I would say that people are doing stuff, but we're constrained by several things:
Fixed election cycles: Once in office, only the fellow officers of the federal government, whether Congress or the top tiers of the Executive, are able to recall, expel, or remove officials in the government. Since all the branches of our government are held by one political faction, the chance of this is vanishingly small
Lifetime appointment of judges: As a consequence of the actions of some key figures (cough cough, RBG) we're stuck with an extremely conservative and Trump allied Supreme Court that won't block or overturn any of the administration's actions
The leaders of Congress have decided not to exercise their power which for the 249 years prior to 2025 has been the main check against something like this happening. Per point number 1 there's no recourse for citizens until this November essentially. I don't know the statistics in countries like the US vs Canada, but at least here in the South, Senators or Representatives in leadership positions get essentially a free walk at least to the general election, most of them through to reelection
Due to how it was set up, the US Senate, whose main roll is essentially being the red or green light on much of the President's agenda, changes extremely slowly because we don't elect them all at once. Luckily this year, a majority of the Senate incumbents facing reelection (20 out of the 35) are Republicans, so the Democrats could (in theory) make significant gains or at least have more of a chance to
This administration has shown that it really doesn't care about popular opinion at all about anything
As others have mentioned in this thread, the administration has made it a habit of locating and locking up under terrorism charges people that publicly speak out against it and has made it practice to murder people in the street trying to help those in need, so the stakes are significantly higher than political change has been in the past
The main thing Trump has done is exposed just how much of our government has been de facto. I think one of the main issues is that the founders of the country basically assumed good faith in much of the mechanics the built into the system because that was more of a component of high class culture back then.
I think it's important to remember for us Americans too though that almost to a man, most of these guys hated each other and did everything in their power to undermine each other. People talk about polarisation in politics today like it's a new thing and totally unprecedented. The Era of Good Feelings lasted like 5 years people, democracy needs disagreement to survive
Depends on where you live honestly. Besides Sales Tax being regressive and harming low income people disproportionately, where you live affects what the sales tax is being spent on. In general in the US, sales tax goes towards funding infrastructure, primarily roads and other car-centric forms of infrastructure. If I'm remembering correctly, for every dollar the government spends on roads for cars, society as a whole pays an extra $9 or something like that, in contrast to society having a gain when that money going towards bike or public transit infrastructure. So in that way, no, not worth it.
I also think that people get more butt hurt over sales tax because it feels like something you have to pay after you buy your goods/services due to it being levied on the list price so it feels like basically a junk fee. If prices were displayed with tax already included like how VAT works in Europe, I don't think people would notice or care as much, and the mental side of fiscal burdens is as important if not more important than the fiscal side of it
I have been waging a war of attrition getting people to switch onto Signal. After 5 years I've managed to get my spouse, my sister, my mother, 6 of my friends, 6 of my coworkers, and one sports team I play on to begin using it. Only real holdouts are my in-laws, two of my friends I talk to regularly, and another sports team or two. Some I've wooed off of basic texting, others off of WhatsApp. It's been a long hard road, but at this point, I would estimate about 85% of my communications happen over Signal now. Keep fighting the good fight
I don't think that schools (at least in America) teach enough about Eugene V. Debs. Despite his failed presidential runs, this guy was one of the most popular politicians of his day. His imprisonment for sedition caused literal riots across the country. His release from prison was attended by over a million people. He founded the Industrial Workers of the World. Some of my favourite quotes of his that stick with me:
I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.
While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free
Corollary to this is the "I want to be able to choose my doctor" line. If there's only one health insurance provider, then every doctor will have to accept it, ergo you get more choice in your doctor
My preference for winter and hatred of the sun aside, I think this makes a lot of sense. For one thing, it allows them to be a lot more competitive with leagues like the WSL and the Premiere Ligue which are also winter leagues because to sign and trade and loan players across the pond doesn't require a switch in schedule for them.
International play is also organized around winter leagues with the main pushes for events like the World Cup and the Olympics occurring in the summer. I think it's better as a league to not take 3-4+ weeks off for those events every few years or to do like MLS does and ignore international breaks and play with subpar teams during that time. I also think it's a better deal for the national team players because it spreads the soccer out across the year better and for the non-national players there's a more cohesive period of time where they're playing and where they're not playing.
And then to bring it back to weather and climate, I know some fans may not enjoy the cold as much, but if I were a professional athlete, I'd prefer playing 90 minutes of elite sports in Houston during February instead of July
The people essentially have been demanding it. As several others have mentioned in this thread, 70-80% of the public supports universal healthcare in some form. For the nitty-gritty, basically 50 years ago and earlier, extremely wealthy people realised that their preferred policies weren't especially popular with the general public. They identified that their main issue was that what they had was money, not people. So they embarked on a decades long quest to give money the same (or greater) political power as individuals, culminating in the Citizen's United Supreme Court case. I bring this up because it essentially means that the People demanding it doesn't matter, because while there may be a couple hundred million people asking for it, there's a couple hundred billion dollars asking to never do it. It's gotten so bad that there's a kind of perverse, Stockholm Syndrome effect starting to happen to. In 2016 there was a big dust-up during the Democratic Primary where the Culinary Union in Las Vegas/Nevada didn't want to endorse Bernie Sanders, the most pro-Union candidate in decades, essentially because medicare-for-all would remove health insurance as a bargaining chip
I hear almost exclusively people referring to the country as "America". This was actually a very conscious shift at the turn of the 20th century for people in public life to refer to the country as "America" instead of "the US" or "the United States" as we ..... acquired overseas territories and weren't a country only of United States anymore
I'm not some big technical guy, but there is a pretty fundamental difference in how the protocols work. Mastodon uses ActivityPub, Bluesky uses the AT Protocol.
ActivityPub is like email, it's an exchange protocol. So basically you create a link between two accounts by "following" and that says "whenever A posts something, deliver it in this format to B".
ATProto is a bit more complex. It's based around the idea of nodes. A node in this sense is basically a pile of letters. If I decide to post something, that letter gets thrown into the pile with some info like user tags, etc. Another user somewhere else who follows me is in essence just telling their client "pull out all the letters that A has thrown into this pile and shown them to me". And then you have a front facing client that displays the result of that filter in a convenient way. On the one hand, this is why topic lists (I think called collections?) are much easier/better in Bluesky because at the end of the day it's just another filter onto the pile, whereas with an ActivityPub based collection would be a bit more complicated.
In practice what this basically means is that Bluesky is federated in name only. If the Bluesky board decided one day that you couldn't post about cats, but I really wanted to post about cats, I would have to then host the node, the filtering apparatus, and (potentially) the front end. The node hosting specifically is the most technically onerous. If I wanted the Catsky node to federate with the Bluesky node, I would need to set up a tunnel between the two, then posts from Bluesky that the Catsky users would want to see would also be deposited into my node meaning my storage requirements would go up quickly. Conversely, you can run a stable Mastodon instance on a raspberry pi because you only need to be able to store what you want to see, not the entirety of the platform. I personally have only heard of one other successfully hosted node (Blacksky for Black Twitter refugees) and I'm not sure it federates with Bluesky.
In the end, Bluesky works a lot like OG Twitter, which was just a lump of storage and the actual product was the API, but with a couple ropes dangling out the sides with a sign saying "go ahead, hook up, and federate, we don't mind". This is unsurprising as Bluesky and the ATProto were made in essence by the OG Twitter people
Just wanted to pop in to point out that this was Border Patrol, not ICE. Not that it makes it better or anything, just a bit more vanilla than the president's secret police
My advice here then would be to buy a used Pixel from not Google (either through a carrier or a site like Newegg or Backmarket or similar). Google won't get any additional cash, supports keeping waste out of the landfill, and you can use Graphene. For longevity, you can get used Pixel 9s and 9as for not too much so it's still a decently new phone
I would say that people are doing stuff, but we're constrained by several things:
Fixed election cycles: Once in office, only the fellow officers of the federal government, whether Congress or the top tiers of the Executive, are able to recall, expel, or remove officials in the government. Since all the branches of our government are held by one political faction, the chance of this is vanishingly small
Lifetime appointment of judges: As a consequence of the actions of some key figures (cough cough, RBG) we're stuck with an extremely conservative and Trump allied Supreme Court that won't block or overturn any of the administration's actions
The leaders of Congress have decided not to exercise their power which for the 249 years prior to 2025 has been the main check against something like this happening. Per point number 1 there's no recourse for citizens until this November essentially. I don't know the statistics in countries like the US vs Canada, but at least here in the South, Senators or Representatives in leadership positions get essentially a free walk at least to the general election, most of them through to reelection
Due to how it was set up, the US Senate, whose main roll is essentially being the red or green light on much of the President's agenda, changes extremely slowly because we don't elect them all at once. Luckily this year, a majority of the Senate incumbents facing reelection (20 out of the 35) are Republicans, so the Democrats could (in theory) make significant gains or at least have more of a chance to
This administration has shown that it really doesn't care about popular opinion at all about anything
As others have mentioned in this thread, the administration has made it a habit of locating and locking up under terrorism charges people that publicly speak out against it and has made it practice to murder people in the street trying to help those in need, so the stakes are significantly higher than political change has been in the past
The main thing Trump has done is exposed just how much of our government has been de facto. I think one of the main issues is that the founders of the country basically assumed good faith in much of the mechanics the built into the system because that was more of a component of high class culture back then.
I think it's important to remember for us Americans too though that almost to a man, most of these guys hated each other and did everything in their power to undermine each other. People talk about polarisation in politics today like it's a new thing and totally unprecedented. The Era of Good Feelings lasted like 5 years people, democracy needs disagreement to survive
Could have at least gone with Lake New York to stay on theme
Depends on where you live honestly. Besides Sales Tax being regressive and harming low income people disproportionately, where you live affects what the sales tax is being spent on. In general in the US, sales tax goes towards funding infrastructure, primarily roads and other car-centric forms of infrastructure. If I'm remembering correctly, for every dollar the government spends on roads for cars, society as a whole pays an extra $9 or something like that, in contrast to society having a gain when that money going towards bike or public transit infrastructure. So in that way, no, not worth it.
I also think that people get more butt hurt over sales tax because it feels like something you have to pay after you buy your goods/services due to it being levied on the list price so it feels like basically a junk fee. If prices were displayed with tax already included like how VAT works in Europe, I don't think people would notice or care as much, and the mental side of fiscal burdens is as important if not more important than the fiscal side of it
I have been waging a war of attrition getting people to switch onto Signal. After 5 years I've managed to get my spouse, my sister, my mother, 6 of my friends, 6 of my coworkers, and one sports team I play on to begin using it. Only real holdouts are my in-laws, two of my friends I talk to regularly, and another sports team or two. Some I've wooed off of basic texting, others off of WhatsApp. It's been a long hard road, but at this point, I would estimate about 85% of my communications happen over Signal now. Keep fighting the good fight
Eclipses so crazy, you can't even see the sun at all!
Auburn
I don't think that schools (at least in America) teach enough about Eugene V. Debs. Despite his failed presidential runs, this guy was one of the most popular politicians of his day. His imprisonment for sedition caused literal riots across the country. His release from prison was attended by over a million people. He founded the Industrial Workers of the World. Some of my favourite quotes of his that stick with me:
Goodhart's Law:
Corollary to this is the "I want to be able to choose my doctor" line. If there's only one health insurance provider, then every doctor will have to accept it, ergo you get more choice in your doctor
Impossible! Trump has lowered prices 600%! [sarcasm]
Glad I renewed mine early. Now if only I had a work visa from somewhere else to put in it....
My preference for winter and hatred of the sun aside, I think this makes a lot of sense. For one thing, it allows them to be a lot more competitive with leagues like the WSL and the Premiere Ligue which are also winter leagues because to sign and trade and loan players across the pond doesn't require a switch in schedule for them.
International play is also organized around winter leagues with the main pushes for events like the World Cup and the Olympics occurring in the summer. I think it's better as a league to not take 3-4+ weeks off for those events every few years or to do like MLS does and ignore international breaks and play with subpar teams during that time. I also think it's a better deal for the national team players because it spreads the soccer out across the year better and for the non-national players there's a more cohesive period of time where they're playing and where they're not playing.
And then to bring it back to weather and climate, I know some fans may not enjoy the cold as much, but if I were a professional athlete, I'd prefer playing 90 minutes of elite sports in Houston during February instead of July
"Citizen I.C.E." - Dropkick Murphy's
"Solidarity Forever" - Old trade union song to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic, here performed by the Mountain Goats
The people essentially have been demanding it. As several others have mentioned in this thread, 70-80% of the public supports universal healthcare in some form. For the nitty-gritty, basically 50 years ago and earlier, extremely wealthy people realised that their preferred policies weren't especially popular with the general public. They identified that their main issue was that what they had was money, not people. So they embarked on a decades long quest to give money the same (or greater) political power as individuals, culminating in the Citizen's United Supreme Court case. I bring this up because it essentially means that the People demanding it doesn't matter, because while there may be a couple hundred million people asking for it, there's a couple hundred billion dollars asking to never do it. It's gotten so bad that there's a kind of perverse, Stockholm Syndrome effect starting to happen to. In 2016 there was a big dust-up during the Democratic Primary where the Culinary Union in Las Vegas/Nevada didn't want to endorse Bernie Sanders, the most pro-Union candidate in decades, essentially because medicare-for-all would remove health insurance as a bargaining chip
I hear almost exclusively people referring to the country as "America". This was actually a very conscious shift at the turn of the 20th century for people in public life to refer to the country as "America" instead of "the US" or "the United States" as we ..... acquired overseas territories and weren't a country only of United States anymore
I'm not some big technical guy, but there is a pretty fundamental difference in how the protocols work. Mastodon uses ActivityPub, Bluesky uses the AT Protocol.
ActivityPub is like email, it's an exchange protocol. So basically you create a link between two accounts by "following" and that says "whenever A posts something, deliver it in this format to B".
ATProto is a bit more complex. It's based around the idea of nodes. A node in this sense is basically a pile of letters. If I decide to post something, that letter gets thrown into the pile with some info like user tags, etc. Another user somewhere else who follows me is in essence just telling their client "pull out all the letters that A has thrown into this pile and shown them to me". And then you have a front facing client that displays the result of that filter in a convenient way. On the one hand, this is why topic lists (I think called collections?) are much easier/better in Bluesky because at the end of the day it's just another filter onto the pile, whereas with an ActivityPub based collection would be a bit more complicated.
In practice what this basically means is that Bluesky is federated in name only. If the Bluesky board decided one day that you couldn't post about cats, but I really wanted to post about cats, I would have to then host the node, the filtering apparatus, and (potentially) the front end. The node hosting specifically is the most technically onerous. If I wanted the Catsky node to federate with the Bluesky node, I would need to set up a tunnel between the two, then posts from Bluesky that the Catsky users would want to see would also be deposited into my node meaning my storage requirements would go up quickly. Conversely, you can run a stable Mastodon instance on a raspberry pi because you only need to be able to store what you want to see, not the entirety of the platform. I personally have only heard of one other successfully hosted node (Blacksky for Black Twitter refugees) and I'm not sure it federates with Bluesky.
In the end, Bluesky works a lot like OG Twitter, which was just a lump of storage and the actual product was the API, but with a couple ropes dangling out the sides with a sign saying "go ahead, hook up, and federate, we don't mind". This is unsurprising as Bluesky and the ATProto were made in essence by the OG Twitter people
Just wanted to pop in to point out that this was Border Patrol, not ICE. Not that it makes it better or anything, just a bit more vanilla than the president's secret police
My advice here then would be to buy a used Pixel from not Google (either through a carrier or a site like Newegg or Backmarket or similar). Google won't get any additional cash, supports keeping waste out of the landfill, and you can use Graphene. For longevity, you can get used Pixel 9s and 9as for not too much so it's still a decently new phone
As someone still begrudgingly living in America as a US Citizen, fuck us up Canada
Not sure how to do this