Uh oh, after a democrat is disappointed they might gasp consider a sternly worded letter.

How can fascism survive such robust resistance?!

Being an American right now is so consistently embarrassing.

I worked hard my whole life, went to school, volunteered to help my fellow man, love my wife, support my family, voted against this fascist.

Now I have to listen to every moron that asked in school “teacher when will I ever use fractions in the real world!?” opine about their take on global economic theories.

Canada has been our stalwart ally, good neighbor, and economic partner since that little dust up when you burned the White House down a couple centuries back. And we are blowing it all up for fucking nothing.

We are a stupid nation, don’t bother trying to salvage this relationship. Take the time you have now to shift trade away from this fucking dumpster fire.

Can you fight them as hard as they fought you

Nope

Filibuster maybe?

Only when there’s nothing pending

Procedural moves that slow them down

Nah

Could you at least not vote to enable them

Votes to enable them silently with intense eye contact

What the fuck can you do?

Pulls out phone, texts you for $20 for their battle fund

Jesus fucking christ

The republicans are bringing back fascism but they are at least doing awful things their constituents want.

I disagree with these things, but they deliver on their stupid backwards promises.

I’ve voted for the democrats for my entire adult life, the very first vote I cast was for John Kerry.

Here’s the thing though. Are you a liberal, you wonder why the party is hated, have you ever seen Last Week Tonight?

Jon Oliver gets on tv every week and talks about some horrible problem that started with Reagan or Nixon and has just been going strong ever since. There are so many of these. And which ones can I look at and go “well the democrats sure did fix X when they finally had the levers of power”

I can’t think of a single thing. The most important project they’ve undertaken was the ACA, and I don’t know if entrenching health insurance companies permanently and legally into the fabric of our nation is all that much to celebrate.

Do they do some good things from time to time, sure. You can point to a policy here or there that are nice. But it’s a party of not-even-half-measures.

Can we have single payer? No How about a public option? No What can you do? Romneycare… great

Can we have immigration reform? No What can you do? DACA and that’ll be rescinded the moment we lose power.

Can we reign in the banking sector? Nah

Can we close Guantanamo? Too difficult

Can we enshrine the right to abortion in law? No, but we will ask justices to pinky swear… oh they just removed it, nevermind

Can we do anything to help the common man? Let me check with the donors, nah they don’t like that, but if you like some tweets about how trump is bad, I’ve got those for you.

A party that refuses to use the power you give it is not much use.

And before you type up your essay about how Ackshually! There was only one weekend in 2009 when they could have passed any kind of legislation at all. Fucking stuff it. Then they should have sat there all goddamn weekend and passed bill after bill fixing this shit box nation. Their lack of any kind of foresight and planning and doing anything but building a better and better donation collection machine has led us to fascism.

They can collect a billion goddamn dollars but have to text me to see if I can give them just $27 more dollars before they can pass a bill. We need a new party to represent the people.

Amazing what $500B can do to change someone’s mind.

A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.

Excellent point and kudos to you for knowing that widgets are juiced based.

Tariffs suck for the country implementing the tariff. But before I tell you why they suck, let me tell you the way they are supposed to help.

Here’s the way tariffs are supposed to work according to people that like tariffs (spoiler alert, this thing I’m about to describe is a fantasy and I’ll explain why).

Let’s say people in the US can make widgets for $10 and sell them for $12 and have a viable business. But mean old foreign country can make widgets for $5 and sell them for $7 and have a viable business. The foreign country sells the people of the US widgets for $7, which is great if you live in the US and want to buy a widget but sucks if you live in the US and want to make a widget.

Tariffs are supposed to protect local businesses by making foreign goods less competitive. Let’s say we pass a law putting a $10 tariff on foreign widgets. I used to import widgets from foreign country and pay the manufacturer $5 per widget and sell them to Americans for $7. Now when I import the widget from the foreign country I still pay the manufacturer $5 per widget but now I have to pay the US government a tariff of $10 per widget. Each imported widget now costs me $15 and so I have to sell them for $17 to make a profit. This now means that American made widgets are competitive again, the locally made $12 widget is a great deal compared to the $17 imported one. Great if you are a US widget maker and shitty if you are a US widget buyer.

Now you might notice the people in the US buying widgets, even in the best fantasy scenario, end up getting dicked over. The theory goes that widget making jobs are good though and if we do that enough then everyone will have to pay more for goods but we will have lots of jobs making stuff that pay ok.

Now here’s the part that really, really sucks. Let’s say you are a US widget maker and now you know that your foreign competition can’t make a widget for less than $17. You could sell your widgets for $12 and have a viable business or you could sell them for $16.99 and have a super profitable business. I’ll just gesture broadly at the sea of corporate greed we find ourselves floating in and let you decide which is more likely.

Tariffs induce even local manufacturers to raise prices because it hurts competition. It’s basically a massive transfer of wealth from local consumers to local producers by cutting out the foreign producers and the competitive pressure they exert on the market. This is why basically every economist said “do this and kill the economy”

So why do people want tariffs? Well the promise for your average voter is that the tariffs are going to bring back good solid blue collar jobs. You can go work in a factory and pump out widgets and get a nice middle class paycheck. It’s a nice sales pitch and a lot of people would really want that to be true. I suspect though that the manufacturers will automate most of this work and pocket the profits, again, gestures broadly at the late stage capitalism hellscape all around us.

I like how none of the points are correct.

At best they could be a critique of the lives of the people that voluntarily join up to starfleet. Really the only thing that rings true is that, like any military, they have uniforms and you have to follow the orders of the chain of command.

They show tons of citizens of the federation doing whatever the fuck they want. Doing weird science experiments, going to conferences, settling planets, running a vineyard in France, Captain Siskos dad just has a restaurant for the fun of it.

After his 40 minute solo dance party, he’s probably exhausted.

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

People that are upset about electron should consider it’s not:

Electron App vs Wonderful Fully Supported Native Linux Application

The reality is that your choice is largely:

Electron App vs No App (maybe running their windows app in wine if you can get that to work)

It’s not like companies are going to go build a native linux app but electron got in their way. It was always electron or no support.

So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something. There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”