rwhitisissle

"And in a historical turn of events, every member of the DNC over 50 has elected to just...not vote this November. Calling it a once in a generation political upset, mainline Democrats have almost unanimously elected to...not elect anyone. One such non-voter was on record not outside of a polling station saying 'I can't in good conscience vote for someone who actually seems to stand for something. It's just not what you're supposed to do as a Democrat and it's not in accordance with any beliefs I might have had, if I had ever decided to have any.'"

He’s by far done more good than bad. Even the railway workers were resolved in the end (without a shutdown that would have fucked the inflation greed economy even more).

The issue is that by doing this he showed his hand. A strike has two sides to it: the side of the workers and the side of the bosses. Biden's interference, by executive order, shows which side he's on. It's very telling to me that we live in a country where Biden can make it illegal for thousands of people to go on strike, but he doesn't have the power to force a single corporation to take the deal that's on the table from their employees. Or if he does, he elects not to do that. Either way, a union has one single recourse against the company it works for: striking. If that's suddenly off the table, you are effectively toothless in negotiations. Also, it's fascinating you can say to thousands of people "oh, you don't want to work anymore? Well, guess what? You have to." Last time I checked, that's functionally indentured servitude, if not outright slavery.

There’s a good chance it was manufactured by a combination of Russia->Iran->Hamas triggering i

Not every single thing is a plan by Russia to destabilize the Western world. This conflict had been ongoing for decades. Is this particular escalation of it bad timing? Sure, but it was also a ticking clock.

The issue is also that he's gotten a lot done that people do not like or not done enough in some ways. They don't think he pushed for enough support for Ukraine. Or they don't like how he handled the late 2022 railway workers strike. Or they don't like how he's handling Israel's invasion of Palestine. And then there's the fact that he's the face of mainstream, neoliberal Democrats, who are just generally disliked by more progressive members of the party for seeming to never get things done (like codifying Roe v. Wade into law when they had the chance) and for being so arrogant that they fumble the ball constantly (like with the DNC and Clinton thinking Trump was a fucking pushover and then letting him get elected and functionally give the RNC the Supreme Court for the next 30 years). People are frustrated with Biden because they're frustrated with the party, and Biden is the party in a very real way.

Well, that's because Trump was a softball candidate who stood no chance at winning and only acted as a spoiler candidate in relation to other, actual potential Republican candidates.

Given that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google together only account for 64% of global cloud hosting, I'm going to say those numbers don't add up. But you are right that Google is third behind the other two.

Google does not have a monopoly on search. Bing / DuckDuckGo works just fine.

Around 82% of search engine requests are issued through Google. Bing around 10%. I don't know if we just have differing definitions of "monopoly," but Google is the default on all Android devices, almost every non-Microsoft browser, and probably on Apple products as well. And most users don't know enough or care enough to ever change from that.

Let's not pretend like google does not have a monopoly on search engines, maps, and shortform video content. Also, their cloud ecosystem might be second behind AWS, but it's still fucking enormous and makes them truckloads of money.

SCP-196

I think what people believe is more a matter of environment, exposure, and upbringing. The Rittenhouses are victims of an ideology that they internalized because they were, in some very real way, made to internalize it. It doesn't benefit them and it exists purely to support systems of power that actively disenfranchise them and people like them. And "our" ideologies, however similar or different your beliefs and mine might be, are just as much a product of environment and conditioning. I'm not entirely sure I can draw the exact line where a society's failure of its own people stops and personal accountability begins when it's tied so intimately to how an individual believes the world is and should be.

I'm going to go ahead and post my hot take: I hate that these people are facing eviction and that they're faced with crippling medical debt caused by chronic illness and frequent hospitalization. I don't like these people. I don't agree with their beliefs. I think Kyle Rittenhouse did something unforgivably terrible and that his family likely enabled him and his actions. But I also don't want them to be homeless or to have to deal with medical debt, because those are things that I believe our society should guarantee, as inalienable rights, that no one, regardless of how odious they or their family might be, should have to endure. And I don't care that they (probably) believe differently.

Right. That's why I didn't say "it's impossible for things to be this way," but instead said "this is what I've seen." It's possible that I've just happened to see the worst of long term relationships by virtue of bad luck or environment. I don't discount that possibility and I'm not saying that my limited experience of the world represents the sum total of all human potential.

Every single long term relationship I've ever been witness to has been defined by either eventual resentment between partners, or a pervasive sense of apathy between them. The people I've seen who really "make it last" aren't affectionate towards one another after being together for decades: they're codependent. One person supports another person's narcissism and the other person facilitates their partner's alcoholism. That sort of thing.

On a more fundamental level, I'm not sure I even believe that the concept of lifelong partners or lifelong marriage is natural for human beings. Being a part of a community, sure, but being emotionally attached to the same person in the same way forever? Not really. I think it's in our nature to constantly grow, and that typically means growing apart. In fact, that might be a lot healthier for people than the alternative.