Also on Mastodon… a guy supposedly in Africa building a house. He just needs another couple hundo for soil to fill in the floor!

And one I just reported the other day… an account called Mastodon from a .jp instance spamming people saying there was an error with their account verification and they urgently needed to click this malicious link to fix it!

The fediverse is definitely not immune to scammers folks, do your part and report this stuff to instance admins.

And donate to your instance admins (or run your own instance) too because it’s a pain in the ass to stay on top of the bots and scammers.

It’s hard to tell from these articles whether they isolated cannabis use from smoking. That seems important to clarify…

Both IBM and Oracle I haven’t really worked with because they’re heavily used by massive companies. We had an Oracle database when I was in banking that was because we were self hosting a loan accounting system. IBM does backend data processing stuff for massive companies like American Express and Bank of America. All of the smaller shops I’ve worked in have built things on Microsoft’s stack.

A genocide anywhere is a huge problem. The US is playing a major role in the genocide in Palestine, so yes it makes sense that Americans are more concerned about that one than the one in Sudan.

It’s more that local authorities are offering incentives to big tech to bring in those data centers, ostensibly because they think it will benefit the area, but more likely because it is benefitting the local authorities personally through kickbacks or campaign donations.

This is the first I’m hearing of Aurora, that seems promising. I’m guessing you’d use FDroid for anything that is available there but use Aurora for anything that is only on the Play Store?

Thoughts on pros and cons? Do you still install apps through the play store or are you using FDroid?

I think at least one class a day for some sort of technology literacy is important. Maybe some typing courses or web development or coding courses or graphic design or even how to create chat bots…

But as much as I’m into tech I agree that kids shouldn’t be staring at screens all day.

I don’t think the congressional districts are actually relevant to the electoral college, but the # of electoral votes is based partly on how many congressional representatives the state has, which is based on the state’s population.

Most states award electoral votes solely based on the popular vote of that state. So if 5,000,001 people vote Democrat in California and 5,000,000 vote Republican, all of California’s electoral votes go to the Democrat.

Many people would like to see gerrymandering ended, but I don’t think many people want to see congressional districts eliminated entirely. Congressional districts ensure that different parts of the state are represented in congress. For example, in a state like Massachusetts if the congressional districts were eliminated, then probably all of the representatives would hail from the Boston area which is the most densely populated.

In fact, one way that the negative impacts of the electoral college could be partially eliminated is by using the congressional districts as electoral districts, as described here: Congressional Districts as Electoral Districts

This would result in more states awarding partial electoral votes, but would have downsides such as allowing gerrymandering to influence the presidential election instead of just the congressional elections, and it would still technically be possible for someone to win in the electoral college but not in the popular vote.

The best way to eliminate the electoral college in my opinion is for more states to award electoral votes proportionally. So in the California example above, half the electoral votes would go to the Democrat and half to the Republican.

I agree, but this is related to the drawing of congressional districts and not related to the electoral college for presidential elections. So this is relevant for determining which party controls the House of Representatives, doesn’t affect how many electoral votes for president California has or how those votes are awarded.

If Republicans don’t like it they can get on board with efforts to stop gerrymandering everywhere. Glad we’re on the same page now!

I’m honestly confused about what you’re asserting here. For my daughter, they did a blood test on my wife in order to tell us that we’re having a daughter instead of a son. Doesn’t that mean that there IS in fact a genetic test that “reveals biological sex”?

Oh great, meat prices were already at all-time highs.

What the alternative?

True… but if Trump had to contend with Democrat majorities in the house and Senate then he would have an incentive not to do illegal shit because he could be removed from office.

Hopefully the results is that everyone is concerned about gerrymandering instead of just Democrats and something can be done about it at the federal level.

No. The strategy can work perfectly fine both ways.

The entire point of gerrymandering is to make the geography irrelevant.

If you have a large, reliably blue city where 80 percent vote Democrat you can split that into districts that go 60 percent Democrat so that Democrats win more seats but by smaller margins…

If you wanted to gerrymander in favor of Republicans, you would fracture the city even more so that you disperse those Democrat voters over more districts.

I was actually thinking it would be sweet to train as an electrician as a backup to my software engineering job, since it’s something that seems interesting to me. However, it doesn’t really seem doable. It would be cool if there was some equivalent to a coding boot camp for trades.

It would be sweet if instead of college there was a four year program where you could be trained in the basics of plumbing, electric, carpentry, automotive, landscaping and do various internships (apprenticeships) then decide when you graduate what you want to do.

It’s bullshit for companies to lay people off and retain H1Bs. The government shouldn’t approve any new H1Bs for development positions until companies stop the layoffs and the amount of developers searching for work goes down significantly.

I really wonder what would happen if the UN and Europe just sent troops in to keep the peace and establish a Palestinian state. Would the US and Israel actually go to war with the rest of the world in order to continue the genocide or would they admit defeat?