MrMcGasion

Viva la what he said!

Not saying there wasn't a spike in people searching if Biden dropped out, but a spike of approx 100 searches isn't really that significant.

Similarly, I looked at the "can I change my vote" trend that I've seen reported, and again it was 1000 searches (if you're generous) and was pretty much entirely on election day. Which to me would indicate was more people who voted early wondering if they could change their vote on election day.

Don't get me wrong, I would love if there was something to blame to make me feel better about sharing a democracy with a bunch of hateful morons, but even trying to find evidence to convince myself that they are more dumb/uninformed than hateful isn't turning up much.

I've heard tentative plans for a mass general strike in 4 years. It won't be easy, but if they won't hear our voices, they don't get our labor. There's a lot of preparation to do between now and then, and we're going to have to look out for each other. But labor has more power than we realize if we just use it.

Absolutely agree. I'm only talking about the fleeing the country part. Those of us who can stay are going to have to put in a lot of work, speaking out against fascism, protecting those who cannot flee, and being generally rebellious against tyranny.

If anything those of us who happen to not be directly in their crosshairs have a greater responsibility to speak out for the groups that are going to be targeted, because it could quickly get to a point where it's dangerous for those marginalized people to be as vocal. We cannot leave the most vulnerable to fight alone for their right to exist.

Technically it's not a full 55% of my countrymen, just 55% of the ones who bothered to vote. I'll admit that's not really a meaningful distinction though. Unfortunately, there's also more of us who want to leave than the rest of the world can reasonably handle. I hope as many marginalized people can get out, because it's going to be bad, especially for them. But those, like me, who are unlikely to be directly targeted due simply to being lucky enough to be born straight, white, men should probably leave those limited seats for those who truly need to leave.

One of the stated goals of Project 2025 is dismantling the Federal Reserve, they won't need to bother with "accidents" if they just shut the whole thing down.

They actually recently (within the last few months) agreed to join a larger grid. So that should be a bit less of a problem this year. It is Texas though, so there's always the chance they turn around and shoot themselves in the foot.

Linux Foundation Europe has taken over the rust-based Servo engine that Mozilla started several years ago. It's not ready to replace any other browser yet, but progress has been picking up speed quite a bit the last few months. Could end up being better than a Linux Foundation Firefox fork simply due to the advantage of being a newer codebase with (hopefully) less baggage than Gecko and the added bonus of rust's memory safety.

China needs us economically as much as we need them for manufacturing. Sure, we're trying to be more independent and make more domestically, and they are trying to be more independent economically through BRICS. Neither country is doing a very good job of attaining their goals of independence, but to keep up appearances both countries like to simultaneously pretend there's not a relationship and also that they are the top in the relationship.

The reality is both countries have some wealthy "oligarchs" who exploit workers and governments that mostly only work to benefit themselves and their oligarch friends. China will take out an oligarch here and there when they decide they're getting too powerful, and Americans get to elect some of our leaders, other than that we're not very different. Deep down both governments understand it would be political suicide to antagonize the other to the point meaningfully harming them. At least both current governments that is, Trump is probably too dumb to realize we need each other, so that's a potential wild card, but North Korea is almost certainly a bigger threat to both the US and China than we will to each other for decades.

I still use DDG as my "daily driver" (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven't yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I'd like, but it's nice to have as an option, and I'm never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

And then once your person wins, shout at them every day about the things that are important to you. Pester and annoy them so much that they are both motivated to do what you want just to get you to leave them alone, and also so they have support they can point to to convince their colleagues to join the cause. We'd be in a very different place if we had demanded getting rid of the Electoral College even 10 years ago, and a vastly different place if we had gotten that changed 25 years ago.

I know it's a lot of work to stay loud about political issues all the time, but if you don't use your voice, someone will take your silence as contentment and nothing will change.

As long as they don't remove my ability to still have a separate search field beside the address bar, I'll still be happy. I know it has probably been a decade since Chrome merged the search and address bars (and Firefox followed), but IMO it makes the experience of both searching and typing addresses worse, in exchange for a at best mildly cleaner UI.