The Masque of the Red Death seems appropriate given how often sickness runs rampant on the closed society of a cruise ship.

Seems like whether you’ll be home and awake an extra 40 hours each week during the warm part of the day could probably cause significant extra electricity use through AC. This town has had high temperatures of 80 in January and 115 in June.

Really including utilities in the rent is a bad idea as it gives the tenant no incentive to care about electricity use. A non-WFH tenant can also just leave the AC on all day. Install a sub meter and let them handle it. For $3k+ per month you can eat the installation cost instead of this awkward fee.

My experience of trolls getting bored was from Reddit. It’s so easy to ban them and filter out fresh accounts that practically no equation of troll vs. moderator effort would ever be anything but a waste for the troll. There was one guy who set calendar reminders to flame us in modmail every 90 days or whatever when the longest mute expired and it was just amusing. He set up all this infrastructure and typed out a big flame message and we just hit a single button.

Only truly automated trolling would be meaningful, and that requires a home instance that doesn’t put in restrictions or hurdles in account creation. Which will quickly become obvious as an attack vector and then defederated. And federation of new instances can be restricted so they don’t get to just unleash hell. I’d be more worried about actual DDOSes than a troll storm.

I’m sure there are fake accounts flying under the radar here now, and they’re a big problem on Reddit, but trolling is easy to manage.

In my experience most trolls just do low effort trolling, so simple interventions can quash a lot. While some people do get so into social media they make multiple alts for ban evasion, it’s much easier for mods to ban an account than for the troll to make it so after a few cycles they’ll just get tired of it.

And if there’s an instance so open that people can automate account creation so that trolling is just as easy it’ll probably get defederated.

Is the country racist?

Not just “Obama”, Barrack Hussein Obama. With a foreigner father, the middle name of an Arab dictator enemy of the United States, and a radical black pastor. And he won the largest margin of all the modern presidents. None of these theories about the overwhelming power of bigotry hold up to how badly that deck was stacked against him.

He was charismatic and campaigned on good policies. That’s all you need and AOC has that.

Justice has been prompt as ever. At least we trade these long case lengths for having real consequences for people in power that will dissuade future law breaking. There’s something to look forward to in a year or so other than “that thing they already did was wrong”, right?

They were also bland establishment figures in a political environment of “change”. Since Bush the only time a party has held back to back presidencies was Obama (the change guy) and he struggled to do so.

Every cycle people’s lives get worse and the guys who aren’t in office have a better story about how they’ll make it better. But it’s a lie, so 4 years later things flip again. Biden didn’t use his penis to win. He used that Trump was currently in office and fucking everything up. And then after 4 years he was cruising toward a bit fat loss even before his brain leaked from his skull on national television.

Sure Jan.

Lemmy seems structurally much better for this, as different instances can independently prune their list without needing one true culture to grow. If people want their social media to be a clubhouse rather than a gladiatorial arena, that’s fine. Go find the spaces that accommodate your preferences. Lemmy supports it.

How does it feel about black men with Muslim names and non-American fathers?

I mean, I see where you’re coming from, but it’s all awful lot like “when they go low, we go high”, which just allows people without shame to get away with abuse. SC as the first state IS a dirty move that’s not about representation or maximizing Democratic chances. And the decision is like a couple days old, so “stop complaining” is a little premature.

He’s saying we need to come together to support the democratic socialist.

Whoah! I remember vaguely liking Mandela Barnes for some reason and thinking it was a shame he had to be beaten for her to rise. That’s a big and very impressive move by him.

Edit: It might not have been entirely altruistic, though also there hasn’t been any real evidence that he was involved in wrongdoing.

Barnes’ move came on the same day that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that it had asked him about allegations of inappropriate behavior lodged with the state Democratic Party, local party officials and others against him.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party received an anonymous letter in 2024 and again in 2025 making allegations against Barnes, a person with direct knowledge of the party’s actions told The Associated Press. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the review.

The party hired a law firm in 2025 to look into claims that Barnes used his position in the party to seek out inappropriate relationships with young adult women, the person said. The review found nothing actionable because the allegations were anonymous and unspecific, the person with knowledge of the probe said.

https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-governor-barnes-democrats-primary-8d5c0f75dcc364b80fa41c7ab7b32407

One slide in that day’s presentation showed that in April alone, Mythos had uncovered 90 “critical” bugs and 141 “important” ones in SharePoint, Microsoft’s widely used collaboration software. In the first half of May it found even more.

If an organization the size of Microsoft is struggling to fix 231 bugs in a month, that’s an indictment of Microsoft, not an example of some impossible task. Tech companies have been laying off people left and right and this is a threat to their core business. Most of these shouldn’t be more than adding some input checking.

It’s inherent to the centrist brainrot that Democrats should care more about gaining Republican votes than figure out why their own voters aren’t turning out. They don’t want a candidate who expands the coalition with new blood in the form of young people and disillusioned city dwellers. They want to chase Republican unicorns.

Barrack Hussein Obama won the largest victory of any recent president. It’s not the demographics that sway those superficial voters.

No choice she makes will ever end with her being majority leader. It’s not something you take as spoils for defeating the previous holder.

I don’t really think this delusion that Harris is a viable candidate will last until 2028, and if she’s gone every single name being trial-ballooned is a white man.

On Black voters, AOC is from the Bronx. She doesn’t have the same blinders as Bernie. The real problem isn’t the black voters in general, it’s that the DNC chose older and more conservative South Carolina to represent them and loaded it right up front to set an expectation. Maryland and Georgia both have a greater proportion of black voters and they have a different political lean.

Lol. No.

Convenient excuse if you want to pin the failures of bland centrist campaigns run by revolving door consultants on women though.