vote for a (D) in one race and an ® in another. US primaries are supposed to let the parties - which are essentially semi-private clubs - reach consensus on who they run against the other clubs. Having the states run those primaries was supposed to be democratizing and let more people have a voice in their representation, and maybe it even worked that way a hundred years ago. It’s the nature of people to organize themselves into cliques to consolidate and maintain power, and they’ll figure out ways to manipulate any system to do that. The fact that no one votes in primaries - regardless of their structure - makes them an easy lever of manipulation.

US taxes all forms of income. Wages, investments, gambling winnings, gifts (after fairly generous exemptions). If money goes in your pocket, Uncle Sam gets a cut.

Is that not the second sentence in my original comment?

Not really. I’m saying that the system discourages change. If there’s blame for the DNC, it’s that their message has constantly been something along the lines of “be reasonable & empathetic; improve the world through measured change” which tends to demoralize people who think the system is seriously fucked. That empowers the career politicians. GOP propaganda, at least for the last 50-or-so years, has been “More guns! More babies! No brown people!” which tends to attract passionate radicals.

Voter turnout in primaries is pathetic. In 30 states, you have to be registered with the party - i.e.: give them your name and address for fund-raising purposes - to vote. This all works to bias primaries to ‘establishment’ candidates, or at least people well known among party apparatchiks. They are, theoretically, the best way to get progressives or populists into office, but practically, those progressives are fighting demographics and the general apathy of voters under 40.

The same phenomena that let MAGA take over the GOP keep the moderates in charge of the Dems. At least, until someone figures out how to motivate all the young internet revolutionaries to actually go and vote instead of memeing about how useless voting is.

Do you get so excited when someone says, 'My house was robbed"? Houses, of course, can’t be robbed. They can be burgled; only people can be robbed. Legally. Colloquially, we all know what they’re talking about.

Maybe “The Technician” does, but insisting that people be very carefully precise with language outside of the specific technical domain is a form of sealioning.

They’re happy to call it an intentional act of violence, so they’ve ruled out a lot of the explanations for an exploding car. The bar for “terrorism” is pretty low - they charged an Atlanta student with is for tossing bottles of water and dry ice out his window.

Regardless, it’s definitely a journalistic choice whether to quote the police lieutenant’s very careful, and possibly technical statement, or to quote the business owner (Musk) or US President speculating. And maybe it just turns out that it’s carefully ethical journalists reporting on potential right-wing violence, and usually unethical hacks reporting on possible attacks on the corporatocracy, but it sure does feel like a pattern.

The UPS needs some power to keep its batteries full. Could be that it’s triggering off some threshold to do a charge cycle instead of just running a constant trickle. I’ve noticed that my laptop and phone charge that way, for example.

They’re also using self-reported loneliness, which I would guess that people who’ve been alone for decades accommodate and feel less lonely.

…hanging from their cables…

It’s the Black Friday price gouging model. Remember when gas prices went from $2 to $5 in…2008? Everyone was so excited when they came back down to $3 that no one noticed we had a permanent 50% price hike.

It really depends on what your data is and how hard it would be to recreate. I keep a spare HD in a $40/year bank box & rotate it every 3 months. Most of the content is media - pictures, movies, music. Financial records would be annoying to recreate, but if there’s a big enough disaster to force me to go to the off-site backups, I think that’ll be the least of my troubles. Some data logging has a replica database on a VPS.

My upload speed is terrible, so I don’t want to put a media library in the cloud. If I did any important daily content creation, I’d probably keep that mirrored offsite with rsync, but I feel like the spirit of an offsite backup is offline and asynchronous, so things like ransomware don’t destroy your backups, too.

55% of Georgia lives in Atlanta - she can’t win statewide without doing at least OK among the people she’s spent the last 4 years denigrating. Her kind of politics really only plays in the specific rural district she represents.

Is he attacking America until we burn?

I think Trump should take a lesson from Henry VIII. If they won’t make him Pope, he should start his own religion. The constitution only prohibits Congress from forming a national religion - nothing at all about the PresidentKing

Remember that half of Americans are dumb enough to vote for Trump. A lot of the other half are also just voting for their favorite letter, without any thought of who’s holding it. Even with RCV, there’s an enormous amount of work to convince people who’ve been voting for their favorite letter for decades, who’ve been told for decades that politicians are all the same, to even pay enough attention to realize there’s another option.

RCV would be a start, but the start of a similarly decades-long process. IMO, it would be easier and faster to reform Dems from within. Recruit properly progressive candidates to primary the tired, old corporate Dems, inspire some of our younger non-voters, and change the party direction. Still take a few election cycles, but you’d keep the people who just vote for their favorite letter.

With only 15U, assuming devices don’t stick out the back, I’d move it face-up, so devices are more hanging from their ears than cantilevered. A full, 42/48U rack is extremely top-heavy and tipping during move is a serious risk, but 15U is fine. It’s still very dense, and OP should try to ratchet-strap it to hard points in the trailer.

And yet, the 3rd parties themselves don’t seem to do anything until the Presidential election year. If they were serious, they’d be out there now, putting up candidates in the much-easier-to-win midterms, talking about how they’re really different from the entrenched parties. They don’t. They only come out of the woodwork and put up spoiler candidates for President.

I do 150g with a light sauce, like aglio e olio or chili oil. Maybe 75g if it’s going with a bunch of veg and meat.

How is this man in charge of anything?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Z9IpTVfUg tl;dw: people confuse action with leadership.