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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Huge difference, Ukraine military operations were for a long time purely defensive, only engaging in their own territory. Now they are starting to target military facilities in Russian territory more with no evidince of excessive collatoral damage, which is still understandable. If Russia withdrew offensive forces, Ukraine would not be trying to ‘wipe out’ Russia.

    Versus Israel where just tremendous indiscriminate operations are inflicting more ‘collateral’ damage than what would be considered understandable targets for deliberate damage. I think the world might have been pretty fine with surgical incursions against Hamas and Hezbollah, but Israel has not displayed that discipline.




  • Problem they had was that ssh doesn’t really have any way to enforce details of how the client key manifests and behaves. They could ship out the authentication devices after the security team trusted the public key, but that was more than they would have been willing to deal with.

    Rotating the passphrase in the key wouldn’t do any good anyway. If an attacker got a hold of your encrypted key to start guessing the passphrase, that instance of the key will never know that another copy has a passphrase change.




  • In Afghanistan? Sure, I’d accept that any administration faced with the successful WTC attack would likely have ultimately reacted a similar way. Though there is some data suggesting that intelligence agencies were a bit off due to the delay in transition from the Florida indecision, so a more decisive election either way might have caused the agencies to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Maybe there’s a case to be made of it being handled better, but I can’t think of any data to suggest either way how that hypothetical would have gone.

    However, the thread specifically mentioned the Iraq war, which was a distinctly Bush/Cheney adventure. Even in the vague “Middle East” starter, it would have been fewer, by virtue of at least limiting the engagement to Afghanistan. Iraq would have been left to its own devices in a Gore presidency.



  • I’ll say one problem is that for a number of items, there’s a technicality in the supply chain that exempts stuff from the price match. I don’t know about Microcenter, but have seen it in other contexts.

    For example “Oh, Amazon is selling a 120 pack, but we only carry 125 packs, so it’s not equivalent”. Or in the most egregious, “You have the price for model number 762LAZ, but we stock 762LWM”, and you search and find out those two model numbers are absolutely identical, but “AZ” models come in a box with an Amazon logo printed on it.


  • If out of proportion in scale, back in 2000, Nader voters going for Gore would have decided the nation for everyone. Ultimately the choices of a few hundred people overcame over half a million votes going the other way. The very small number of Stein voters in a certain place can decide the output. I don’t fault them for 2000, even if I disagree with them, because I don’t think folks could have reasonably foreseen the warmongering that was to come.

    If out of proportion in severity, between November 2020 and January 2021, you had several attempts to undermine the election, and that was with very little planning/prep work. You had trying to get the states to “find enough votes”, you had fake electors, trying to get the VP to unilaterally refuse the election, inciting a crowd to storm the proceedings. In the aftermath you have certain people planning their whole political careers on promising to guarantee the elections for GOP, speculation that Vance was picked carefully as someone willing to do what Pence wouldn’t, and a whole carefully constructed plan to start getting things ready for 2028 election the moment 2025 starts, if they can. You have a supreme court that ruled that a president may be considered immune for crimes, unless of course the supreme court decides it’s not an “official act”, reserving the ability to selectively enforce law on the president themselves.

    With respect to Russian influence, this is specifically a Stein situation and plenty of evidence to support that Stein is being supported by and manipulated by Russia. It makes sense too, as Trump has shown himself to be awfully susceptible to Putin’s manipulation, so taking advantage of a naive Stein to foil the votes of naive voters in favor of Trump is a plain strategic path for them.

    Yes, we can talk about her platform, particularly about her wish to dissolve NATO and stop support of Ukraine, but other parts of her platform are difficult to explain the nuance of the problems. Like “dump money on third world nations”, which sounds the decent thing to do, but historically trashes any semblance of local economy and frequently reinforces warlords instead of the people.


  • What they ultimately do with their vote is their business, but I’m just responding to the premise that would-be Stein voters would not vote for Harris anyway, because they are “too dumb” to vote for Harris, which is incorrect.

    As to discussing the strategic situation, I think that is important to reiterate the consequence of their vote. Stein will not win, it’s very obvious, so a vote thrown that way is merely a message to try to break the self fulfilling prophecy of third parties being hopeless. If you truly feel either candidate is roughly equal, this is a fine and strategic move. I could understand that perspective in most presidential races I have seen. Given the happenings associated with Trump’s first term, I personally can not understand that perspective, but ultimately it is their business.

    To be quiet on this would be to let what seems to be forces looking to weaken the Harris prospect prevail in swaying people to vote for Stein, despite those forces not actually wanting Stein, but just wanting a spoiler candidate to take some votes the way they want.


  • You don’t have to be “smart” to vote for a good candidate.

    Stein is the nominally “more liberal than the Democrats are willing to be” candidate. So most likely if they were forced to vote and could only vote for Trump or Harris, then I’d wager they’d mostly go Harris.

    A relative weakness is that on the left there are currently more people ready to discard strategic thinking and stand on what they consider their absolute principles. The right is currently a bit more unified, as they are more willing to yield on their differences to vote closest to their overall goal with a decent chance to win.

    Or the left is fairly unified in practice but Internet manipulations present the illusion otherwise, I have no idea






  • Actually, an RCV system may help the democrats, at least in the short term.

    For the last couple of decades, the “spoiler” candidates generally take from the democrats more than the republicans. Last big spoiler third party that screwed the right was Perot that I remember. With RCV, then the ‘fringe’ votes can still be cast and democrats can work toward being the second choice of those hardliners. At least in the short term, it alleviates the need to actually compete for votes with candidates that are going to lose anyway.

    Longer term, it may cause a viable third party or more to get some steam (attracting practical candidates that no longer see the need to be a D or R to get votes, the parties generally getting left alone by outside forces that find them not worth weaponizing), but I don’t think the politicians are too concerned on that long a time frame.