Then they have a shocked Pikachu face when the people they left to stagnate and rot, turn out to be the shitty products of their environment aka the neoliberal hellscape of modern day America.
I mean, the Democrats didn't really leave these people to rot, they've largely been prevented from doing anything to help them since rural areas vote so overwhelmingly Republican. What do you really expect the Democrats to have done when it's the other party these folks keep electing to represent them? They effectively say they want the policies that have left them so exposed and disadvantage, then they have a shocked Pikachu face that "those darn liberals haven't done anything to help us." Heck, even in broad terms, their voting habits have screwed all of us by preventing broadly popular things like universal health care or drug reform from going forward because of the disproportionate power the self-destructive votes they cast wield at the national level. My sympathy for them is extremely limited, and my patience at their insistence in making everyone else suffer for their god-awful politics has long since run out.
You're probably selling yourself short on the tech front and over-estimating the difficulty of installing something new. If you wanted to install something like Linux Mint or Fedora, the most complicated step would likely involve making a bootable thumbdrive to load it from. You could check that all your hardware works as intended (ie, can you connect to wifi, does sound play properly, can you watch a video on youtube, etc) without actually modifying your base OS, and if it does, the installations mostly hold your hand and you can get a perfectly sane setup just sticking to the defaults for most things and clicking next. There are plenty of options out there where you don't need to be a command-line wizard to have a perfectly usable system.
I would just say that not everything needs to be a BIFL product, but there can be a tendency to push towards recommending only buying the best of everything. Like, I cook a lot at home, so it made sense to buy a $200 chef's knife that I'll get tons of use from and decent sharpening stones to maintain the edge. I listen to a ton of music, so I've dropped probably around $1500 into a pretty good pair of headphones, a DAC and an amp. On the other hand, I solder like once every couple of years, so getting my cheapo $40 Amazon special made more sense than dropping $500 on a much better soldering iron that offers features I simply don't need and won't benefit from. Sometimes good enough is exactly that, but it can be a nuance lost in these discussions.
Heck, even though I use them several hours a day, my hearing just isn't that good for me to justify spending a substantial amount upgrading my current audio gear. Even if there is an improvement to be had, I'm not sure it would be something I could even notice, so I'm not tempted to go down the rabbit-hole of upgrading my DAC, amp or headphones, as it would be chasing diminishing returns that I'm not even sure would be perceptible for me at a simple biological level.
I wouldn't jump to compare Reddit to Amazon. Amazon may have operated at a loss for a few years, but it seems pretty clear that Bezos did have a roadmap to make it a profitable business and made decisions to make progress towards that relatively early. Reddit has never been a profitable business and has no real way to get there that doesn't alienate increasing numbers of their users. It's basically in a race to cut a deal that makes spez some money off the whole thing before the bottom falls out from under it and someone else is left holding the bag.
Even when Amazon expanded into categories and took losses on them, Bezos was able to do so knowing that it would damage other businesses that didn't have the deep backing needed to outlast him, eventually leading to many competing retailers in that sector shuttering and Amazon being able to raise prices and rake in money once there wasn't really another competitor in a given field. He might be a massive scumbag, but spez is a massive scumbag and an absolutely inept businessman. For all his assholery, the best case scenario for his legacy is driving reddit into the ground and managing to foist it off on someone else before they realize it's no longer worth anything.
It moves the discussion further to the right and legitimizes Republican talking points for the majority of people who will only hear a brief soundbite about this, rather than diving deep into the matter.
Besides, the GOP isn't about to run out of bogeymen to trot out just because they could get what they want on the border. They can take it as a compromise and try to push things further down the line. Or they can decide this is good enough for now, and start railing against something else. Union membership rising being a Chinese plot to infiltrate the US and install a Communist dictatorship, so we better write some new laws to enable even more union busting. Free school lunches for kids from poor families turning them gay AND communist by getting them hooked on the government teat early. Woke public libraries turning kids trans by letting them check out books that don't universally demonize it, so better put some sort of draconian funding limits on them. They'll find something else, don't worry.
The way you're framing it and Congressional Democrats approach these things only work if the Republicans aren't completely shameless, above doing things that should completely destroy any remaining vestiges for their voters, but this has been disproven time and time again by the actions of the GOP. If they think they'll have half a chance, they'll wring out even more concessions on this front from the Democrats by pretending to offer something they immediately renege on, just to leave the Democrats going "Aw, shucks, fooled me again. I thought you said you weren't going to do this again."
Some people are just stupider than you would like to believe possible while still not forgetting to breathe. My father is one of the idiots that moans about "For English, press 1" or feeling slighted that people around him have private conversations in Spanish when he doesn't speak it. Out of all the states, where does this idiot move to for retirement? Florida, famously known for its lack of any Spanish-speaking population, of course.
A good chunk of restaurants will also suddenly close or have massive price hikes when they can't count on taking advantage of undocumented people and paying them sub-minimum wage off the books.
Not sure how you take that away from my post. The point was that you can't expect people to suddenly come to that realization when the preceding long series of awful stances of the party haven't had that effect yet. Go out and organize, have conversations with people you know who might vote republican, but don't just assume this one bad stance of theirs will be the tipping point to get folks to stop voting for them.
If people actually did that every time the Republicans had a horrific take, the party would have died out decades ago. I wouldn't hold out hope people will suddenly wake up now.
Everything else in our system is invalid, but RICO laws and mail fraud laws are all good. Good to know.
You'll wind up dealing with a bleaker outlook on democracy one way or another. Just see how long the Democrats can cry wolf with "Oh no, the other guy is going to destroy our democracy, and I swear to god, guys, just vote for us one more time and we're totally going to fix it this time." You can only pull this bit so many times before people stop taking you seriously. At a certain point, you have to ask how stupid the DNC can be? This was a losing tactic with Hillary Clinton, it's not looking so great for Biden, but just keep rolling it out every few years, it's bound to start working sooner or later, right? Definitely sounds like a winning move to me. Heck, it's real convincing when that's what Biden ran on last time, and he's not exactly crushing it with his strategy of "I'll just go talk to these Republicans like I did 40 years ago, I'm sure we can reach an understanding like we used to, back when I still wholeheartedly helped pass laws that would lock up minorities."
I'm sure being able to say "I told you so" will make you feel much better if things don't pan out and it turns out you can't just nag and guilt trip people into voting for a candidate that holds views they can't stomach voting for.
Could just be that you can only run so many campaigns in a row with "If you don't vote for us, it's going to be the end of the world as we know it. And at least I'm not as bad as the other guy." With the exception of Obama's first run against McCain, that's been the pitch for every single election I've ever been able to vote in, as well as a few before it. It gets old real quick, makes them come off as insincere, and doesn't motivate anyone when we're still largely dealing with the same BS issues that we were 20 years ago.
Trying to browbeat people into voting with the same old song and dance has diminishing returns, especially when your candidate is increasingly out of step with many of the voters they should be courting on major issues.
I think their implication is that you want them to stay around to keep producing and offering more content, but I'm also pretty okay with that happening. Series produced by streaming services just can't seem to write self-contained seasons without leaving unresolved plot lines as a hook to keep you subscribed, but they're also just ruthless in acing anything once the numbers dip a touch. It's gotten to the point where I see "Netflix original" or whatever as a massive red flag when picking something to watch, as I know there's a high chance I'll never get any resolution to the series.
Beyond that, given the proliferation of streaming services replicating the cable packages this services initially were pitched as letting us do away with them, I say let 'em burn to the ground.
who is maybe the perfect reflection of what everyday conservatives have become, ignorant, stupid, and incredibly well off while whining about how they’re not well off enough.
I wouldn't say they're that representative of a lot of everyday conservatives. A lot of them are doing pretty poorly, but they're ignorant and get pissed off at the idea that anyone else might benefit from a program they personally don't qualify for or disagree with. My father is absolutely convinced that if the Democrats had the political will and ability to implement a wealth tax, that he would somehow be absolutely murdered by taxes on his $10 or $11 an hour he's making at a Winn Dixie in Florida. He's also the sort convinced that welfare queens living it up with brand new cars and designer clothes are not just a real thing, but a common thing that happens that Democrats just don't want people to know about. He'd probably also chalk up his retirement sucking due to what limited social safety net we have in the US, rather than him draining his retirement accounts while he was unemployed before hitting retirement age so he could play golf and go hang at the bar with his buddies even though he was broke. Medicare is his right, though, he worked for that and earned it, but screw these poors under 65 trying to get healthcare with Medicaid. About the only thing he's missing for your average, everyday conservative is an unhealthy dose of religion.
Things have gotten bitter, but you can't have bipartisan politics when the majority of Republicans don't engage with it in good faith. As recent years have shown, it's a concept Democrats insist on sticking to for optics that prevents them from delivering on major platform issues, which the GOP only pays lip service to in years where they don't have the votes to ram through their policies, regardless of what the opposition thinks of them. As long as the GOP continues with this attitude that lets them pack the Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary, while passing broadly unpopular laws and blocking policies that have majority support, insisting on bipartisanship is a losing play for Democrats. Leaving aside whether or not they would prefer to perpetually campaign on issues like reproductive right versus definitively solving the matter once and for all, it just feeds into the narrative that the Democrats are a bunch of incompetents who can't deliver on their promises, and even flub the ones they do make progress on by compromising their stances in the name of bipartisanship, sometimes before the Republicans even raise an initial objection.
Coupled with their abject failure at communicating their actual successes to the public at large, they're kind of self-sabotaging here. All they're accomplishing is further demoralizing their voters to maintain an image of respecting procedural norms in the face of an opposition who explicitly seeks to undermine and subvert those same norms. Who exactly is this supposed to excite?
See, this
I care within some limits. Using a phone I don’t like aesthetically is not in that limits.
and this
No no, I would prefer privacy.
are in direct opposition. They are irreconcilable positions. It's your phone, it's okay for you to decide you won't compromise on aesthetics on your own devices, if that's what's important to you. Just own it and be prepared for pushback when you're commenting on an article about a privacy-focused OS and using this as the basis of your criticism.
I've had bad experiences with all of them, it's just the most consistent with FedEx. Out of the major services, I prefer USPS and DHL, by far, but even they still fumble things from time to time. FedEx has just been a consistent pain to deal with, across 3 addresses at this point. Plus, I happen to get off work and get home right around when FedEx comes through my neighborhood, so I've had the pleasure of seeing the lady that handles this area literally hurl every package small enough for her to be physically capable of doing so the 8 feet from the sidewalk to peoples' front porches. I buy a lot of small, delicate things. Do other couriers toss stuff around? Probably at some point. But I know it's a 100% guarantee it'll happen with this lady, so I'll take the "probably, at some point," over a sure thing.
If they don't deliver something to me and determine I need to go pick it up, their delivery hubs are also the least convenient to reach. One is across my county, the other halfway across the neighboring county, Both are at least 90 minute trips each way on public transportation, with a healthy walk between the last stop and their location. At least UPS drops things off a 15 minute walk away, and the post office is probably a 10 minute walk.
This is still kind of reading like "Look, I know 'pretty phones over privacy' is a bad take, so no, but really, yeah."
Basically all the positives you've mentioned have been aesthetic, with one you even admit is worse to actually use, but which you prefer the look of.
Why on earth would I want to shop somewhere that I can guarantee will ship with FedEx? I'll actively avoid places that only offer FedEx shipping as it is.