That’s composing quite an edifice of unprovable postulation to reverse engineer faith. “A” for effort!

Yup. The requirement of “faith” is a sure sign of charlatanism.

It’s a funny thing, when you think about it. If you were truly God, you wouldn’t need to prove it; you could just make it so everyone believes you.

They do require a valid ID, though, which can be a problem for some people. I don’t know what their requirements are for “ID”, but it’s probably a driver’s license or passport, or state-issued ID. These have all been shown to be barriers for certain groups of people.

In states that have voter registration, proof of identity often accepts more broad documentation: birth certificates, or other documents acceptable for what you’d need for a DL.

So, it’s cool for everyone who has a driver’s license, or a passport. Not so cool for folks who don’t drive (because of a handicap, for instance). Convenient for many people, but not “based”. Requiring ID at voting time is a tactic used to disenfranchise groups of people. Young urban voters, for instance, who may not yet have needed a license.

Nicely put!

Reddit at least allowed blocking of trolls, whereas if we want that here, we will need to expend the effort to make that happen.

I don’t so much mind this, at least. It’s just curation, and I’d far rather have it in our hands than the hands of moderators or platform owners. Not that moderation isn’t useful, and hosting admins can still defederate - but giving users the ability to manage their own block lists, at the user, group, and instance levels, makes it less critical to have moderation, and makes moderation a little less prone to abuse.

Completely agree, except that I’d amend that no real conservative politicians exist. I think there are a lot of real conservatives - you named several - but that simply can’t get elected with our current election mechanisms. Primaries need to be eliminated. Progress like adoption of RCV needs to expand. The electoral college needs to be eliminated. If we can make progress in these areas, it’ll let moderate conservatives to regain control of their party. And it’d let people stop arguing and being frustrated with having to vote for the lesser of two evils.

Like most things, there’s a sliding scale. I block two instances (in my client) because of the high noise-to-signal ratio, and a few individuals who I find particularly obnoxious. I’ve never blocked anyone who I thought was trying to have a good-faith argument with me, regardless of their position. But I also don’t feel obligated to stand and listen to the MAGA dipshit shouting obscenities at minorities, either. Is it an echo chamber? No more than me not watching Fox “News”.

Although, Lemmy leans strongly left, and the instances are tankie ones; there isn’t a lot of right-leaning posting IME. I think this is a particularly difficult time for reasonable conservatives because of how their party has been co-opted by fascists. The instances I’m on doesn’t do a lot of defederating, but I know just by virtue of being on Lemmy, I’m getting a left bias.

Your use case is obviously different, but I’ve gone years between system upgrades. I mostly do OSS coding, or work stuff; not gaming. The only case I can imagine needing to upgrade my little Ryzen with 16 cores - a laptop CPU - is if it becomes absolutely imperative that I run AI models on my desktop. Or if Rust really does become pervasive; compiling Rust programs is almost as bad as compiling Haskell, and will take over my computer for minutes at a time.

When I got this little micro, the first thing I did was upgrade it to 64GB of RAM, because that’s the one thing I think you can never have too much of; especially with the modern web and all the shit that brings with it; Electron apps, and so on, absolutely chew up memory. The one good thing about the Rust trend is better memory use, so the crappy compile times are somewhat forgiveable.

“Boner” would be a fantastic name for a TV series about a grumpy orthopedist with a drug problem who’s always right. “It’s always osteoporosis” could be the tag line.

You want Upspin. I want Upspin. But Upspin never went anywhere (it’s at least 7 years old… ever heard of it?), and I personally believe that it was because it’s a royal PITA to set up, and because the tutorial had instructions that expected you to be using GCS. If you wanted to do everything on your LAN, it was even harder.

It’s got all the of the features you mention, and it’s really the only system that does what it does; I really did try in the early days to get it running, and failed. It still has the caveat:

Upspin has rough edges, and is not yet suitable for non-technical users.

and, at 7 years old, if it hasn’t gotten anywhere yet, I think it never will. Commits trickle in, but there’s really no significant progress in usability.

Read the mission statement. It’s glorious. And then wallow in despair that nothing else does this, and it’s a zombie project.

Really? That’s surprising. I would think inhaling a bunch of ground glass would severely damage your lungs, permanently.

Which is worse: a line of asbestos, or a line of grounf-up fiberglass? I can’t imagine either is going to do your lungs any good.

Seconded. OP, if you can write Markdown, Hugo will turn it into a website.

There are grammar Nazis, and fashion Nazis; PC Nazis, and good ol’ fashioned fascist Nazis; but my favorite Nazis are logic Nazis!

Go ahead… you can whisper it to me

“… as opposed to 70% of non-trans people.”

Statistics without context are meaningless, even if it is biggotted propaganda.

Who do I write?

Opening an office is a completely different thing; there is an enormous difference between offshore contractors and offshore employees. That much, I’ll agree with.

In the US, though, it’s usually cost-driven. When offshore mandates come down, it’s always in terms of getting more people for less cost. However, in most cases, you don’t get more quality code faster by throwing more people at it. It’s very much a case of “9 women making a baby in one month.” Rarely are software problems solved with larger teams; usually, a single, highly skilled programmer will do more for a software project than 5 junior developers.

Not an projects are the same. Sometimes what you do need is a bunch of people. But it’s by far more the exception than the rule, and yet Management (especially in companies where software isn’t the core competency) almost always assumes the opposite.

If you performed a survey in the US, I would bet good money that in the majority of cases the decision to offshore was not made by line managers, but by someone higher in the chain who did not have a software engineering degree.

Thing is, outsourcing never stopped. It’s still going strong, sending jobs to whichever country is cheapest.

India is losing out to Indonesia, to Mexico, and to S American countries.

It’s a really stupid drive to the bottom, and you always get what you pay for. Want a good development team in Bengaluru? It might be cheaper than in the US, but not that much cheaper. Want good developers in Mexico? You can get them, but they’re not the cheapest. And when a company outsources like this, they’ve already admitted they’re willing to sacrifice quality for cost savings, and you - as a manager - won’t be getting those good, more expensive developers. You’ll be getting whoever is cheapest.

It is among the most stupid business practices I’ve had to fight with in my long career, and one of the things I hate the most.

Developers are not cogs. You can’t swap them out like such, and any executive who thinks you can is a fool and an incompetent idiot.

Me: Mom, can see have Evil Santa?

Mom: No, we have Evil Santa at home.

Evil Santa at home:

“I’ll bet I could fly that thing! How hard could it be?”