skisnow

The frustrating thing working in a big company is wanting to pay for something that costs 0.0000001% of the company's annual revenue, but not being able to because big companies are always divided up in hundreds of small teams with their own budgets, and your boss is already over-budget for the quarter because the team's cloud bill was 20% higher than predicted.

This is, of course, working exactly as designed.

Just to put a downer on things, looking at the final results I do worry that Canada may have won the battle but lost the war.

The situation in the US came about because an entrenched two-party system drowns out most viewpoints, and is what allowed Trump to seize control of a party of politicians who almost universally spoke out against him ten years ago. It's also responsible for the Democrats' constant and unrelenting shift towards the Right, enabled by the knowledge that most left-leaning voters are still too cowardly to vote third party.

And what did we see this election? All the smaller party seats drifting to the big two "to stop the wrong guy getting in".

Be very very careful not to continue down this slope. It does not end with the bad guys staying defeated once and for all.

like 100 times

Is it closer to 100 or closer to 3?

They're not saying it because they believe it to be true, they're saying it because they need it to be true in order to justify what they're doing.

So you think they should just comply in advance?

The detail I enjoyed most about this is that he had fewer than 220 followers at the time of the ban. This suggests that in order for any details on this incident to have got out at all, a decent percentage of his fans in 2025 are actually just journalists waiting for him to do something stupid they can get an article out of.

What makes this even more batshit insane is that they're currently pressuring the UK and EU to lift their ban on US chicken; a ban which only exists because of the already poor food safety standards of the US meat industry.

Yeah this is 2025, you can't just say something overtly dumb and expect people to understand it was a joke.

But behind Washington’s repeated call for Europe to “do more” usually came a second one: “Not like that.”

This is right on the nose. The US wants the EU to pay its own way, but also continue doing exactly everything the US wants.

That whole "the French are cowardly" trope in the Anglosphere was born and stoked entirely not from France's actual war record, but in response to France's post-war reluctance to toe the US line; first by de Gaulle ejecting US nuclear bases from the country, and then again decades later when they refused to join the US's Middle East misadventures.

Good for you. What people from the "a vote for third party is a vote for Trump" camp don't understand is that the two-party system is exactly how fascism was able to become standard Republican Party policy in the first place.

A decent multi-party democracy would have enabled traditional non-fascist conservatives to break off into their own party whilst still holding seats in Congress, but instead we've got a whole party full of people who denounced Trump as a fascist way back in 2014 but have now kissed the ring. Likewise parties like the Greens would be able to enjoy votes from the millions of people who agree with all their policies, and be able to have members speaking and voting in Congress.

But the only way any of this can happen is if people stop being so short-sighted about every single election, and stop trying to whip each other into toeing the line of a demonstrably pisspoor party.

Was looking for this. One of the many many many problems the US has is spineless cowards terrified of trying to fix the underlying problem because every single election they ever have is always "the most important election in history", that if they can just keep the bad guy out this once they can fix the systemic problems in their democracy later. And yet, the Democrats won in 2008, 2012, and 2020, with a congressional majority accompanying four of those years, and y'all did nothing during that time to fix matters.