Yeah, there is profound love of Fascism on both sides of the aisle in the US at the moment.

Which is why, IMHO (and FYI, I’m not American hence have no emotional stake on it) the only option for American voters who don’t want Fascist-lovers running their country to make things better (rather than merely slow the worsening of things) was to send a message to the leadership of the party that can more easily move away from the whole Fascism-loving business, so that in the next elections they field a candidate which is not a Fascist lover.

The US is so ridiculous undemocratic that the only possible way to chose improvement with one’s vote is for traditional Democrat voters to refuse to vote so that the Fascist-loving Democrat candidate barely wins or even loses - which means enduring 4 years of Trump - to try and scare the DNC to field a less Fascist candidate next time around. All this is a stupidly long shot because there are so many ways the DNC can react to it that don’t really move the party leftwards.

That’s it. That’s the only way one’s presidential vote in the US can be used to improve things. A ridiculous long shot with 4 years of pain until things might get better. The useful idiots getting the DNC of the hook for its electoral defeat by blaming “lefties” sure aren’t helping the DNC get the message from the electorate and fielding a candidate who is not a Fascist-lover.

By the way, all this is entirely consistent with the view that Democrats are closer to not being Fascists than Republicans are. I’m not at all disputing that Trump is worse, I’m saying that if the Democrats aren’t turned around from the current trend in the “evolution” of their politics, it’s pretty much guaranteed that there will be US Presidents in the future who are even worse than Trump and hence that it is logic (though risky) to use one’s vote now to punish the Democrat leadership in order to change the type of candidate they field in future elections.

PS: I dispute that Israel has only sped up their genocide after Trump won the election - it seems to me the speeding up predates that, having happened still well in the period of the Biden Presidency and before the next president was known. It’s hard to pinpoint it, but might even have happened when Kamala Harris made clear her unwavering support for Israel, hence the Zionists knew that no matter who ended up as POTOS they were unwaveringly suppported by future POTOS. Then again, maybe it happened when enough hospitals were destroyed by Israel that the dead in Gaza stopped getting counted properly hence the numbers published in the International Press stopped going up significantly. That said, all that is irrelevant for the point I’m making as I accept that Republicans are slightly more Fascist-loving than Democrats.

Good thing I did not call them NAZIs.

I called them “modern day Nazis”, exactly because they’re “like the NAZIS” rather than being the actual National Socialist Party of The German Worker.

It was always a comparison.

The NAZIs themselves didn’t start with what we say today that “the NAZIs did” - the Holocaust - they started with extreme racism, claiming to represent an entire ethnicity, claiming that said ethnicity was racially superior and a “normal” Genocide along ethnic lines of people from an etnicity they deemed subhuman, just like the Zionists.

You’re making the disgusting argument that even when an ethno-Fascist group is displaying massive similarities to the NAZIs at the mid/later point of that ideology, in terms of behavior, discourse and doing a violent mass genocide of people from an ethnicity they deem “human animals”, it’s improper to compare them to the NAZIs until these newer ethno-Fascists have committed their very own Holocaust.

By your logic we have to wait for the newest version of the same variant of Fascist as NAZIs to take their current Genocide all the way to a Holocaust just like the NAZIs before we can compare them to NAZIs.

PS: What’s happening in Gaza was tantamount to what the NAZIs did in the Warsaw Ghetto. I say “was” because the size and nature of the killing and destruction in Gaza has already go far beyond what the NAZIs did in the Warsaw Ghetto.

That’s some pretty extreme wilful blindness you have there if from that long post all that you got was that the acronym NAZI was imperfectly used as a shortcut for ethno-Fascist.

I mean, you’re absolutely right that ethno-Fascist (which, as I said, is an ultra-violent extremely racist kind of Fascist of which there are only 2 big examples: NAZIs and Zionists) would be better there than NAZI.

You’re also totally missing the point if that’s all you took for that post or think that you criticizing the slightly innapropriate use of NAZI is a criticism which in any way addresses 99% of what was in there.

I’m not American and don’t get to vote in US Presidential elections.

On the other hand I easily find the detachment to analyze US Politics because I have no emotional stake on that race.

Frankly, you guys are fucked no mater what you do because the voting system in the US is undemocratic, but at least have the decency of not being willful bitches to one set of Fascist-supporting assholes with the lame excuse that doing otherwise would be being a bitch to a different set of Fascist assholes.

As I see it, in the absence of any choice who was not as Fascist-lover, the vote in these last US Elections wasn’t about choosing somebody who is not a Fascist, it was about sending a message to the party which can move away from Fascism more easily to do so for the next elections.

In that sense, all the useful idiots here now trying to dilute that message by blaming lefties for the outcome of that vote, rather than the DNC, are just making sure the DNC doesn’t move away from it’s current trend of “ever more love for violent Fascists”, hence keep on offering a smooth-talking-Fascism-lover candidate to face the opposition’s loudmouth-Fascist one and hence things keep on getting worse in the US because both “options” keep getting worse.

It’s funny all the criticism I see here of Republican voters for being stupid all the while many if not most of members of the Democrat tribe doing and upvoting those very memes repeatedly display the strategical-thinking ability of a goldfish.

Zionists are ethno-Fascists like the Nazis, who are the most violent kind of Fascist around.

Congrats for totally and very purposefully missing the point and learning no lessons at all.

• Party has a President who supports modern day Nazis commiting Genocide with weapons, including some the US Military refuses to use because of “excessive collateral damage”
• Party put forward presidential candidate who openly thinks that support of those modern day Nazis is the right thing to do.
• Whilst actively supporting Nazi-level Fascists in their commiting of a Genocide, Party deploys Propaganda strategy of claiming that the real Fascist is the opposing condidate.
• Strategy only ever convinces the Party faithful, fails miserably and Party loses the election
• SurprisedPikachu.PNG
• Party faithful blame “lefties” for that massive fuckup.

Lessons Learned: Zero

Worry not: in 20 years’ time people born in 2028 will all pretty much look like kids to you.

I have a cheap N100 mini-PC with Lubuntu on it with Kodi alongside a wireless remote as my TV box, and use my TV as a dumb screen.

Mind you, you can do it even more easily with LibreELEC instead of Lubuntu and more cheaply with one of its supported cheap SBCs plus a box instead of a mini PC.

That said, even the simplest solution is beyond the ability of most people to set up, and once you go up to the next level of easiness to setup - a dedicated Android TV Box - you’re hit with enshittification (at the very least preconfigured apps like Netflix with matching buttons in your remote) even if you avoid big brands.

Things are really bad nowadays unless you’re a well informed tech expert with the patience to dive into those things when you’re home.

Ah, right - I misunderstood that point you were making.

So, as it turns out, we’ve been in agreement all along.

Not living in the US, I’m not up to date with US salaries.

That said, even for administrative personnel paid $25/h, $25 will pay 1h of somebody’s work which is way beyond what is needed to close a retail customer account in any modern administrative system were such thing is a common operation which should take less than a minute to do, because people who design the kind of company administrative computer systems (such as yours truly, at least during part of my career) will make the most common business operations be the fastest to do in that system.

It deceives people whose idea of how things work in large companies hasn’t changed since the days when it was the manager of your bank branch who decided if you you should get a loan or not.

Nowadays, for certain in middle and large size companies, all the administrative main business pathways are heavilly if not totally automated and it’s customer support that ends up eating the most manpower (which is why there has been so much of a push for automated phone and chat support systems, of late using AI).

Those $25 bucks for “account closure” pays at worst for a few minutes of somebody’s seeking the account from user information on a computer, cross checking that the user information matches and then clicking a button that says “Close accout” and then “Ok” on the confirmation box and the remaining 99% or so left after paying for that cost are pure profit.

As somebody who works in designing software systems, including for large companies, lets just say that the amount of human time that goes into a customer account closure is negligible because main business operations such as openning and closing customer accounts are the ones that get automated the soonest and the furthest.

The stuff that uses “lots” (in relative terms) of manpower is supporting customers with really unusual problems involving third parties and even then spending 2.5 h man/hours (assuming the administrative person get paid $10/per hour) is pretty uncommon.

You’ve been lied to, repeatadly, for at least 3 decades.

“Perceived value”

Without that element, there would be no explanation for Marketing other than pure Brand Awareness promotion working (and McDonalds is definitely beyond needing more Brand Awareness, at least in the Developed World)

Even then, it doesn’t explain a lot of how Marketing does its work (namelly the stuff they took from Psychology and use to do things like create associations between brand and specific feelings on people’s subconscious - you know, the way cars are “freedom” and perfumes are “sex”).

And don’t get me started on other techniques that prey of human cognitive weaknesses (for example, FOMO would not work with the fabled Homo Economicus that underpins so much of Free Market Theory)

Anyways, a ton of present day enshittification (and that includes this kind of price inflation) relies on people having a well entrenched positive perception of a brand after years of having a relationship with it (i.e. chosing it as customers) and there being quite a lot of momentum behind it. It also relies a lot on using a “slow boiling” effect to keep people from spotting the full picture of the changes.

It’s funny because i learned 6 foreign languages, 2 of which to fluent level and another 2 to good level (and the other 2 to “I manage to get away with it” level ;)), and the approach of using of a dictionary to learn the meaning of the words which I tried at first didn’t work at all well (it was slower and way more frustrating) and what did work best was just exposing myself to the language (in two different ways for two different languages, one by just consuming media of that language whilst the other by living in a country were people spoke the language) and going along with the flow without worrying about the words I didn’t know, so quite a different experience from that.

Anyways, my point isn’t that most people can’t dig down on things by for example going into Wikipedia or that I wouldn’t prefer if they did, it’s that most people either don’t have the time or the inclination to do so, and expecting them to be different is denying human nature.

In my experience with explaining expert domains to non-experts, you have to try and meet them in the middle, which will pull more people in to try and understand it that merely standing fast on my side of the domain language barrier and demand that the climb that mountain to get to me.

That said, some people will never even try, no matter how much effort you put in making it easy for them, and sometimes it’s not even stupidity (which, as something one is born with, it’s kinda excusable, IMHO), it’s just laziness.

If you’ve ever tried to read a foreign language book when your knowledge of the language is merely basic and tried to use a dictionary to solve the problem of many words being unknown, you’ll know how frustrating that becomes and fast - one actually learns faster at the beginning by just keeping on reading even if not understanding a lot of things.

Further some of the “words” are often not words but acronyms, so not likely to be in a dictionary, plus a lot of domain specific words aren’t in general dictionaries either (good luck finding the names of certain chemical chains and their properties in a general dictionary when trying to understand the booklet in a box of medicine).

Last but not least often even the explanations for some words require understanding of some concepts that people do not understand (most people probably know what “analgesic” is, but how many know what “antipyretic” - a not to far away concept given how many common medicines have both - is?).

Things which are supposed to be simple can turn into veritable dives down the rabbit hole to fully understand for those outside that expert domain if they were not simplified for ease of access to the general population, so it’s hardly surprising if many people just chose to blindly use something as advised without even trying to understand it (which, let’s be honest, it’s probably the correct way for most people to used things like for example medicine if the source of the advice is a medical doctor).

Don’t get me wrong: people should be more curious and more often trying and figure things out beyond the merely “how to use”. At the same time, the information that comes with from expert domains in things targeted at non-experts should be as much as possible reduced to common language (though even that is a balance, since a ton of things required several layers of explanation to fully explain to non-experts).

That’s a tiny minority of people and an ultra-specific belief.

I would say that the prevalence of the belief in fairy stories being real (aka Religions, Cults and so on) would be a pretty good indication of just how common and widely spread the Comprehension Handicapped are all over the World.

This is a way broader phenomenon than just the US, though granted the US educational system might skew things a bit in a negative direction versus most other supposedly “Developed” Nations.

IMHO, in general very few people have to really think things through in their life or work and most people can live life in what’s pretty much an auto-pilot of habits most of which were picked up in childhood, teen and early adult years, and such people simply don’t have any “training” on figuring complex things out by themselves and will have trouble understanding complex subjects.

Further, the instructions for advanced domain stuff (for example Medicine and some kinds of Tech) are often riddled with domain specific language that people without a broader vocabulary won’t understand.

I literally have two machines running on always on VPNs, one my personal PC and another a home server were a torrent service is running, and have no such problems.

I think maybe the mistake you made was spending most of the time with it OFF and then turning it ON once in a while, whilst mine just goes ON as soon as I boot my machine and stays on.

Granted, I’m not using it for getting around geo-locked websites, I’m using it for having a bit more privacy and for safety when sailing the high seas so once in a while I have the opposite problem (that I’m blocked from accessing sites in my own country because the connections appear to be coming from a different country).

I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It’s totally unsuitable for gaming unless we’re talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I’m using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn’t exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they’re about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you’re starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).