Is every vaguely prominent leader in Russia dumb as rocks? How did he think he’d get away with an attempted coup while leaving the dictator in power?

Did he expect to get points for being bad at a coup?

This is an obvious exaggeration, but I can’t help but feel like we’re witnessing a death match between American democracy and the Republican Party.

So I have something of an unhealthy obsession with finding out just how dumb this guy is. I don’t know why.

I’ve pirated a couple of his books and found he appeals to a very specific type of person- that being, the person who wants to appeal to science without understanding a single thing about it. He cites HUNDREDS of reputable sources, and sprinkles in his own bullshit website to give the appearance of legitimacy by proximity to real scientists. But even funnier than that, it’s clear he only ever reads the headline of the studies and never goes past that. Without fail, he’ll just straight up make up fantasies about what the study actually is and what the researchers think. Hilarious, if so many people didn’t buy into it.

3 hour deep dive of book screenshots and debunking coming soon to a YouTube channel with single digit subscribers near you

Are you telling me… that investors and potential customers… DON’T want to spend money to be imploded thousands of feet below the surface?

God I know nothing about good business.

One point to keep in mind is that drama also brings engagement IN, not just out. When the drama subsides, the temporary boost in activity from new users or lurkers will go down too.

That being said, the percent decrease was always gonna be in the single digits. The average redditor was never gonna stick with a prolonged protest of a service that remains free to use.

Biden has had a couple victories, but they’re difficult to conceptualize into headlines. Things like confirming federal judges and jobless rate reductions. Many people, left and right, see his presidential accomplishments as lukewarm at best. Compare that with the current R headlines, striking down affirmative action, student loan forgiveness, and abortion, expanding the “right to refuse service” based on orientation, and future hearings which will likely further strip protections for LGBT people. These are MASSIVE conservative platform victories that have been campaigned on for decades, literally since the civil rights bill. I don’t think it can be stressed enough just how much red meat is in these few rulings for the conservative base. Couple that with stubborn inflation and negative real wage growth, Dems are looking at a very steep hill next year. Counterpoint, Dems have managed to embolden their younger base to mitigate midterm damage. But morale for this base is likely low given the student loan fiasco, LGBT rights, and a difficult economy.

Trump specifically is looking at two major challenges: legally, he has to avoid sentencing before the election. This will likely be something of a cakewalk for the guy. His federal case is currently being overseen by an openly biased judge who previously ruled in his favor on no basis other than “he’s a former president and should get special treatment”. Even with higher courts excoriating this particular justice, they are not likely to change their rulings this time. State charges are more difficult to dodge, but ultimately he will have fall guys and plea deals to fall back on in most if not all of these cases. A majority of Americans see these cases as political attacks anyway, not unbiased justice, so it’s unlikely these even hurt him in the polls.

The more poignant challenge in my opinion is in winning back independents and moderate Rs. He’s the front runner currently for the nomination, but it’s undeniable his antics wore thin on independents. He ran a divisive campaign and a divisive presidency and, well, it divided people. There’s no walking back some of the horrid opinions or outright lies he espoused. And there’s no hiding how ravenous hard conservatives have become in general for extremism and he and DeSantis are in a race to the bottom on appealing to this base. Time will tell whether independents hold their noses again and vote for him over Biden or another conservative in the primary.

Personally, I don’t see a world where he doesn’t win the primary and face off against Biden in the general. No world where the courts actually pin something to him either. If you don’t want to see another Trump presidency, swing state independents are gonna be your best shot.

But my friends and family aren’t real

Growing evidence that governments/corporations would sooner give up seeing the goddamn sun than get off even a fraction of fossil fuel usage

Oh god, the Nintendo DSi is actually retro now, huh

Based on how this was (apparently?) an automatic response by the Google search algorithm, seems more like a case of:

Twitter: ”You took everything from me!”

Google: ”I don’t even know who you are”

Probably coulda just like… emailed someone at Google and asked before making the switch.

So trying out changes to a platform isn’t a bad thing and can lead to a lot of good optimization, but usually you don’t just push them onto the entire user base without testing/marketing research to try and anticipate their effects.

How exactly do these changes make it to production without being evaluated? I know blame is mostly on Musk here but do the software devs really never stand up and say “we’ll look into it and get back to you in a few weeks”?

Agreed- an annoyance, sure, but it’d be comparable to moving to a similar subreddit

Fair enough- losing a whole platform is the reason a lot of us are here.

Though I do think that smaller instances with flightier admins are going to experience this issue more frequently. This leaves exclusive communities in the lurch for discoverability if the admin pulls the plug. I’m no server admin expert so I have no idea if this is even a thing, but it’d be cool if communities could choose to be hosted under multiple instances at once. Even just one “secondary” instance that only retains a portion of the activity would help, both with engagement and keeping reposts low.