Don't misunderstand, I live in a solid blue state. Whether or not I made good on my threat to abstain from voting is an entirely moot question for the presidential election. As far as the electoral college is concerned, my voting power went to Harris.

Yeah it's working! Everything is burning down. It's great!

And it's been inevitable since the DNC decided to fuck Bernie and push establishment candidates back in late 2015.

It's a waste of rage to blame the voters for their obvious response, as every election since then was cynically forseeable. The party would fuck around in 2020 and win anyway because Trump was awful, continue fucking around during their administration because "bipartisanship", and now we get to find out if we get to have elections again or how long it takes America to descend into it's own unique brand of fascism.

But Im sure people like you think we can just undo all this calamity in a few years huh?

Of course not, but the Democrat Party chose this future. They had every opportunity to avoid this path, but they have always preferred the negative peace that is the absence of tension to the positive peace that is the presence of justice.

There is no undoing this now, the American Empire is over and just hasn't realized it yet. We have reached The Cool Zone™ and the only question that remains is how we'll organize to survive the years ahead. If the Democrats won't lead the resistance then we'll have to do it ourselves.

Reality is this current backwards turn won't be fixed in our lives, let alone progressing forward. Dumbest fucking gamble ever.

I agree, and so do a lot of people who are unhappy with the Democrat party these days. They gambled on another pro-establishment, "everything is fine, nothing will change" campaign when they know they win when they run a "hope and change" campaign. They lost, we get to pay the price, and too much of the party leadership joins you in blaming the voters instead of taking responsibility for their own leadership.

But hey, at least the new chair of the DNC is starting to point in the right direction, and might not even stomp out a popular candidate this time: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/18/dnc-chair-outlines-pro-worker-union-focus

You've got that precisely backwards.

It is not the job of voters to vote correctly, it's the party's job to convince the voting population that they are worth voting for.

The Republicans are really effective at this because they can lie and cheat and overpromise on anything and their base will love them for it. Democrats are remarkably ineffective because they can't promise anything that might raise taxes on their campaign financiers.

If you want the Democrats to stop losing, then they need to fear losing your vote more than they fear offending billionaires. The only way to do that is to threaten to withhold your vote.

And it's working! AOC and Bernie's rally tours have more people excited about the Democrats than there have been since Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC kicked Bernie out of the 2016 primary. AOC is a front-runner for the 2028 election, the campaign for which appears to have already started.

I need tthose leggings, where'd you find them?

I agree. Whether it was ignorance or arrogance, the Democrats are entirely responsible for driving so many people away from the polls and squandering what could otherwise have been a shoe-in for Harris.

"Didn't vote" always beats out the votes for either candidate, though. A small downward shift in the numbers is probably the fault of Democrats dividing their own base by endorsing genocide.

So, not any different from any other presidential election in the USA?

Me fuckin' too.

Just existing has been exhausting lately.

It was big news 75 years ago too.

I suppose if there was a wine config that had an appropriate dosdevice setup for the boot sector then it'd be able to write to it, but wine doesn't need to boot so I don't think that would do anything.

By that definition, gossip with friends is advertisement too whenever it mentions a business. It's an excessively broad view of ads, and that's coming from an enby that won't play live service games because of the dark patterns inherent to their design.

I'm not just talking about targeted advertising, I'm also talking about paid preferential treatment on black-box algorithmic social networks.

A business could self-publish its own newsletter and it wouldn't be advertisement until they start mailing them to people who didn't sign up for it. If someone follows an artist on social then they have signed up to see those posts.

Buildings provide shelter, advertising provides nothing.

Artists who post their work on social media aren't advertising unless they are also paying to have their posts injected into the feeds of people who don't follow them.

Time to move to the opposite side of the planet, right?

I'm jelly, that looks like an interesting life.

I'm not making a moral argument, I'm describing the state of things.

According to the law as it is now enforced, murder is less bad than protesting against the genocide in Palestine, because murderers get a trial. Protesters don't, they just get shipped straight to a foreign gulag.

The resources used to make the sign don't come from nowhere. They have go be mined, processed, transported, fabricated into a finished product, and shipped again. That's a non-zero environmental impact even for a basic non-illuminated sign.

then the penalty for peaceful protesting is the same as the penalty for murder

It's your horrific education in morality that makes these actions equal. You need [email protected] education right here and right now along with the entire population of every age (voters and even those too young to vote) alike.

You appear to have misread, there's nothing about morality in that statement, just structural incentives.

The law is no longer following due process, therefore there is no longer any distinction between the punishment for non-crimes and the punishment for capital ones.

Therefore, keeping the rebellion peaceful no longer confers a degree of safety to the protesters.

Alright, so for your specific case, it wasn't necessary, but your experience isn't typical.

Granted.

Even having a sign on your building saying what your business is is a form of advertising.

Agreed.

At its core, to advertise is just letting people know that your product or business exists, which is why it's not inherently a bad thing.

Hard disagree.

Of course you can find examples of it being a bad thing, but it's not true in every instance.

Even where the harm is minimal, it's still harm. At best, it's a waste of resources that could be doing something useful.

I already explained that it was a small town, my first customer called me while I was still finishing up the paperwork to establish an LLC.

I didn't have to tell anyone, I already had a reputation for tech competency and word travels very fast in small towns.