I’m glad they reported on this, but the author needs to look into federal regulations for people who work on or hold federal contracts. There’s a ton of qualified language in there that makes it clear they didn’t do a ton of research. It’s actually much more black and white than they make it seem.

I’ve worked as a federal contractor, and before I could even start onboarding, they do an intensive background check and interview where they ask probing questions about substance use (among many other things) and then they check up on your answers with a number of third parties (acquaintances, colleagues etc). Nearly without exception, if you want a job in the civil service, any prior drug use is almost always automatically disqualifying. Telling the truth about it doesn’t win you any favors with investigators either, so the general recommendation is that if you’ve smoked weed in the past, you must consistently lie about it, or you won’t get a federal job (or contracting job).

And that’s just weed. This guy does and talks about doing hard drugs in public.

The fact that it doesn’t seem to be a problem for someone who has pocketed such absurd amounts of taxpayer money from federal contracts, to openly use schedule 1 drugs in public, is one of the best examples of the legal double standards the rich have come to expect. Anyone who isn’t a billionaire would be prosecuted and jailed for the behavior Musk brags about. And they’d obviously never be awarded a federal contract.

Drugs should be legal. But until they are, these double standards have got to go.

I come back to this problem every year or so because I’m never satisfied with my music metadata. Years ago I had my musicbrainz picard settings dialed in really nicely, where I could drag folder over and it would spit out the right thing like 7 out of 10 times. It still required a lot of doubled checking and manual oversight though, so I was never satisfied.

I tried mediamonkey for a while, because it has decent metadata support and plugs into most of the expected APIs. But when all is said and done, all these tools use the same data sources, and none of them are exactly consistent with each other so matches aren’t as straightforward as they should be.

Lidar never quite did it for me, so I haven’t looked at my install in a couple years. But based on @skoberlink@lemmy.world’s recommendation I’ll try a fresh install and see if get I better results this time. I’m always happy in the arr interfaces.

This may be splitting hairs, but this is being pushed on EPA scientists by the political appointees. This is why the politicization of these agencies is so critically dangerous. EPA scientists are incredibly talented and their recommendations are largely driven by good science. They know their shit. This is not that, this is political appointees forcing “interpretations” that the scientists themselves would undoubtedly take issue with.

I’m not making excuses, this is bad no matter how you slice it, but blame should be directed at the political appointees.

So now we can legally buy fully automatic machine guns, but not a lifesaving miracle of medical science, that we all paid for.

Republicans are a death cult, through and through.

I find Kenyatta’s comments to be pretty disingenuous, to be honest. He talks about how important it is that everything have the same source of truth, but then says shit like this:

“We’re not for the incumbents; we’re also not for the challengers,” he said. “We are for listening to our voters who make the decisions about who they want our nominees to be.”

That’s just laughably untrue. The DNC has almost always favored incumbents and establishment candidates, that’s why it’s so incredibly unpopular and why most Democrats don’t believe it represents their actual values.

“You look at every story that’s written about this, and it’s, ‘Oh, my gosh, the party is doing this to David.’”

No, I haven’t seen that narrative anywhere. What I have seen is a lot of disillusioned leftists pissed off on Hoggs’s behalf because of the intra-party double standard he has helped expose. Kenyatta harps about how unhelpful all the infighting is while he contributes to the infighting.

‘The States’ is a common nickname for the USA, but you’re right, it isn’t ideal for the same reasons as American.

It’s definitely pedantic, but I’ve had more than one friend from countries in Central and South America comment on it, so it’s not just me noticing.

Ugh us Americans from the USA don’t seem to understand how arrogant it is to say he’s the first American pope. Argentina is in South America. This guy is the first North American pope, or better yet the first pope from the United States. This is going to bug the shit out of me.

Edit: Because I’m genuinely loving the downvotes (you really felt it when I called you arrogant, huh), if the next US president was from North Dakota, we wouldn’t say they were the first president from Dakota, would we?

It’s not just that it was written by an LLM, it’s that you didn’t write it.

This platform is for reading stuff written by people. Whether that’s news, comments, whatever. You’ll find plenty of AI communities here, but each community has a culture and norms, and you’re now feeling what it’s like to push against those norms.

There’s an obvious difference in language and tone between LLMs and a genuine comment written by a living breathing human being. Most of your comments read like they were written by a PR firm, and that’s just not fun for anyone.

Don’t rely on a machine to filter and improve your thoughts. Use your own thinking and writing to do that, otherwise you’ll quickly be blocked by all the humans here who actually participate.

Lemmy users are pretty skeptical of anything that reads like it came out of an LLM. I downvote and block all the low-effort slop I see.

This might fly on other platforms, but lots of Lemmy users came here to get away from this kind of stuff.

If you want to engage with people in good faith, then take the time to think through your thoughts, and write them out using your own words. If you’re not willing to take the time to write a post yourself, I’m not going to take the time to read it.

Good tip!

Yup! Canned chickpeas also work really well and are a bit easier to deal with, with a slightly different end result. Takes about 5 minutes total for a fresh batch. Here’s my standard eyeballed recipe I’ve been using for decades:

• 1 can of chickpeas, keep a couple spoonfuls of the water (or use dried chickpeas that you’ve soaked overnight)
• 1/3 cup (or so) tahini
• A few tablespoons to a 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice, to taste (you can just use water if you don’t like lemon, but I recommend lemon as it kind of fades into the background with the other flavors)
• 1 or 2 cloves of garlic (optional, but again, it adds some important complexity to the taste for me)
• Couple teaspoons salt, to taste
• Few grinds of black pepper
• Extra water if needed to adjust consistency

1. Throw it all into a bowl and purée with an immersion blender, or blend however you normally blend stuff
2. Serve with olive oil drizzled on top, with some zataar, roasted red peppers, sumac, pine nuts, or whatever you want

In case you’re not aware (many people aren’t) journalists almost never choose their own headlines. It is usually written by an editor after the article is finished. Journalists, especially at large papers like the Guardian, usually have no say in the headline.

This is really well said. Throughout history, you can reliably find people on both sides of moral and humanitarian issues like this. There were Roman elite who spoke out against slavery in antiquity, there were Brits who mocked the American Colonies for owning slaves while founding a country based on freedom, there have always been men who believed in equal treatment and rights for women. Right and wrong is usually pretty clear, and in general regular people throughout the ages have been able to recognize which is which. Our values haven’t changed much, but our systems of power and accountability have.

That said, I also believe a good amount of the right wing backlash against the internment camps was performative. Because up until relatively recently, many racists themselves understood that their beliefs were terrible, so they at least tried to hide their true feelings and spoke out against obvious atrocities like this in public. But that was only so they could be accepted by the wider culture, and so they could continue to participate in left-coded spaces. They don’t need to hide how awful they are anymore because the president is leading by example.

Yeah that’s very true…

I wonder if I can still find my grandparents’ yellow Star of David patches…seems like I’m going to need it.

Damn that’s a lot of cash. I like to carry some cash for emergencies, but shit, $3000??

Not only tiresome, which he really is, but he’s also just a stereotypical politician who talks in speeches and doublespeak, even in intimate settings, so you never actually know what he believes. Listen to him give an interview to a friendly reporter from a liberal outlet. He can barely answer the simplest questions without sounding like the most cookie-cutter mainstream Democrat. That’s not what people want anymore.

We need a down to earth candidate like AOC who communicates like a human being. Not a greasy rich white guy who talks like the most generic politician with no genuine values.

But I don’t want him to die, I just want him to go away and stop pushing himself on us.

That’s a great point. The party is only hurting itself in the short and long term by not welcoming younger candidates and trying to elect people who are actually willing to wield their power by trying shit out, rather than just further entrenching themselves by wielding their political influence. That’s the difference, the younger generations are willing to try out new policies and see if they work. That’s how this whole fucking system is supposed to function. Try something out, if it doesn’t work then too bad, you lose the next election and continue working on your ideas while the other party tries their shit out to see if their ideas work. We’ve strayed so far from that, that everyone is just accustomed to the government not trying big things, and nobody trusts that the other side would ever govern or compromise in good faith.

That’s why their anger is so frustrating to me. They’ve been there forever and done jack shit, and whine like children when someone young comes along and acts more mature by offering to fix the shit the elders have refused to.

I think it’s safe to say that the ancient Democrats who’ve been holding onto their seats by sheer force of incumbent political influence, contributed to turning Hogg into a school-shooting survivor. Obviously Republicans bear more responsibility thanks to their gun/violence fetish, but these Dems wouldn’t be so angry if he hadn’t touched a nerve. They’re clearly afraid of young people with new and rational ideas.

I hope these young’uns keep at it, their passion and drive is inspirational. Since the geriatrics in power clearly can’t smell their own bullshit anymore, fuck em. No one is entitled to power, you have to earn it like Hogg has through his dedicated activism. His organization has helped pass more than 250 gun safety laws, for example. He’s actually doing shit.