You must not be that interested in staying in contact with your family if you’re only willing to use one, specific way to do it and simply refuse to use any other method.

How about texting? Does texting work?

Amazon has become an expensive version of Wish.com.

If North Korea wants us to know something different, they could tell us themselves. Or, even better, let the people talk to foreign journalists without handlers and threats of repercussions.

Otherwise, we’re forced to wonder about how weird it is that it seems like every news organization in the world is dead-set on spreading lies about this one, tiny, geopolitically insignificant country (and no, being able to launch toy rockets into the ocean once every couple of years does not make them geopolitically significant). Like, why did the BBC and RFA and Reuters and the AP and Al Jazeera all get together in a dark, smoky room and cook up a conspiracy to defame North Korea, of all countries? Why not, say, Thailand, or Malaysia, or Morocco, or something?

Right? Where has this article been? They’ve been denying it since the 80s.

Over the entire course of my life, the New York Times has never once been on the right side of an issue the first time. They only come around 5-15 years after the obvious public sea change. Same with the Washington Post.

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

Nobody. They are the Supreme Guardian Council, which is why I will only ever refer to the so-called “chief justice” as “Ayatollah Roberts”.

A quick google search tells me that:

Veterinarians must prescribe certain therapeutic diets because, depending on the disease being addressed, these foods may contain levels of nutrients below what is legally allowed to be sold for a healthy pet without that medical condition.

and

While some are not appropriate for long-term use, as they’re not 100% nutritionally balanced (some low fat or low protein foods fall into this category), all are safe for pets in the short term.

and

veterinarians believe they might be misused by owners, or worse, implemented in lieu of veterinary care. Neither of these things are good for pets.

HOWEVER, I also found:

(Prescription Diet® is a registered trademark of Hills® Pet Nutrition, Inc.®)

and

In the dog food world, the term Prescription Diet® describes an effective marketing agreement between a hundred-million dollar pet food manufacturer and the veterinarian community. This agreement allows for the sale of their foods through licensed veterinarians only. Veterinarians benefit because they can achieve a much higher mark-up on these foods than they would by offering foods widely available without a “prescription.” The pet food manufacturer, in return, gains credibility as a manufacturer of veterinarian-recommended food and uses that as an endorsement, if you will, for the rest of their products.

Add to the data that I’ve heard (from a vet, but that’s not a source you can verify yourself, so take that how you will) Hills is often kind of like a D&D 5e warlock patron for veterinarians, in that they give out a lot of scholarships and grants to people going through vet school, and many vet schools’ only nutrition-based course is taught by people on Hills’s payroll.

I’m guessing they will try to solve this issue with some cheap human labour to review what is being generated.

They already do. These current "AI"s are starting to look more and more like Mechanical Turks, except with a couple hundred third-world wage-slaves inside the box.

Most literate tankie

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

The kind where Ken goes off on a super-badass special forces mission and says “Take a bullet for ya, babe,” as he leaves the house.

in true Calvinist fashion it doesn’t matter what choices people make, there’s no action one can take to change their position.

Exactly. Like how all the “self-made men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” slag off on AOC for having had to work a real job once.

Like Russia and Ukraine are working together, vatnik?

is this seriously what we’re arguing?

No.

I’m arguing that voter suppression cannot possibly account for the 65% of registered voters in Florida who did not vote one way or the other for DeSantis’s second term.

I’m arguing that a substantial portion of voters in Florida were, if not DeSantis fans, fine enough with DeSantis to not bother going out to vote against him.

I feel like you’re arguing that all of the non-voters would have voted against DeSantis, but did not because they are systematically oppressed. That 14 million citizens were actively denied the right to vote and the Florida gubernatorial election was stolen by voter suppression. If that’s not what you’re claiming, then we don’t have anything to argue about; if that is what you’re claiming, I’m going to need more substantial evidence that Florida’s democracy is in the same state as Myanmar’s and Zimbabwe’s than what has been so far provided. If anywhere close to 14 million people in one state are being actively prevented from voting for DeSantis’s opponent, that would probably be the biggest scandal, with the biggest cover-up, in American history by a wide margin. It makes the Business Plot look like the schemes of a grade-school playground clique.

1 million people being disenfranchised is awful. It does not prove that the 65% of registered voters who did not vote were directly oppressed by the government and denied their rights, and such a claim would be entirely hyperbolic, and would only serve to obscure the fact that a large majority of Floridians are fine with DeSantis and the GOP. I get that it’s more empowering to believe that we can fight a few public entities engaging in voter suppression to free Florida from their minority rule, as opposed to believing that we’d be fighting to change the opinions of over 10 million individuals who literally don’t care about us and who wouldn’t bat an eye if we were all hunted down by DeSantis’s private brownshirts.

I’m not trying to fight those people, or change them. I fled before Fox News told them it was time to “cut the tall trees”, and I advise everyone else to do the same.

1 million voters is just under half of one five percent of registered voters. That’s a far cry from 65%.

Edited to correct my stupid math.

Edit 2: Edited my original post in this thread to reflect the provided data.

i don’t know why you out of hand dismiss this as a possibility.

Because there’s no evidence.

“65% of all the eligible voters in Florida were prevented from voting due to direct governmental interference and extreme voter suppression” is a fantastic claim. One might even call it an extraordinary claim. One for which I would expect to see some fairly extraordinary evidence. I can’t just wake up in the morning and decide to believe something because it fits with my preconceived biases, especially not something directly involving almost 14 million people.

Are you actually expecting me to believe that 14 million people tried to show up at the polls and were turned away, without any evidence whatsoever? That’s a Q-level conspiracy.

35% of the population turned out to vote.

So 65% 60.35% [edited to account for the provided evidence of voter suppression] of Floridians weren’t sufficiently motivated to try to change the government after living through a first DeSantis term.

Yes, yes, I know, “voter suppression”, “disenfranchised”, etc. I’m sorry if I have a hard time believing that 65% of FL really super-duper wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so by systemic corruption; that would put Florida in the same ballpark as Somalia in terms of governmental autocracy.

At some point, we just have to cut our losses and scram. That’s why I left Arkansas, and am now squished into a tiny, overpriced, neglected little apartment with a roommate in a blue state, slowly working on replacing all my stuff.