Which is a bonkers argument. You still have all that choice out there, a Windows user just chose an option that is less compatible with the other options. There are fair arguments as to why it is impractical for some, but choice is the least of the problems.

I continue to think at least his administration, maybe not him specifically, drove prices up in 2025 on purpose.

Imagine midterm campaign ads, bragging about how prices have decreased, and citing annual percentage decrease. Damn near impossible when you are always trying your best to manage affordability but perhaps actually doable if you blow things up the year prior.

If they did somehow cut a partial rebate check from the tariffs right smack in the middle of midterm campaigns, they brag about lower prices and people feel the weight of that bonus in their pocket, even if it was their own money in the first place. Lots of people act like tax refund is some sort of spring bonus instead of repayment of a 0% loan they have to the government.

In short, they are going to win midterms by botching the off year.

I have been predicting that the tariffs will be dropped as we go into midterms. They are going to have so many campaign ads about bringing pruces so far down year over year…

So much easier to make a metric good if you screw it up first.

"This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls,

That’s not ‘barely legal’…

This assumes this is an annual thing and not a one-time stunt.

I think this is a potential component in a ‘2025 sucks to make 2026 look better’.

Imagine that they use part of the tariff revenue over 18 months to issue a check roughly that size right smack dab in the middle of midterm campaign season. Maybe also implementing one of those random tariff pauses, say, 90 days covering the tail end of election season to get prices to maybe come down. If there’s one thing they should have learned is that the average person sincerely loves getting their own money back without interest and views it as a ‘nice bonus’, like they do every April.

So they drive prices up in 2025, then use some of that to ‘stimulus’ the voters as they implement pricing relief…

I think everything is coming together for them to win the midterms. People have already forgotten about USAID and similar, and maybe associate that more with Musk than Trump. People are pissed about the inflation but this would likely erase that concern particularly if they ease up for election season. They endangered people by taking away SNAP, but democrats caved and the Republicans have a chance to make short term healthcare extension and vindicate their ‘democrats caused this by being stubborn’ narrative. Further, since open enrollment closed and it’s “too late”, one thing I heard floated was implementing the subsidy as a cash rebate to those that would have benefited, and just like this refund here, that goes even further than reducing the costs in the minds of the voters. If they want a little boost they can also do things like throw RFK Jr. under the bus and install a vaguely credible person in his position, to illustrate they can improve things.

Well this is pretty much exactly what Republicans needed.

They pitched that they were perfectly willing to be reasonable and the democrats were the crazy ones.

Now they pass an extension, specifying to block the non-existent illegal immigrant gap and say “see, we were ready to take care of the people, but the democrats forced things to be bad, and these few democrats reluctantly came over which just proves they were in the wrong”

Another chunk of what I assume is their strategy: Make 2025 bad in ways to make it easier to make 2026 feel great by comparison.

For there to be any kind of real “civil war” there would need to be a very clear distinction between sides and goals alongside states declaring

That’s how the US Civil War happened, but frequently a national Civil War does not have such clear boundaries and sides. See Syria for a very messy conflict where about the only thing defining one ‘side’ was ‘not Assad’ and very little agreement other than that.

Civil war would be the worst possible outcome to be sure, but a messy situation can just as easily feed a civil war.

They believe the “proper” stewards of society are the wealthy. In order for the wealthy to make the best of things, they need that money, so low taxes.

But the wealthy need something else, a desperate working class that will do anything the wealthy says just so they can eat and have some chance at things like decent healthcare. One of their favorite refrains is “nobody wants to work anymore”, and in part they blame government assistance for this perceived lack of workers or workers that are so uppity as to demand a living wage.

Of course desperate people can do something other than nicely do the things the wealthy tell them to. So that’s where “law and order” principles come in. Make a big authoritarian police force to discourage the more dangerous path that mass desperation can cause.

I feel it’s premature to assume JD would be the GOP candidate. No one particularly likes him, even as some people like trump for whatever reason.

It’s certainly capable, and has a more structured pipeline structure saving you in theory from awkwardness of grep/awk sorts of ‘processing’ that may be out of whack. It also has a command model where whether you are calling cmdlets or .Net functions, it’s lighter weight than a typical bash interaciton that has to fork/exec every little thing (and the ability to invoke .Net functions means a lot of capabilities that are normally not directly available to something like bash).

However, from a user experience, it’s got a few things that can be a problem:

• It’s a bit too ‘programmer-y’, and particularly maybe a bit too perl-y. Some of the same criticisms of how perl can be a bit of a mess carry over to powershell.
• It’s ecosystem is mostly just whatever Microsoft gives to you. The *nix side of the house has had a diverse ecosystem, but Microsoft is largely on their own. Good hooks into most Microsoft products, but not a whole not of third party enablement.
• Other shells have better and/or richer UX, like fish

The point is that you can’t “pipe GUI output to other command”, the GUI would actually have to serialize things in a useful way and send to that fifo. Similarly you can’t send stuff to it’s stdin and expect it to do anything sane.

Further, since you can’t seek() in a fifo, a lot of likely GUI applications involving files would break on trying to deal with a fifo. Also the typical GUI app on read doesn’t assume a ‘tail -f’ like approach to arbitrary file inputs.

But only if the gui very specifically designs for it. With a cli you can generally wrangle arbitrary command into a pipeline.

Cmd was torturous and powershell not much better.

Some things are just massively tedious to do through any gui. Sometimes the converse is true.

One reason why LLM is desired as a ui element is that you can describe what you want in text without having to remember how to navigate a bunch of convoluted ui elements. CLI is related, except more precise but more demanding on specifics of input.

Yeah, I knew someone who voted that way, he voted for Trump and we see how that worked out…

I think the argument would be that the voter strategy changes and they vote their preference more confidently instead of going all prisoner’s dilemma and trying to vote the person that other people will vote for that is most acceptable. So a large volume of people vote for their second choice and never express their true preference in a FPTP system.

However, I do think he would have carried a FPTP system as well, the other candidates were all pretty terrible, and everyone 100% knew the Republican candidate was never going to matter so they didn’t even have to sweat the ‘who can pull the center’ thinking.

NYC had ranked choice in the primaries, but honestly I don’t think it mattered this time because as far as I could tell, Mamdani was the only vaguely credible candidate from the onset. The field was otherwise pretty broken by the Eric Adams mess and Cuomo trying to stage a political comeback despite being at his best times merely an ‘acceptable’ politician and then suffering scandal.

A practice run, to refine their strategy to declare "election I don’t agree with* into insurrection. If it can work, get ready for it to get rolled out like crazy in 2026.

Though passkeys are now commonly shared across devices. That was one of the changes they made. For example, chrome will gladly do all the passkey management in the Google password manager. Under Linux at least there’s isn’t even a whiff of trying to integrate with a hardware security device. First pass they demanded either a USB device or Bluetooth connection to a phone doing it credibly, or windows hello under windows, but now they decided to open it up.

Technically the truth, but an argument can be made that 2FA was mostly more secure by virtue of how bad password security is, and selling a switch to passkey as a convenience is a big security win.

Also with passkey, you’ll be commonly be forced to do some sort of device unlock making it generally the “thing you have” require either “thing you are” or “thing you know” so it becomes effectively 2fa.

If a service were going to passkeys for sake of law enforcement or works be so much easier for them to just comply with bypassing auth to access the user data altogether. Passkey implementations originally only supported very credible offline mechanisms and only relaxed those requirements when it became clear the vast majority of people couldn’t handle replacing their devices with passkeys.

For screen lock for the common person it was either that or nothing at all. So demanding a PIN only worked because most of the time the user didn’t have to deal with it owing to touching a fingerprint or face unlock.

People hate passwords and mitigate that aggravation by giving random Internet forum the same password as their bank account. I wouldn’t want to take user passwords because I know I have a much higher risk of a compromise somehow leading to compromise of actually important accounts elsewhere.