• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Not necessarily precise, just a more resonant presentation. She didn’t have a killer sound bite. If details actually mattered, we’d be in the closing months of the second Warren administration after all.

    I literally saw scads of signs saying “Trump - Low Prices/Kamala - High Prices” and one that specifically claimed “Want $2.15 gas, vote Trump.” She didn’t counter well at the slogan/vibes level. There was no “Harris/Walz/$2-per-pound ground beef” signage.

    It’s also an audience problem. The Democrats, as incumbents, were stuck with higher expectations. They couldn’t pad their numbers with low-hanging “I just want different” and “let’s burn it all down” crowds, so they have to chase voters who are harder to activate.


  • The message was weak though. The policy was fairly limited-- like limits on gouging in emergencies-- and not expressed in terms of a tangible achievable metric. And it’s not like we have direct economic control that would allow for specific deliverables-- how exactly are you goung to get Kroger to bend the knee? A fine that’s 12 seconds of their turnover?

    ‘I’ll get the 99-cent Taco Supreme back’ (or the $2 gallon of milk/dozen eggs) would have helped-- a graspable specific rallying cry. “We’ll tax gougers back into the stone age” maybe too. ISTR there’s some rightwing scumball in Canada who achieved most of his political rise by literally campaigning on $1-per-can beer. Again, a tangible goal, and one more achievable because there’s direct state controlled alcohol sales in much of the country…


  • We need to convince Trump that the way to win a legacy is to deliver something like universal health care. Present it as a display of personal power and his unique talents, and as a branding moment like no other (beyond Obamacare). 'The Democrats couldn’t do it in 50 years, but I rammed it through in 2. Got the chair of Cigna on the phone and fired him personally. Now we all have Trumpcare and even Hillary has to praise it through gritted teeth…"

    The GOP tied themselves so tightly to his star that they’d have to own the pivot, or find some way to retract their allegiance. And the rest of us could at least enjoy the historic worst-person-you-know-makes-a-greatipoint moment.



  • What I hate about the current situation is that there’s no room for “Russia is a significant power that won’t suddenly vanish, so maybe if we can avoid being at complete loggerheads with them 24/7, it might avoid decades of tension and expensive military grandstanding.”

    You must either fellate Putin or demand the entire 82 billion square kilometres of the Russian state turned to glass. No other options. It worries me that any more nuanced takes on Russia get pushed into the “Kremlin talking points” file.

    Not that she isn’t a screwball all on her own, but we could use a less militaristic take here.



  • The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.

    But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…




  • I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.

    Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.