I don’t know why Techdirt is so concerned about the so-called “COVID denialism.” They call it themselves when they suggest it might be mocking. Judge Walker was an Obama appointee and has been remarkably sane in his judicial career, including on COVID. He is clearly trolling the state’s attorney at several points throughout, letting their previous positions hoist them on their own petard. I particularly like the point he raises about how Florida handles parental rights:

THE COURT: Well, we’ve empowered parents to control what books our kids read in school. Why is it far-fetched to empower parents and think they know best for their individual children about who they are engaging with socially on social media platforms?

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Well, parents certainly have a role, but the key is these controls. And the controls have proven ineffective. So these platforms —

THE COURT: You are taking the control away. Because if I’ve got a 13-year-old child and I want him to — does my kid get to sign up if I want him to be able to sign up and have an account in a social media platform on Facebook?

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: You can register for an account and a kid can use your account, and you can monitor them. THE COURT: I don’t want to monitor them. Just like I want them to read the book about the two penguins raising an egg together. The two male penguins raising an egg together. I don’t want to sign up on my account. I want to have my own Facebook account. I want my kid — you’ve taken that choice away from me; right?

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: I just think it’s an irrelevant issue because their — I mean, the degree of control that parents have is irrelevant. What’s —

THE COURT: The point, Counsel — and I don’t think it’s particularly far-fetched — is the State of Florida picks and chooses when they want the parents to be making the decision. And when it suits their purposes, they do; and when it doesn’t, they don’t.

But I’ve got it. Fair enough.

It’s not that there’s no argument against letting children on social media. There are strong arguments, but the science is not mature maybe never will be, and the experiences parents permit their children to have can vary wildly. The point is that under the US system, you can’t make laws that limit free speech and private family behavior based on “this is probably not a great idea,” and if you can, then social conservatives will not always like where that leads.

I literally have no idea.

Because I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory that separation on purely ethnicity/looks is not constructive where people are artificially treated as if they were different even though they’re not. I think the damage clearly outweighs here.

Justifying racism by saying ‘this is what we always did and it worked like that’ is not the right way forward imo as we can’t be stuck in the past and make the same mistakes that could be successfully improved.

What I’m trying to get at is that while appearance is not any kind of enlightened reason for distinct communities to have arisen, through accidents of history and genetics they did, and they are still relevant and appreciated by the people who are part of them. The color terminology is shorthand that acknowledges history. It’s not “justifying racism” to accept that in many places your ethnic background, especially if visible, means that certain experiences will have been more or less common for you. You can engage in this, even light heartedly, in good faith and as a way to understand your neighbors better, and indeed to think of them as your friends and neighbors instead of “Other.” People who are trying to do right by their fellow Americans are not using it to “separate,” but acknowledging that separation gave rise to proud, distinct communities and there’s no value in snuffing that out. The dialogue can be a way to unite us.

I believe we can agree that using visible “racial” markers to treat someone as less valuable than someone else is disturbing and evil, and still sadly common. I’m just saying that it’s not the mere use of the terms, or creating media that acknowledges them that results in the continuation of racism. Hell, in some ways, refusing to acknowledge differences gives a person with bad intent the license to settle on a single definition of what it means to be a “proper” American and to decide that anyone who doesn’t act the right way is less valuable: “I didn’t refuse to hire him because he’s black, but because he dresses and speaks differently. All he has to do is be exactly like me and I’d be more than happy to hire him!” (coughJDVancecoughcough)

Eh, you may be right, but I’m starting with the stuff that will also involve a clean install and maybe seeing how everything comes together. With the 30 or 40 bucks residual value of the 8GB 580, a used RX6600 should still be in the budget, which TBH is a bit artificial, but also based on the priority I place on my “gaming rig.”

The 2600 is not much better on single threads, but has more cache and more cores, and is on the W11 list; I guess I could return it, but I’m probably topping out at the 5500. RAM for this build is cheaper than cheap right now and I do want to play with VMs a little. Storage should help with some things but is also for my own sanity.

So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.

Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been made of statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.

Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate, into whatever soup of dimly remembered pan-European customs that passes for a privileged culture here, were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.

I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”

It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

I’ll use them till they don’t serve my needs and then move on.

This. Certain regional and hobby communities need a critical mass that doesn’t exist on Lemmy, and frankly it’s mostly the popular subreddits that are really bad over there anyway. I have reduced my engagement to posting about Mechanical Keyboards and otherwise lurking, I use an app that survived the APIpocalypse because the blind community (of which I am not a member) uses it, and I keep my adblocker and RES on. They’re probably still extracting some value from me, but so are several other companies that are probably even worse.

Lemmy is the community I choose to engage with most directly, and I will shed no tears over the end of Reddit when it comes, but for now I’ve found the middle ground that works for me.

Boxer shorts, specifically stretchy cotton knit ones that fully enclose the elastic waistband. I do have a couple of pairs of synthetic boxer briefs for the increasing rare occasions where I am running around enough that I might get chafed, but I think of them as sporting equipment or almost a medical garment.

Decided to get 16GB more RAM, a Ryzen 5 2600, and a Gen 3 Sabrent Rocket 1TB SSD. About $145 all-in. If there are still issues, then a GPU in the ~$150 used range is really the last upgrade for me on this platform, I think.

I mean, it’s definitely certainly 100% true that when Russia breaks the ceasefire it will be Zelenskyy’s fault, personally, so the US will have no choice.

It’s true. Agent Orange and Couchfucker told me so.

I mean, people will still trade with the US, but no exporter is going to eat those tariffs out of the goodness of their heart or fear of the Orange Menace, so prices in the US will go up, likely a bit more than the amount of the tariffs as suddenly volumes are lower and administrative overhead is higher. Then the US economy slows in a way that will not rebound quickly, and investment in the US becomes much less attractive due to low customer buying power and the inability to move goods freely. All of this of course reduces the amount actually collected in tariffs. Reduced economic activity may ultimately have positive knock-on effects for many, but the direct economic impact worldwide, distributed, will definitely be negative.

I don’t see a single way this is good for anyone, aside from those who can directly benefit from access to the levers of power and/or just want to watch the country burn (or at a minimum, smolder).

That’s the other galling side of this. It’s just so fucking dumb even as a way to “do” capitalism. Yes, theoretically one of the options in the face of tariffs is that an exporter can choose to eat the cost and both the importer and its country “win,” but that presupposes a market with few buyers and exporters with big enough profit margins that they can eat the cost. In reality of course, the exporter will instantly seek out other customers and if none can be found, they might eat some of the costs, but also pivoting their production to (previously) less profitable goods now makes much more sense because of the artificial barrier, and in the extreme case simply shutting down and liquidating assets is better than losing money on every sale. Then of course there are retaliatory tariffs, which work much better than the initial ones because they are targeted and leave the remainder of the global market available to country levying them.

Damning with faint praise, but you’re not wrong. No billionaire getting stuck-in like Musk is doing it to make the world a better place for anyone else, and no one except autocrats and accelerationist wackos should be pleased with how things have changed in the last 6 months.

I have a license for Alibre Design. I have heard it works okay in a VM, but also that Linux is not at all their priority. I also have a very clunky, weird German program that I still kind of like for 2D work.

The current spinny disk in this PC runs my linux install and has a bunch of random stuff.

Yeah, for the first several years of this motherboard and CPU, I ran it with the integrated graphics. Vega APUs were the new budget gaming hotness for a little while. :-) God, I’m old.

I’ll keep an eye out for good deals, and see what I can put together. Sounds like this is at least a non-crazy budget for what I’m after. Thanks!

Off the top of your head (because otherwise I’m happy to do my own research) would the Ryzen 5 5500 be worth the small premium over a 4500?

I’m leaning towards keeping the GPU, at least for now, but looks like I could get the SSD for ~$50, some well-matched RAM for around $25 (I guess this will help with a VM quite a bit?), and maybe a Ryzen 5 4500 for around $65. Given the limited and “squishy” info I’ve provided, does that sound halfway reasonable to start, and then see if the 580 still feels like a bottleneck?

I have no hope for USA anymore. It’s gone steadily from bad to worse, and it seems like Americans never learn, ans especially like the Democrats never learn. Because they’ve done absolutely NOTHING to strengthen checks and balances or to strengthen democracy in USA.

This is a fair criticism, and is looking like a much bigger mistake than it seemed initially, and I think it’s telling the one single thing Obama spent the political capital on to get properly enshrined into statue is the one bit of his legacy that Trump is having the hardest time undoing. Constitutionally, we have fucked ourselves by thinking we could run the largest economy in the world on the legal equivalent of a “plan of a plan,” worshipping said high-level outline like it was holy writ, and then making surprise-pikachu face when a bad actor who’s not concerned about long-term stability starts shoving dynamite into its many cracks (pardon the mixed metaphor).

I hope you’re wrong, but I am not confident enough that you are to argue the point.

Yup. Whoever is next, and hopefully that will be in January 2029 if not earlier, is not going to have anything like the same influence that previous presidents have had. They will be able to deescalate short-term issues and generally provide a lull in the storm, but Trump has exposed the fragility of US power, and his base proves that America is an unreliable partner, so getting anything significant done that might cross administrations is going to be so much harder. Even if the next president is not insane and is without any above-average level of evil (neither is guaranteed), then that only helps temporarily. Hell, even if there’s some sea change in the electorate that makes democratic allies more optimistic, recovering from Trump 2 is going to mean the US looks inward for a time and there will be, if not a power vacuum, a serious low-pressure system that draws in disturbances.

Now, I’m not sad about the decline of American hegemony per se, but this is very much a “not like this” moment, and a slower unwinding would be better for stability. Our best case scenario here is that our allies understand the conflict inherent in the American ethos and work with us where practicable but also pursue the “strategic independence” we’ve been hearing about. I hope it’s Europe that steps up and reasserts itself, because barring a very unlikely leveling of the international order, your other options are China bulldozing the world for the financial benefit of the party, or Putin throwing bodies (both at enemies and out of windows), cutting off fossil fuels, and threatening nuclear war every time he doesn’t get his way.

Aerocart from Worx looks a little gimmicky, but might be closer to your needs.

If budget is no object, then maybe a Polymule at USD1000+.

Inbetween, there’s something like a “Foldit Cart”.

Try searches for folding wheelbarrow, folding garden cart, or folding “vermont” cart. Your options get better if you can live without it being collapsible.