I won’t vote for a centrist in the primary but I also won’t abstain or vote third party in the general.

Vote your conscience in the primary, harm reduction in the general

I always wanted New England to join Canada and be part of the Maritimes so that the time zone would make more sense. And so New Englanders could get healthcare that wasn’t tied to employment

Danish can be a bit hard to understand

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

It doesn’t impact the contents of your drive but I would certainly back everything up and be prepared to start from scratch. When I did it I had to get a programmer, disassemble the computer, and hook up wires straight to the coprocessor. Not for the faint of heart

I’ve done one before, it was an involved process but doable with the right tools. I think it’s easier on the T480s than the older thinkpads though

Dang, one of the few that can run free firmware. Put libreboot on that thing! If you haven’t already

False hope. Come election time Republicans will rally around some insane thing like “Democrats are eating babies” and they’ll pull the lever for whoever has an R by their name. Even non-crazy people will tell themselves some half-baked story that starts with “Well, I don’t like Trump but…” and do the same thing.

You mean RFK Jr didn’t have any medbeds for such an influential figure? Color me surprised

He was flirting with holocaust denial decades ago, was a Trump supporter from the beginning, became more and more of a generic unhinged conspiracy theorist following that, and yes as you noted was a pretty blatant racist. Sprinkle some misogyny in there for good measure as well.

Behind the Bastards has some good episodes about him

WinLink and VARA are pretty cool, really gives you an appreciation for how little bandwidth is really available in HF bands.

Without a way of knowing which satellite passing overhead was the ISS, in the narrow windows each day where you could see them well enough to correctly point a Yagi at one, you’d quickly run out of battery before making a relevant contact. Also the people on the ISS rarely listen or respond, the most used ham equipment on the ISS is basically a glorified repeater so you’d also have to get above the pileup of all the satellite chasers just trying to log contacts.

JS8Call and FT8 are digital modes that don’t require talking. Plenty of other things to do as well

It’s largely because Russia and China are building their gold reserves to decrease reliance on the US dollar. More demand means higher prices. Other investors are moving away from US treasuries and towards gold as the US deficit continues to grow.

Why are we inflating dimensions? 3D chess was already challenging for the smartest Federation citizens, so 4D chess is already well beyond that of future sci-fi. Do we really need a fifth D? When will it end!?

A general strike would be the end game. To get there you have to do community organizing, set up mutual aid groups, unionize workforces, engage in union solidarity, etc etc. When you lay all that groundwork then you can start thinking about a general strike. Expecting normal, everyday people with kids, mortgages, sick family members, and no class consciousness to rise up spontaneously, risking their jobs and livelihood, is unrealistic to say the least. They need ways to feed their families, care for their children, and maintain their communities without the help of corporate/oligarchic systems, all set up in advance. And then you need to understand that a strike with a schedule is a lost cause as well; you have to be able to strike indefinitely for those in power to get the message. Otherwise they will just wait it out.

I certainly agree that Harry Potter has fascist precursors within it, but that’s mostly my point: Neoliberalism itself is a fascist precursor in real life, or at least fascism easily exploits neoliberalism’s weaknesses. So to that end I think the labels do matter. For example, in theory it’s easier to right the ship and turn away from fascism or recognize its warning signs in a neoliberal society than in an actually fascist one. I.e. turning away from the path of fascism and towards a more egalitarian society might have been easier in 1990s America than it is now in a 2025 America. In much the same way no one thinks JK Rowling isn’t a huge bigot, no one could have reasonably claimed that 1990s America didn’t have its problems. Neither really fit the definition of fascism, although both lead to fascism.

I think the distinction is important because it hopefully makes it easier for imperfect, neoliberal places like Western Europe, Canada etc. that are having problems with rising right-wing movements to recognize problems before it becomes too late, rather than pointing out their weaknesses and jumping straight to a fascism label.

I’m not sure that the outcome of Harry Potter is fascist in nature. After Voldemort is defeated there’s no mythic national rebirth, no driving nationalism, no cult of personality at the top, and the society doesn’t treat violence as virtue. What it looks like to me is more of a reactionary neoliberal, paternalist world. Hierarchy is enforced and treated as natural, change is looked at with suspicion, institutions are trusted, and the only problems come about when bad individuals are in charge of those institutions. This is essentially the worldview of 19th century imperialist Britain.

To be clear, though, fascism does exploit these weaknesses in liberal/neoliberal thought to bring itself about and does share some of the superficial look, but I think it flattens the term to label Harry Potter and/or JK Rowling as explicitly fascist. I think at best her work is neoliberal slop and that she has some abhorrent views about gender that people who are fascists would agree with.

If you pay them they’ll publish anything. Half the stuff on Spectrum is sponsored content or barely disguised ads now

Fun story, he was killed with a bomb which caused the car he was in to fly so far into the air that he’s often referred to as Spain’s first astronaut.