Or they'll do shit like put Harris on full blast for not providing "detailed policies," and then moving the goalposts to "but how do you pay for it" when she does, and nitpicking every word of every sentence she says. Meanwhile, Trump will cancel interviews, go up on stage at rally, spew a word salad response, and the NYT will bend over backwards to reword the salad to make him look better, while casting his decision to dodge a second debate as "smart" and avoiding any form of scrutiny as "efficient use of campaign funds." At best, they'll halfheartedly throw in a fact check like "his plan to fix inflation by levying tariffs will increase inflation" but they don't dare portray him as the senile, hate-filled lunatic he is because they're terrified of angering their right wing audience (who are already shifting away from legacy media anyway to reinforce their bubble). They also do this because virtually all forms of legacy media have been coopted by the billionaire sociopaths that would very much like a second Trump term to give them another tax cut and the "freedom" to pollute our world and grind the heel of their boot into the face of the working class so that they can race to become the first trillionaire.

I was one of those that thought biden shouldn't drop out, because I was worried about the risk of infighting breaking out over who would replace him, distracting everyone and driving away voters, and I was also concerned about throwing away the incumbent advantage. I still feel the risks of that happening were real and valid, but I'm immensely pleased that those worries didn't come to pass and everyone immediately unified behind Harris.

They did use them as best they could. They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators (Sinema and Manchin) who refused to support getting rid of it, making killing the proposition of killing the filibuster DOA. As a result, their only choice to pass legislation was budget reconciliation, which aren't subject to filibuster. The issue is that reconciliation has several big limits:

1. The bill has to be related to government spending, revenue, and the debt ceiling. You can't toss in things like minimum wage increases or voting rights legislation.

2. You can only pass one of these bills per year (theoretically you can do more, but additional reconciliation bills have to go through the budgrt committee and with a 50/50 senate the GOP can just skip those meetings to deny quorum and keep it stuck)

3. Whatever passes still has to get at least 50 votes, which means either appeasing Manchin/Sinema or getting Republican votes (which ain't gonna happen)

And despite that, we still got the CHIPS act, an infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which--even with Manchinema throwing as many grenades in the process as they could get away with--was the biggest climate change bill in our country's history. Not perfect, no, but a sizable step in the right direction, for once.

God, the unrelenting misery is killing me in this platform. I think the thing I'm most sick and tired of more than anything else is the constant stream of The Usual Suspects butting in with "But what about Gaza?!" on Every. Single. Post.

Post an article about Biden proposing a ceasefire agreement in the war? Complain about Biden giving support to Israel!

Post an article about Biden celebrating pride month? Complain about Biden funding Israel!

Article about Biden forgiving another batch of student loans? "BUt Biden supports israel!"

Article about Trump getting convicted of felonies? "But Biden! Gaza! Israel!"

Article about a small town library fighting LGBTQ+ book bans? "GAZA! ISRAEL! BIDEN! BAD"

Article about a goddamn random topic completely unrelated to Biden, Trump, Israel, politics, or the US at all? "GENOCIIIIIIIIIIDE!"

It's at the point where I've cut back on Lemmy usage entirely because every comment thread I click on is like navigating a fucking minefield of misery. Nothing good can ever happen, no policy changes can ever be celebrated, no events can be remarked upon, without someone butting in with a reminder that Genocide Mother-Fucking Joe is personally shoveling coal into the palestinian child incinerator. No post can ever leave you with any emotion other than the thin veil of doomerism settling upon your shoulders, a pall of depression casting itself over the tragedy of the world, and a sense that modern society is an Aristocrats joke that has long since crossed the line from "horrifying" to "funny," then back to "horrifying," then back to "funny," before settling itself so firmly in "horrifying" that the audience is casting nervous glances and hoping that someone else is the first to call the police.

Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn't access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.

Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.

People dismiss AI art because they (correctly) see that it requires zero skill to make compared to actual art, and it has all the novelty of a block of Velveeta.

If AI is no more a tool than Photoshop, go and make something in GIMP, or photoshop, or any of the dozens of drawing/art programs, from scratch. I'll wait.

My dude, they're trying to combat the peer pressure effect of someone's buddies razzing them over drinking a "frou-frou sissy drink" instead of grabbing a cold beer. I know it's Lemmy, but come the fuck on.

Yeah, before Tucker got his Fox segment, he used to do a show on CNN with Paul Begala called Crossfire, whose entire schtick was having a conservative and a liberal talking head co-hosting the show and basically arguing with each other for an hour. Jon came on the show in 2004 and ripped the entire concept apart so thoroughly that it got the entire show cancelled. It's truly a glorious moment: https://youtu.be/aFQFB5YpDZE&t=0

Pick up a pen and learn to draw?

Basically, companies are required to pay for unemployment insurance that funds the government's unemployment benefits system. If you lay someone off, the employee files for unemploent, and gets paid a portion of their weekly salary while they look for another job (the amount you get paid and whether there's any additional requirements varies from state to state, with Democrat-controlled states usually being more generous, but generally you have to show you're actively seeking a new job), and the employer pays a bigger unemployment insurance rate to compensate for the additional burden the former employee is now placing on the government benefits system.

However, if you're fired for cause--say, you get caught stealing from the cash register--then the employer can contest your unemployment. If the employer can show you were fired for a good reason, the employee can be denied unemployment benefits, and the employer doesn't have to pay extra unemployment insurance. This meeting is the company trying to cook up a justification for firing with cause, and the employee trying to get them to admit they're just being laid off, because if the company admits during the exit interview that she's just being laid off without cause, it's nearly impossible to contest her unemployment benefits claim later.

The Sharrans' Shadow Ambush ability will now only trigger on weapon attacks.

Son of a... I just did this stupid fight YESTERDAY and they nerfed it the very next day! The mages causing 10-20 AOE necrotic damage every time they cast Darkness was easily the single most BS part of the fight, I had to look up a cheese blade barrier/wall of fire strategy to eventually beat it.

Good sci-fi usually treats this on par with using nuclear weapons (which it kinda is?). In Babylon 5, mass drivers are banned by intergalactic treaty, and when one race uses them anyway it literally bombs their victims back into the stone age, and it's treated as a horrifying event --one of the character's defining moments in the show is just him looking on silently in horror.