Nope. I’m a RINO. For LGBTQ+ and women’s reproductive rights. For gender equality. For religious freedom without interference from the government. For supporting our kids’ education and well-being. For reasonable gun control measures that involve training and background checks if that cost is borne by the state. Against banning of weapons or special taxes on guns/ammo. For involuntary psychiatric treatment (commitments). I want single-payer healthcare. I want a vetted method of entry for immigrants that doesn’t take years to complete. I want non-violent convicted criminals to have the option to be surgically “tagged”, then allowed to continue their lives knowing that they’re being monitored. Maybe then they can repay their victims. I want to abolish the death penalty. I want to set fines as a percentage of a person’s wealth. I want all non-lethal drugs to be legalized, including prescription drugs. I want the government to provide an interest-free home loan for anyone who can show they can afford the property, currently owns no other property, and will use it as their primary residence. I want a free path to a self-study college degree, but I oppose paying for others to obtain degrees without some form of payback.

The only thing that stopped the last big fire from burning down my home was a clear-cut patchwork left over from the last logging operation 15 years ago. It allowed CalFire to establish a firebreak. In areas that had not been logged in 50 years, folks lost their homes. I’m a member of my community’s Fire Safe Council. We have retired CalFire chiefs on our board. They were the ones who told me that California’s opposition to logging has resulted in major fuel loads with no firebreaks and a rapidly degrading network of logging roads that are used to fight fires. You can quote articles by tree huggers like the NFF. I see the thousands of acres of dead burned “mature” trees with “thick bark” just up the road.

You say my complaints are petty. People are losing their homes because of the out of control increases in fire insurance. People are worried about what they’ll use to power their homes during our frequent outages when CARB outlaws gas generators. California Democrats want us to go all electric. I’m all electric. My utility bill last month was $500. I’m expecting $700 for this month.

Know what starts big fires here? The electric company. My utility company deferred essential maintenance for over 50 years with the blessing of the California Public Utilities Commission. Camp Fire, LNU Complex Fire, Mosquito Fire, Dixie Fire - those were all major wildfires caused by PG&E. Now they want to play catch up by undergrounding power lines and hike our rates even more to pay for it - again with the approval of the CPUC.

If you believe that outdoor boilers are a fire hazard, you have never seen one. Burning wood waste is carbon neutral, yet the EPA and CARB restrict the use of a method of combustion that’s over three times as efficient and clean compared to a fireplace. They’re one of the safest ways to burn biomass. Safer than a fireplace and much safer than an open fire, which is how most folks in my area dispose of green waste. We had 4 fires this year in my county due to people burning green waste. How many fires nationwide were due to outdoor boilers?

You don’t live in a rural area, do you? Yeah, Trump is a trainwreck. I won’t vote for anyone so antithetical to what is right. Biden is currently the lesser of two evils. My point is that I’m voting -against- Trump. I’m actually hoping Biden does terrible in the debate, allowing another candidate to become a contender. I’d rather vote for someone I actually want to be president.

Biden is borderline senile. He’s like a well-meaning but incompetent father. His party stands for many things I totally disagree with. I can’t buy gas-powered tools to maintain my orchard because of Democrat “one-size-fits-all” regulations. Instead, I’m paying thousands for electric tools that need multiple batteries. They do the work slower, and that means more man-hours of labor. You see that as higher produce prices.

Every year I torch thousands of pounds of wood from the 3 acres of forest that I’m required to manage. I could use it to heat my home, but CARB (controlled by Democrats) won’t let me have an outdoor boiler. Instead I use electricity that comes from non-renewable resources and burn the wood in a big pile every spring, creating 10 times the pollution of that boiler and consuming 3 days of my time. The only other option for us rural folk is to haul it to the dump and pay $300 a truckload. And Democrats are holding up the biomass power project in my town over pollution concerns. That facility would give us a place to take green waste, reduce our fire danger, and probably lower our electric utility rate.

The fire danger here is directly a result of Democrat-led forest management - or lack thereof. Their anti-lumber industry policies caused the town’s mill to close 15 years ago. Without thinning, the forest was primed for the destructive fires that have swept the area. That has made fire insurance unaffordable. Mine was $800 just 5 years ago. Today it’s $6500. Others in my area are paying a lot more. One neighbor got a renewal letter for $85,000.

Sorry for the lengthy post. I wanted to show that I have legitimate reasons for not wanting a president from a party that is making my life more difficult. But vote for Trump? Not happening.

Edit: typo

The only voters that matter in this election are the moderates. We will decide the winner in November. The Hard Left and Right will vote for their party’s candidate, but neither can ensure the Oval Office without moderate support. I look forward to the debate, mainly to see how Biden handles himself without a teleprompter. I already know Trump is going to spew word salad.

Maybe someday (in my wet dreams) I’ll have a ranked-choice vote. Then I won’t have to base my vote on the lesser of two evils. That’s unfortunately the way things are in our two party dominated political system. It’s another election where I have to vote to keep the worst contender from winning.

Isn’t this illegal? The Stolen Valor Act of 2013 prohibits false claims of earned military awards and medals if the intent involves tangible benefits. Obtaining public office is one such benefit, isn’t it?

I’m one of those people who answer the polls. “Party?” Republican. “Do you support Donald Trump?” Hell ya! (Hell no) I have a few friends who do the same thing. I hope it throws the polls off enough to give Trump false hope, or at least lights a fire under Biden’s ass. Another 4 years of Trump and we’ll be fighting Civil War 2.0. Just hoping all those McDonald’s burgers catches up to him and he has the big one.

There are quite a few non-dischargeable debts. When it comes to legal judgments, if the damaged party objects to dismissal of the debt, it can remain, particularly if liens are involved. Liens can’t usually be discharged. That may be why Jones is seeking to liquidate. He can then start fresh using an company that he doesn’t own (but does control) to shield new assets. For instance, the company can provide him vehicles, a home, and an expense account. The company owns the real property, and the expense account is not considered personal income as long as it’s for “business expenses”. That limits the amount of his personal income subject to garnishment. I only hope that there’s a bidding war on Infowars so that his new company can’t afford it - and so the victims get max restitution.

It’s a protest vote in an inconsequential election. When it matters, they will vote for the lesser of two evils, just like every other November election.

Her base may not care, but she can’t win an election with only the votes from her base. Moderates and independents do care and make the difference in who wins.

I reuse the small Amazon shipping boxes. Each box has a number and a general category. My phone has a database. When I put something away, I take a picture of the item, add it to the database, put it in a box, and record the box number.

But it’s OK. God told them to do it. God is OK with genocide against enemies of the faith. Says so in the Bible. 1 Samuel 15, Ezekiel 9, Numbers 31, Deuteronomy 20 /s

No gold. It’s what they charge us privileged Californians.

It’s $210 a month plus $30 in taxes and fees for 400 mbit internet with a 1.2 TB usage cap and a mid-tier programming package renting one cable box (required) and one cablecard for the Tivo box. Some months I exceed my internet cap and have to pay $10 for every 50 GB over the limit. Welcome to California living.

Remember when TV used to be free, except that you had to watch commercials? I pay $2800 a year to this company for Internet and TV - and I still have to watch commercials. What’s wrong with this picture?

If data reliability is high on your list, but speed is not, use a NAS running RAID 1 (mirrored drives), so one drive can fail without compromising the data.

I used to do RAID 5 on an 8 drive array, but had a failure of the NAS motherboard. And wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t make that model anymore. No easy way to get the data back out of the RAID. I finally paid to recover the data, but learned my lesson. It’s MUCH cheaper to buy duplicate drives than it is to recover data later. If the RAID motherboard failed tomorrow, I would pop the working drive in my computer and it would just work.

Using drive mirroring pretty much eliminates the concern over premature drive failure. If it’s in warranty, pop out the bad drive and send it in for repair/replacement. The NAS will still work. Buy another drive or wait with sweaty palms until the faulty drive is fixed. Rebuild the array.

Where does that put entertainers, professional athletes, and lottery jackpot winners? I hear that Taylor Swift is a billionaire solely through her music sales and performance income.

Given that there are several cancer vaccines currently in human trials, this is not surprising. Most are based in mRNA technology, like the COVID-19 vaccine. Basically, researchers identify the marker proteins of a specific cancer, then create an mRNA vaccine that sensitizes the immune system. Then the immune system attacks cells with that marker. Other advances are methods to take down the “shield” that cancer cells have that hides them from the immune system.

If a country chooses to ignore patents, they can copy the methods and produce their own vaccines with significantly less investment.

What seems to be impossible is to locate businesses, their employees, and stores geographically close together. I have lots of friends who drive over an hour each way for work. I used to drive 30 minutes to my job. Now my wife and i work from home and for the first time in my life we have only one car. But there’s no way we could go without a car. Family lives 120 miles away. Groceries are 10 miles, and other necessities are 26 miles. The US was laid out to require personal vehicles. It’s too spread out to have a functioning mass transit system that’s convenient to use.

Using the such a system in the US, even if convenient, has risks. During the peak of COVID, many riders refused to wear masks. There’s no security, no hygiene or conduct standards for riders (try to sit next to a crazy homeless person or someone higher than a kite for 45 minutes), and when you try to get help from law enforcement, nobody shows up.

The survivors will be those able to adapt. There’s plenty of nourishing fauna, but how many are ready to eat bugs? Rats?

I care because every theft means I pay more the next time I shop. When someone steals from a store I patronize, they’re stealing from me. I was commenting on a post about stealing from Home Depot.