Yeah, that volatility came up in discussions at work. Since it’s unpredictable, attempts to plan around it after just futile.

sex-positive, consensual space for couples and moresomes."

Oh so discriminating against lesssomes

Yes, they can do that. But not fire people in the executive branch, let alone do that CIA black site thing mentioned at the top of this thread.

I somehow mashed to forget her for a second…

He probably would have made it up to the full 8 years, since he did in our timeline. I doubt Palin would have won a race.

That’s not in the cards in 2026 race, that office won’t be up for grabs until 2028… maybe

Right, but a lot of that would require either POTUS or 2/3. They might be able to do some things, but almost certainly can’t remove from office or override vetos

To be more accurate, he actively cancelled an extension granted by a previous executive order.

I think a McCain victory would have been the best shot at averting the Trump wing. The Tea Party was the first manifestation of what we see now, and that was triggered by Obama’s first term.

He said when they take the house. In that hypothetical, they would still be moderately impotent with regards to what you describe, they’d need 2/3 of Senate too.

This is the most optimistic plausible scenario for 2027, not 2029.

And a lot of people end up with a hematoma like that because something screwed up during their annual blood draw. Most of them are not dead two days later.

It means someone was poking around his blood vessels. Could be for serious reasons or routine.

Yeah, I had a mildly botched routine annual blood draw and it left a pretty significant hematoma for a while.

Yes it means he has probably had blood draw or IV through the hand for something, but impossible to say if there anything significant to it just because it left behind a hematoma.

not the ballots

Go to the ballots and vote for who you want. Will it be sufficient, dunno, but it is absolutely needed to put in at least that effort.

Historically non-democratic means of overthrowing a previously democratic systems do not end well…

I mean some are, and their support of Cuomo is worthy of condemnation. But it’s worth pointing out ‘vote blue no matter who’ cuts both ways and 100% it means Mamdani.

Broadly I hate the whole ‘party’ system and getting stuck with a ‘team sport’ mentality, but at least for now, for the national races I have to be pragmatic and steer into the skid of party politics. The local/state level I can afford to be more nuanced as for now, neither big party is as scary locally as the GOP is federally.

Another interesting thing to consider.

To be clear, he is rich. But he’s not crazy crazy rich, like nowhere near billionaire status.

With that in mind, his kernel is a key component of RedHat’s, SuSE’s and Canonical whole business, with at least two of those being multi billion dollar businesses.

His kernel is a key component of Android phones, which represent over 50 billion a year in hardware spend, and a bunch of software money on top of that.

His kernel is foundational to most hosting/cloud services with just mind blowing billions of revenue quarterly.

It’s used in almost every embedded device on the planet, networking gear, set top boxes, thermostats, televisions, just nearly everything.

People with a fraction of that sort of relevance are billionaires several times over. A number of billionaires owe much of their success to him. Yet he is not among their numbers.

Now there’s more to things than just a kernel to be sure, but across the hundreds of billions of dollars made while running Linux, there was probably plenty of room for him to carve out a few billion for himself were he that sort of person, but he cares about the work more than gaming the dollars. I have a great deal of respect for that.

Means that while he may not always be right, but I at least believe his assessments are sincere and not trying to drive some grift or cover some insecurity about being left behind.