You invite my "billionaires shouldn't exist" TED talk.

GOP was setting the bar low for Vance before the debate, and he easily cleared it, so with low expectations, the consensus will be that he was fantastic. Walz was no surprise, he was fine, so I think folks are going to call it a slight Vance win. It won't matter, neither got hit hard enough, it won't move anything.

That's an assholish characterization. And when I lived in Walpole, I had Ed Markey, too. I called his office a couple of times, said, "I vote for Ed Markey, and I want <...>" and they took down what I said, and my info, and I'd a letter reply a little while later.

My current rep is Adam Smith. He has actually been less responsive than other reps I've called, but I've gotten letters from his office after calling with my requests. And in talking to office staff, you can often find out how pressured they are over issues that constituents call about. They definitely care.

Tell them you're withdrawing your support, and they'll apologize, but you're done getting listened to. They know it's a waste of time.

I wonder who represents you. I don't get blown off my my reps. And I don't donate a ton of money, but I do volunteer.

You sound like you've never called or written to your representative or their office, or dealt with a local campaign office. Because what I describe is true, and what you describe is you declaring to the world, "I'm choosing to make myself irrelevant to everyone."

Not voting for the Democrat gives the Democrats all the reason they need to ignore absolutely everything you say.

Voting for Democrats and donating to them gives you persuasive power within the party to help steer it.

That's privilege talking. 100% turnout should not be a requirement, when we do not have, at the very least, a national holiday for voting. Voting is not as easy for everyone as it might be for you.

That's BS. Extreme leftists are very unreliable voters: no party that actually has a chance at winning anything or running the country can live up to their wishlist agenda. They have a "98% agreement with me means you're still my enemy" mentality, so the only candidates that appeal to them are the ones that know they won't win: those are the only folks that can promise rainbows and unicorns all day long, and pass the unrealistic and fatally flawed morality tests that extreme Progressives demand.

Nope, totally blaming Stein voters. They're idiots, truly stupid, to believe that a protest vote does anything except hurt the major party they're most aligned with. Stein is a useful idiot, funded by fascists to leech votes from Democrats. She got Trump elected in 2016.

Third parties aren't a thing under our system. If we were a parliamentary system, sure, but not under our current system, so take your desires for boosting a third party and boost yourself into a lake.

Yeah, and folks know "scruples" as a noun which some people have and some don't, but "scruple" as a verb is a nice archaic version that I really like, which you don't encounter much outside of, say, a Jane Austen novel.

I would say "meaningful". Billionaires can have a very noticeable effect with their philanthropy, while making essentially no sacrifice on their part. The Gates Foundation does very noticeable good, but Bill Gates isn't giving of himself very much.

"scruple" as a verb, meaning "hesitate due to conscience".

It was coined by Cory Doctorow.

Some of us learn better lessons.

I have become aggressively more anti-capitalist as I've grown older. At 56, with a nice professional career mostly behind me, I am vigorously ANTIFA EAT THE RICH ACAB.

Windows has problems, no doubt. But in terms of surfacing functionality in the GUI, it does it a lot more thoroughly than Linux does.

Not to mention having to know things like what my window manager is, am i running “Gnome” or “KDE” before i download an app in a software store. And on and on. Linux is so much less friendly.

Every print dialogue in Windows, they all pretty much have all the same basic options, called the same things, so that inconsistency isn’t that big a deal.

My experience has been filing a bug on a FOSS app, and having it almost immediately closed because it was a dupe of a bug reported ten years prior which remained open and unfixed. I'm not a programmer, so it's just, "Well, I guess I'm out of luck on this ever being fixed."

I've done a fair bit of UI/UX work in my career, so I have a lot of sympathy for naive users, and FOSS devs mainly do not. If there's some functionality that is only exposed with a command line parameter, well, that's good enough. Read the man page.

I think it's pretty clear from my comment that I don't need that law. But some people do, because some people have bosses who will not behave normally and decently unless forced to.

Linux users are self-selected for increased tech savvy, so they'll say, "Yes, it's the best," but really, the Linux community is still extremely forgiving of terrible user interface, and value things like FOSS over things like apps with robust, accessible feature sets. Linux users are happy to fix functionality holes with writing a shell script, and think nothing of it: it's not a lack in the OS, it's a testament to the power and flexibility of the OS!

I've used a few flavors of Linux, and their GUIs are almost uniformly terrible, only partially functional without using a terminal. For instance, they have various software and OS update apps located in semi-random menu locations, and none of them work as well as "sudo apt update / sudo apt upgrade / sudo apt full-upgrade / sudo apt autoremove". And there's a huge part of the Linux community that thinks this is great and not a problem at all.

Windows hides the ugly sausage-making from typical users, and forces IT folks and other developers to wrangle with it. Linux makes IT/dev lives easier while making typical users somewhat hamstrung if they're scared of a CLI. So, if that has meaning for you with regards to the question "Is Linux as good as we think it is?" then you may have your answer.

See, you're just lucky. Many folks don't have good bosses, so a law like this is good.