Jake

Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 11, 2024 at 03:42 UTC

It’s really telling when conservatives joke about being sexually assaulted in prison. It’s a joke that would not fly in any other context, but it’s prisoners so it’s super funny to them. It’s a window into the way they classify people as “criminals who deserve to suffer” vs “everyone else”.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 06:59 UTC

How is it only 63 percent? I swear to to god 30% of the people in this country will literally support anything.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 08, 2024 at 22:44 UTC

Yeah, I agree. But this time I think he wants the job because 1) it’ll get him out of his many legal issues and 2) he wants to use the office to get revenge on his political enemies.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 08, 2024 at 22:37 UTC

I feel like he was held back a lot in term 1 by staffers who just ignored his most insane suggestions. But this time he’s out for revenge and he’s probably going to staff the White House with true believers.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 05, 2024 at 19:58 UTC

People also seem to think the president is personally responsible for everything. As if Biden is personally writing up specific battle plans for the military instead of him being like “my goal is x” and then generals handling the details from there.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 04, 2024 at 04:05 UTC

imo running Kamala at this point is basically giving up the election. That’s an unprecedented event that imo probably does way more damage to average uninformed voters than a poor debate performance. But it’s so unprecedented that it’s hard to really say with much confidence either way.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 04, 2024 at 04:02 UTC

If I could push a button to elect Harris instead of Biden/Trump I’d happily do it. Switching to her now would be insanely risky. If we want to justify that massive risk, I would want to see evidence that the debate actually damaged people’s opinions of Biden so severely that it’s worth it.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 04, 2024 at 03:44 UTC

I wish we had a younger candidate, and one who doesn’t have brief memory lapses or stumble on his words. This whole situation sucks. But ultimately what matters is getting a democrat in office who will sign good bills and veto bad ones. He has advisors to tell him which is which.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 04, 2024 at 03:41 UTC

Luckily the president’s job is not to own people in debates, it’s to administrate the executive branch and produce policy outcomes that are good. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the policy outcomes produced by Biden’s White House compared to what I expected.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 22:29 UTC

This is the obvious, predictable, and intended outcome of the court’s ruling. LGBT rights are under very serious threat now and will be for a long time, even if Biden wins the presidency. Until congress is willing to pass actual laws, which isn’t happening anytime soon, we’re just stuck waiting.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 14:50 UTC

I honestly expected this much (and I feel like you could at least make a case for it) but for them to add “btw the coup is probably an official act hehe” is just absurd on its face. I don’t see how anyone can even argue that.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 05:26 UTC

Wow this was truly maddening to read.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 19:02 UTC

It just depends on what you view the purpose of voting as. If your goal is to vote in a way that produces the least harm, you obviously should vote for the candidate that will produce less harm. If you view voting as some kind of moral test, there’s lots of red lines you can draw.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 01:53 UTC

Furi is a gem. The way they restore lives when you complete a round is great— even if you’re doing badly you get a few tries. There’s a push and pull feeling instead of “oh good I got steamrolled again”

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 21:52 UTC

It became inevitable the second trump got a third justice on the court. This court is absolutely going to overturn obergefell, the only questions imo are 1) how long they’re going to punt before actually doing it and 2) what democrats will do to stop it or respond.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 14:25 UTC

Fair enough! It’s hard to predict. It’s definitely more vibes based than anything policy based, which sucks. I don’t know if a lot of moderates in the US will be willing to vote for a (fairly unpopular) black woman for president.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 14:05 UTC

Do you think Biden stepping down for Kamala to run at this point in the race would help anything? If someone can’t figure out if they prefer Trump or Biden, I struggle to think they’re going to be hyped to vote for Kamala.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 02:47 UTC

The other thing that's so fucking dumb about this debate is the way democrats just accept the republican framing on issues. Don't hedge about abortion, just say its good and fine. Don't hedge on immigration, just say immigrants are good. I hate it.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 02:36 UTC

It’s so pointless. It rewards people who are good debaters and have confidence, it’s just vibes based. They could have a dance battle and it would be equally as useful.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 02:17 UTC

I worry that most people are not informed enough to be able to tell that literally everything trump is saying is a lie or incoherent. He just says it with so much confidence. imo this is why debates are bad, it just rewards performance art more than anything else

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 21:49 UTC

It feels so typical of US politics. We can’t fund anything until it’s an emergency. Don’t repair the bridge, wait till it breaks and then pass an emergency funding bill. Don’t keep the tracks maintained, wait till a train derails and then fix it. It’s so frustrating.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 06:59 UTC

The other contradiction is that every individual home owner wants property values to stay high or go up. But we collectively want low housing costs to avoid homelessness and rent burden. The current situation (homeowners effectively blocking all new housing) creates countless problems.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 24, 2024 at 17:04 UTC

This extends to most benefits in the US. We are so afraid of helping someone who is “undeserving” that we waste an absurd amount of time/money trying to weed people out. But it just makes the benefits suck for the people who need it. It’s like we need people to feed bad for accepting them.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 23, 2024 at 16:19 UTC

I can easily list off the areas and bosses through DS1-DS3 from memory and can barely remember them from Elden ring outside one or two (lyndell and underground areas really stand out). But overall it just felt so samey, which was a real bummer to me.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 23, 2024 at 16:18 UTC

It’s impressive how little they recycle given the scale, but still. I lost all interest in exploring the mini dungeons when I realized they’re all recycling the same 4 bland cave/mine/tomb templates with a filler boss at the end of each.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 23, 2024 at 16:16 UTC

I feel like I’m the only person who thinks this, but agree. The open world made the game so much worse. Every other soulsborne game has so much tighter design. The fights in Elden ring are badly balanced imo and there’s so much copy pasting. I’d take a tighter smaller version of it any day.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 23, 2024 at 07:35 UTC

Feels like this applies to a lot of industries these days 😮‍💨

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 22, 2024 at 07:11 UTC

It speaks to the abysmally low standards we have in the US that Teslas (with FSD) and the cybertruck are street legal. A plane with the safety record of these things would be grounded immediately.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 21, 2024 at 15:17 UTC

imo this is why debates are useless. It’s entirely vibes based. The actual policy proposals mean nothing, you can just say whatever crazy shit you want and people who don’t know better will nod along with it. A dance battle would be just as useful (and more entertaining).

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 21, 2024 at 15:15 UTC

The problem is that the way trump expresses his age is just by saying batshit crazy nonsense super fast, but eveyone already expects that from him. If Biden says “uhhh” for a second everyone will clip it and use it as proof that he’s in decline.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 21, 2024 at 07:28 UTC

RFK jr is just a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist when it comes to medicine, there’s nothing more to it.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 21, 2024 at 03:08 UTC

Haha, it’s definitely ok with me! It’s an amazing achievement that has saved countless lives.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 21, 2024 at 03:04 UTC

I’m always happy to see these achievements but I get frustrated when people act like it’ll fix the problem. The problem we’re struggling with now is a political one, not a scientific one.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 21, 2024 at 03:03 UTC

20k Americans die from HIV every year, despite the fact that we’ve had incredibly effective treatment and prevention for a while. imo The biggest obstacle to HIV treatment in the USA is our healthcare system, not any scientific barriers, and it has been for a while.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 19, 2024 at 23:48 UTC

Awareness is not the issue here imo. Literally everyone is aware of climate change. The problem is that the people in power are incentivized to not do anything about. Protests need to negatively impact those people or it doesn’t accomplish anything.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 19, 2024 at 17:37 UTC

How bad would you say the learning curve is for switching between photoshop and affinity? I had tried to switch to GIMP a while back but really struggled to get into the same flow. I don’t even use Photoshop thaaat often but the muscle memory is so strong.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 19, 2024 at 07:13 UTC

I truly cannot fathom anyone who watched and enjoyed trek before the modern era and didn’t pick up on the obvious heavy handed “woke” messaging. It’s literally been over the top “woke” since 1966.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 18, 2024 at 17:48 UTC

It makes it even more upsetting that 20k Americans die every year from this still. We literally have a preventative and a wildly effective treatment. There should be 0 deaths from HIV anymore. At this point those 20k annual deaths are deaths because of our shitty healthcare system, not the virus.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 18, 2024 at 01:05 UTC

I’m not claiming to be an expert in this area but “verifying user identity” is not a difficult problem from an enginiering perspective. The hard part is the politics of making everyone adopt that system nationally or globally. Look at how much of a struggle RCS adoption has been, for example.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 18, 2024 at 01:04 UTC

We already have the Shaken/Stirred protocol that can cryptographically sign calls with verified identity. We could require cell manufacturers to drop calls with low quality (C/B) or missing signatures by default. We could pass laws about how voip providers are allowed to sign those calls.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 18, 2024 at 00:56 UTC

I understand there are legitimate use cases of “spoofing”, eg for call centers to have a shared outgoing identity/number. We could build a system that allows for those use cases if we wanted to, though. It’s not like identifying who users are is an unsolved enginiering problem.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 18, 2024 at 00:52 UTC

I’m not sure about 2. We are totally capable of building secure systems if we want to, but it’s a political challenge to get those changes adopted (especially when dealing with an international context).

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 17, 2024 at 17:24 UTC

100% agree on serial moving violators. I’m a lot less enthusiastic about increased scrutiny for things like eyesight/age. But totally agree we should have serious consequences instead of a slap on the wrist when people drive dangerously.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 17, 2024 at 17:18 UTC

No, I definitely think we should enforce minimum standards for driving, but I’m saying ramping up enforcement on that angle can only take you so far without fixing car dependency first. imo a lot of current drivers probably shouldn’t be allowed to drive, but there’s no practical way to do that yet

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 17, 2024 at 17:15 UTC

imo we should be approaching this problem more from the “make sure we have viable alternatives to driving” angle more than the “be more selective about who can drive” angle. We should be WAY pickier about who can drive, but since 90% of the country is unusable without a car it’s not a solution atm.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 17, 2024 at 15:26 UTC

Like it’s true that we have made tons of progress. But also we are in serious danger of backsliding on all of these issues and people need to vote like it, not just rest assured that some public servant somewhere will sort it out.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 17, 2024 at 15:24 UTC

What’s the point of these arguments? The court is poised to overturn gay marriage/sodomy laws, has gutted healthcare reform, and we’re rapidly backsliding on trans rights. Everyone knows life is better now than 50 years ago. Not a fan of the “well, just don’t worry, it’ll be fine” attitude.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 17, 2024 at 07:09 UTC

Really feels like the solution here is to just pay housekeepers a fair and consistent salary, not make them do extra cleaning when customers don’t want/need it.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 17, 2024 at 02:45 UTC

And ofc climate isn’t the only benefit— cars kill so many people every year, and the housing crisis causes nearly every other problem in the US (poverty, health, crime, homelessness, loneliness, etc) to be worse.

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Jake @excitedgiraffe.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 17, 2024 at 02:42 UTC

This is why I get so frustrated with people slow rolling housing and transit policy. This is an emergency— possibly (hopefully) the most serious issue we will ever face in our lifetimes. I can’t stand when people endlessly stall these projects or try to slow them down.

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