I’m super behind and that mostly doesn’t matter, which is nice. Excellent podcast. Currently on part 3 of the Thomas Jefferson deep dive. For people who like Behind The Bastards, check out their limited run of Behind The Police.

I just finished episode 48 on my first runthrough. Seriously good shit.

This is interstate 40.

Your experience is very similar to what my trip through SC on I-95 was. But with some occasional regional things. We went a little out away from 95 just to cross buc-ees off the bucket list.

The camera on my Pixel 5a shit the bed, so I just replaced it with the 8a. Because everything else about it still works fine, I keep it around as a home Wi-Fi device. Most of what I use it for is playing spotify. I have a waterproof Bluetooth speaker for in the shower and I’m not even bothering teaching the new phone to connect to it.

If OP has an old phone as a backup, yeah I can see it fulfilling this need really easily. There are even pretty thorough parental control options (on Android at least) to have a separate user profile for a kid and have control of that user supervised through another device.

If OP doesn’t have an old phone for this use case, probably the best bet is to either buy a used, older phone and set that stuff up or just find an old used iPod or similar. If something like spotify is essential to this plan, newer iPod touch models running iOS 15 support spotify. Otherwise, you can find a pretty basic mp3 player for under $50, but you’ll need to source music files yourself for that ;)

That’s a gofundme I would throw a few bucks at. How much does it cost to take a few billboards for a month or two on I-40? A few thousand?

I’m in a similar boat. There have been some setbacks, but I’ve been planning a desktop build to replace my gaming laptop from 2015 for a long while now. SteamOS has given me the confidence to commit to an AMD build with a Linux OS. I’ve been on the fence between a few distro options though. Maybe mint, maybe Nobara, there have been a few others.

Agreed. It was a half measure. Some action was desperately needed, and Republicans made sure that exactly some action was taken. They whine about the world passing us by while ensuring that we’re unable to catch up.

As in “something that would be a bare minimum proposal to rectify centuries of racial disparity, but won’t actually be achieved, and we’ll all pat ourselves on the back for pretending to try”? Yeah, if that’s what you meant, then I agree. But that isn’t what you meant, is it.

And his medical record.

The interesting thing is that I’m not sure anybody gives a shit that his mom got help through the ACA. The story here is that he can’t show any level of gratitude for the thing that has helped his own mother because he’s such a partisan piece of shit. The ACA sucks, but healthcare in this country was a complete dumpster fire before it passed, and it will return to being a complete dumpster fire if it’s repealed without a more expansive replacement in place.

This wouldn’t be a story if Medicaid didn’t have means testing attached which is how she lost eligibility. This wouldn’t be a story if JD would show thanks for the healthcare plan modeled after what a Republican governor put together, but that would be perceived as disloyalty to his toddler-brained master. This wouldn’t be a story if there were universal healthcare as there should be. He’s between a rock and a hard place because he’s too spineless to swallow his pride and show humanity even regarding the health of his own mom. Fucking pathetic.

Welcome to America, where people think that Fox News is a legitimate news source because “‘news’ is right there in the name!”

Decades of civil service would beg to differ. Of course all politicians in a democracy need to sway voters to vote for them, but it’s absurdly cynical to believe that no politician in any democracy ever has given any fucks about the well-being of their constituents. Unless you’re saying that this is something mostly unique to her, which is equally silly. I have my doubts about how much of her campaign promises can actually be delivered on, mostly due to congressional Republicans who will definitely stonewall everything possible, but it’s outrageous to claim without any supporting evidence that Harris is uninterested in serving the people when she’s already been doing so for her entire career.

Equal level of scrutiny > equal number of negative posts

Maybe there are a million “trump is bad” articles because there are a million unique reasons that trump is bad. We don’t need a million “Harris is bad” articles to make it fair, we need legitimate comparison on equal ground. Nobody is insisting that you repost what’s already been said, but nobody needs to hear “Harris is also bad” when the only reasonable goal of such a thing is to draw a false equivalency in order to either encourage people that voting for trump isn’t actually all that bad, or discourage barely-motivated Harris voters from actually getting up off their asses to vote for her.

To be clear, Harris isn’t perfect, but she’s proven to be competent and capable of growth as a human being who is engaging in a similar human experience as other people and understands the actual struggles we endure, their causes, and has proposed some solutions. The other fucking guy is airing out personal grievances, bitching about consequences for his actions, and spreading blatantly racist lies about immigrants which would make Hitler himself blush.

I fucking hate this. Are people really that oblivious regarding who these people have shown themselves to be?

On one side, the top of the ticket is somebody who has lied and cheated their whole life, even to a criminal extent, and has never shown any capacity to learn or grow in any meaningful way. They have shown nothing but contempt for anything related to justice or democracy or social progress. The VP pick for this candidate is funded by tech bro billionaires whose entire philosophy is predicated on the notion that a few wealthy and powerful oligarchs should dominate a rule over their lesser peasant-like laborers.

On the other side, the top of the ticket is a career civil servant who has been elected to all three branches of government and holds a juris doctore that proves their competency in law and the processes therein. They have flaws, but appear to be open to learning and growing, changing stances on policies as the times change and more information comes out. The VP pick for this candidate is perhaps best known for expanding liberties and ensuring that all schoolchildren were properly fed in the state that they were elected Governor of.

This election should be a fucking blowout victory for the latter candidate. It’s absolutely absurd that it could be even remotely close. There is, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this, nothing redeeming about the other ticket. Nothing. They will not help you in any way. They will consolidate wealth and power for themselves and their inner circle, and you ain’t in it. They are not only unwilling, but unable to show any sincere compassion for you. The best they can offer is sociopathic performance of compassion to manipulate you into giving them your vote. Do not fall for these proven charlatans.

No, but 100 dead troops is enough to grandstand about to get enough outrage to justify an all-out war in the region.

No, it’s more like “if Larry gets a 10% grade reduction for turning his paper in a day late to you, then I shouldn’t be getting this 20% grade reduction for turning this paper in a day late to you.” It’s more of a call for things to be fair and give everybody equal treatment.

There was a recent court decision regarding Donald Trump that, more or less, appointing a special counsel for the purposes of DOJ impartiality is not constitutionally acceptable. As a result, Hunter Biden, who was investigated and prosecuted via special counsel in order to maintain impartiality from the DOJ since his father is the sitting president, essentially argued that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Meaning that if Donald Trump should have his case dismissed under the pretext of special counsel being an invalid idea, then so too should Hunter Biden. That decision was already generally seen as fucking silly, but the silliness was put on full display for partisan hacks and their audience.

I was certain that a gander was a group of geese. Why? Because apparently everybody who has ever used the phrase “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” around me was using it wrong. I just learned this week that a gander is a male goose. So based on misuse, I thought that the phrase meant that what’s beneficial for one is beneficial for the greater group, but what it really means is that what’s acceptable in the case for one should be equally acceptable for others in the same situation.

I’m nearly 36 and I would say that I’m smarter than most people, but this was a gaping hole in my knowledge that was pretty damn humbling to learn of and correct.

Bullshit. I’m all of those things. The important part here is a piece that you haven’t brought up: do you want freedom, opportunity, and prosperity for everybody or just for you and your fellow cis white guy gun-likers? Republicans aren’t interested in feeding children or treating the ill unless they or theirs are the children and/or ill. You’re either arguing in bad faith or aren’t paying enough attention to understand that none of what you claim to be has been demonized in any way by either party.

And why do you think that is? Could it be because media outlets are businesses which tend to benefit from Republican policies of helping businesses? And so they feign impartiality but frame stories in a way that serve right wing agendas?

Careful, conservatives have historically been against desegregating spaces.