Yeah… I am pretty sure “willingly joined Blackwater” and “had a nazi tattoo on his chest for 20 years” automatically kicks him off to “broke” with a shade of “holy fucking shit”. And while I do think people can, and should. be allowed to change, all signs are he very much hasn’t. Still using homophobic slurs as recently as 2020 and his defense of the nazi skull boils down to “I am a military historian AND terminally online but I have never seen an SS outfit or the Mitchell and Webb meme”

At best he is a deeply stupid person who should not be allowed anywhere near office. More likely, he thinks voters are deeply stupid. Just a question of whether he is a fetterman/sinema in disguse.

(Also apparently he says his stance on Israel and genocide is basically Kamala’s? Which is even funnier that there aren’t the “I refuse to vote for genocide, period” crowd out attacking him…).

But, he is popular and that is all that matters.

I think platner goes far beyond the bar just being low.

I personally haven’t verified it, but colleagues out in Maine have insisted that Smith-Rodriguez is basically the exact same thing as platner on paper (military veteran, demsoc platform, many of the same positions on issues) but with actual policy details and plans rather than just vibes and speeches. And… she was basically a laughing stock. Maybe it is that she didn’t have a big ol’ nazi skull on her chest or hadn’t served with Blackwater. Maybe it is that she is a woman. Maybe it is that whatever orgs are backing this complete nobody didn’t like her. But she flopped and has since endorsed the “kinda shitty” mayor (?), mostly on the grounds that she can’t support someone who has consistently hand-waived sexual assault as she is a victim of it from her time in the military.

But that is what fucking terrifies me. Because this isn’t a case of “Look… nobody is perfect but class politics above all” because… there was literally an option with the same politics. And Sanders I just assume is on whatever bullshit he was when he was backing fetterman. Homie has a LONG history of bad decisions on that front. But we also have basically all of breadtube and the left leaning podcast sphere supporting this nazi mercenary. And a LOT of establishment Democrats are on his side too (although they seem a lot faster to try to distance themselves from baby skorzeny…)

This is Democrats ACTIVELY backing someone who… best case scenario might be another fetterman. And… I am seeing a LOT of parallels to trump 2016.

At best? It is yet another case of the DNC gladly throwing women and people of color under the bus with the expectation that we’ll keep voting Blue because we have no choice (see also: all the attempts to glom liz fucking cheney onto Kamala). But this is really feeling like they listened to all of us who explained that we need another 2004 DNC Keynote moment to build up new candidates… and decided they wanted their own trump instead.

Mamdani is running for mayor of NYC.

NYC has had a majority (not a plurality) of votes go to Democrats in the presidential election back to 1952 and the last time republicans had a plurality was 1924. NYC is, sadly, not representative of the US as a whole. Also, he was going up against a man who may have surpassed ted cruz in terms of “unlikeable mother fucker”-ness

As we’ve seen with Platner in Maine, though, being a white male veteran doesn’t hurt either.

Platner is… a giant fucking mess. He has more red flags than fucking fetterman did (fun fact: He was batshit insane as far back as when he met Anthony Bourdain…), one of which being the nazi skull tattoo he had on his chest for 20 years and only removed once he was forced to during his, what, 3 months of a political career? Not to mention him having willingly joined Blackwater and his VERY questionable statements on sexual assault and his use of homophobic slurs as recently as 2020.

But, he kissed Sanders’s ring so he has the “socialist” vote and establishment Democrats support him for whatever reason (which should raise a LOT more red flags but…). And while I am not invested enough to personally verify, a few colleagues I have out in Maine insist that Smith-Rodriguez was basically the same platform but with actual details and action plans but eventually pulled out to support the mayor (?) on the grounds of platner’s horrific stances on sexual assualt and her being a victim of assault in the military.

I don’t think it matters what candidate you push a campaign for if they run on Left populism

Editorialized that a bit but… I think that is the real key. The vast majority of people don’t actually care about policy or even basic human rights. They just want populist candidates. And that is not just limited to the US.

Which REALLY fucking sucks because… I’ve been incredibly critical of AOC’s career and I think she was THIS close to wearing clown shoes with the rest of The Squad. But she has demonstrated that she has strong political acumen. And when she does do shitty stuff, she actually owns up to it on social media/direct to constituents videos.There is always the need for MASSIVE grains of salt with any politician but… AOC seems to kind of be exactly what we should want out of a democracy. Someone who cares and has grand ambitions but also understands they are a servant of the people and speaks to The People.

She just was born too late considering both sides are very much at “I can excuse being a Nazi but I draw the line at… I’ll get back to you on that”

Just about 20 years too late.

At the end of the day, the POTUS is not just a party leader, it is a national (formerly world) leader. That involves being able to at least get SOMETHING out of the other side… unless you are just going to be a fascist dictator apparently.

But you can be damned sure that the news media would immediately attack any Democrat who tried that and lead the lynch mob themselves. So we need someone who knows when to “reach across the aisle” and when to say “Fuck off” because they have enough votes.

Traditionally? The Senate is a great place to learn how to do that. Because there are only 100 (actually 101) people and almost everyone is an established politician, you have to do a LOT more negotiation to get anyone to vote against party lines (usually by benefiting their constituents). Whereas the House is, historically, where randos show up and we are just lucky if they don’t eat crayons on camera. So “protest votes”/“meme votes” are more common and they are a lot more likely to break party lines because they know they are going back home next year or trying to join a lobbyist firm.

ANY Democrat would be better than the rapist in chief… maybe even fucking fetterman. But a stronger AOC can do a LOT more good down the line… if there is a down the line.

While I think AOC would be better in the Senate for at least a term or two, it would take a REALLY good candidate for me to not vote for her in the primary (… if we have voting by then). She gives a shit, she cares, and she understands she can’t run the entire government by herself. Although I am still not sure if this country could ever elect a woman to POTUS.

That said… after all the Platner shit (amongst other things), maybe it would benefit everyone if Sanders sat down and stopped talking. His endorsement just makes me wonder if AOC secretly has a fucking anima sola tattoo on her back or some insanity.

He continues to actively defend a man with a 20 year old nazi tattoo on his chest

E’rybody would benefit from Sanders shutting the fuck up and passing the torch.

I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).

Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.

Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.

Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.

My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.

And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.

There is a pretty good It’s Always Sunny joke about how they are pro mental health but anti taxes an it more or less loops around until they decide the important thing is a new stadium for the Eagles. It is a disingenuous comparison but it also kind of sums this up.

People are, by and large, pro minimum wage because even the chuddiest republican knows how much those jobs tend to suck. Just like people, by and large, want to get rid of tipping and just bake a cost of living into the price itself.

Then you put it up for a vote (either just as legislature or as a proposal for the general public). And you suddenly see all the people who realize that money comes from somewhere will lose their god damned minds and start finding excuses.

There are definitely ways to sell it but it is always an uphill battle.

Oh. There is VERY much a big gap between what people deserve and what they get (and where that money should come from but…).

My point is more that if you tell the average voter you want to raise the minimum wage by 10%, you get some knee jerk reactions that almost immediately translate into calls to ALL the representatives.

Sounds like they are letting the klan off the bus an hour or two north in Oakland instead, last I heard

Yeah. It is why I very much side eye the people who feel the need to talk about how the most pointless and milquetoast of things are “better than nothing”.

The reality is that people only care so much for any given set of indignities. And most people are perfectly happy to equate “I marched with Dr King” and “I only watched a little bit of Twitch during the boycott”

Its cops. They just saw a black kid and figured they could plant a dime bag or a toy train after the fact.

Yeah. To me that sounds insane (especially if you are getting the increased passed annually rather than all at once but scheduling the bumps) but, like I said, NYC is weird in that the inflation loops tend to be much more delayed. Or, I guess, have already gotten so fucked that it doesn’t matter as much that the staff at the smaller shops that are increasing prices to increase wages already can’t afford the stuff they sell.

I’m used to discussions and campaigning for even single digit percentages being A Thing.

Presumably most of those services on the same physical host are running in containers? So just add tailscale as a sidecar to that. Each container will be its own host as far as your tailnet is concerned and have its own internal IP. The official tailscale youtube has tutorials on that because it maps much better to a portainer based setup and more or less requires clients to have the tailnet running constantly (which, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of selfhosting but you do you).

Or do a mess with SRV records and… good luck with that

That’s just Fake News and I am going to continue living off vibes

Well, thanks for being honest, I guess?

Its the problem Democrats (and other left leaning parties) fundamentally have.

Right wing supporters more or less want nothing to change outside of the right people to suffer just a little bit more. So if their candidate hurts the wrong people? Whatever, they looked black enough, it’s still good.

Left wing? We actually want something. But what we want varies drastically. You want a focus on healthcare. I want UBI. Fred there… doesn’t give a shit about trans people but DOES want lower taxes. And so forth.

And that is the problem. If people vote for a candidate because they want X and don’t get X? It is a rapid trip to “my vote doesn’t matter” and “douche and a turd sandwich”. We saw a lot of that happen with Biden and Obama where people outright ignore the good they did in favor of the good they didn’t do.

So its a balancing act. Promise big so you can get votes but not so big that those voters get disillusioned. This very much seems like the latter to me but I also know that NYC is REAL weird economically so it might actually be feasible since the folk buying those minimum wage fueled services tend to have “real” jobs.

We can argue on what you consider “substantial” to me. We can also both just walk away and whack it to Sailor Moon hentai. The latter might actually be a more productive use of time. Err, also let it be known I am referring to Queen Serenity or whatever since I just remembered most of the sailor scouts are teenagers and that makes this joke real fucked up.

The fact of the matter is that, yes, it does have an impact on businesses. Moreso small businesses than the megacorps.

Like… it is generally common knowledge that most restaurants fail in the first year and a large part of that comes down to wages and profit margins. Ignoring the hell that is tip based economies for the moment (they still factor in to a minimum wage increase but at a much lower rate), wages come out of revenue. Revenue is based on price per meal. If wages increase, you either pay out fewer hours or raise prices.

Which… does get to the tipping side of things. EVERYONE fucking hates tipping (except for the workers who work it). But the people arguing that we should just bake that into the price are quite often the same ones arguing that everything is getting so expensive. Like… no shit?

Because, at some point (essentially microeconomics at a scale where it sort of works), you can’t raise prices AND you aren’t selling more hot dogs. Same with trying to run a hardware store that has to compete with Amazon and Lowes. And you very much CAN see that over time where minimum wage goes up (good!) and you have more and more restaraunts and local hardware stores with fewer and fewer staff. We all hate the idea of waiting 5 minutes for someone to come make a key but… that someone was busy mixing paint and searching the stock room for that color of doorknob someone needed.

Which, again, is why I am a firm believer that the goal needs to be UBI and we need to decouple work with life. It obviously needs fine tuning so that there will actually still be people willing to do those deeply shit jobs but we also need a way that isn’t just a constant cost of living loop.

Yes. If you surround yourself with chuds you are going to hear chud talking points.

Not sure why you are bringing them up here.