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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Lotteries are specifically called out as illegal when used to incentivize voting or voter registration. By making a lottery only for registered voters, he is violating that law. The petition is a smoke screen, but it doesn’t actually negate the fact that this is a lottery for registered voters.

    That’s why they switched to saying they were sponsors, they were trying to avoid lottery regulations. Unfortunately for them, you can’t make it legal retroactively by changing your story.



  • Presenting a giveaway as random and then not following through with a random selection is very illegal. I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that Musk’s lawyer just straight up admitted to a felony in court, given that there’s no way a competent lawyer would have ever signed off on this and put himself in a situation where he’d have to defend it in court. Not unless Musk is willing to pay him so much that he’ll never need to practice law again.

    Unfortunate that they weren’t able to do anything to stop the election interference. But there’s enough blatant criminal activity here that there should be no reason why they can’t press charges (state and federal) and throw his ass in prison. They just need to be willing to go after him, and also not have Trump in the white house protecting him.



  • Makeitstop@lemmy.worldtoStar Wars Memes@lemmy.worldDamn StarWars Fans!
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    1 day ago

    Remember kids, if you like anything in a series, you must like everything in that series, or you aren’t a real fan.

    Also, anyone who likes the parts of a series you dislike is an idiot that uncritically absorbs trash and doesn’t understand why the good parts are good.

    And of course, the coolest thing you can do is reduce both sides of a discussion to a straw man and mock them to claim a dubious high ground for yourself.


  • Makeitstop@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldFirst World Problems
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    1 day ago

    You’re fabricating outrage at something that does not exist in the comic

    The comment I was replying to was clearly talking about a pattern of behavior beyond what is in the comic.

    The artist is making fun of the petty nonsense that people complain about.

    Which is a pretty goddamn petty thing to complain about. How dare people express their opinions and dissatisfaction with anything that isn’t the end of the fucking world, right?

    Yes, there are people who blow such things way out of proportion, but this comic does nothing to distinguish between reasonable responses to these issues and unreasonable ones, it just lumps them all together and tells everyone to shut the fuck up in the most condescending way possible.


  • Makeitstop@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldFirst World Problems
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    1 day ago

    It’s also being dismissive of real problems people face. It’s an excuse to not address problems here and now because bigger problems exist elsewhere. But you aren’t going to do a goddamn thing about those issues, so this implied triage is a lie. It’s just a way of trying to act morally superior while lacking empathy.

    The whole first world problem concept implies everyone has it easy in first world countries. As though we don’t have poverty, mental health issues, crime, corruption, police brutality, abusive families, disease, loss of loved ones, and so on. There’s no shortage of problems anywhere.

    And you know what, fuck this attitude of turning suffering into competition and mocking people for being bothered by things that aren’t life altering. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy expression of emotion when you are disappointed or irritated, as long as you aren’t taking it out on others. But being a snarky asshole to someone and judging them for having a bad day isn’t helping.

    If you see someone frowning and your instinct is to tear them down rather than cheer them up, maybe you should take a good look at yourself and figure out what your fucking problem is.



  • Harris holds on to the support of nearly all Democrats, with 97% saying they will support her and 0% saying they will support Trump.

    But she also gets 5% of Republicans who say they will vote for her over Trump. Trump holds 89% of Republicans.

    The poll shows a small universe of people who say they previously supported Trump and have now switched their vote to someone else.

    Among those not supporting Trump, 16% say there was a time when they supported him, while 81% say they have never supported him. Another 3% are not sure.

    This is a factor that very few polls ever look for. There are so many reasons to oppose Trump which transcend partisan politics. We’ve had so many Republicans endorse Harris, but you don’t see many polls looking for the voters that are making the same jump.

    The implications are huge. Every voter that switches from Trump to Harris is a net gain of 2 votes. And if they are still registered Republicans, any early voting data will likely be interpreted with them in the Trump column until they are actually counted. And of course, any voter turnout efforts paid for by the Trump campaign will likely be turning these people out as well, which is just delightful.

    We’ll see how accurate this is on Tuesday. But if Iowa really does go blue, it seems likely that it won’t be the only surprise that night.




  • There are some additional reasons to be optimistic.

    First, the poll numbers have been getting skewed by Republican affiliated pollsters that consistently show Trump in a better position than the nonpartisan polls. The race is definitely close, but if these partisan polls really are just trying to give the impression of a surge in Trump support and aren’t actually more accurate than the nonpartisan polls, then that potentially pushes some states from a narrow Trump lead back to a narrow Harris lead. And it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for this, it’s exactly what happened with the polls in 2022.

    Second, while Republicans are casting a higher percentage of the early votes than in 2020, that increase is largely coming from people who voted on election day in 2020. Moving a vote from election day to early voting is a net change of 0. And the Harris gotv machine appears to be much stronger than the one Trump outsourced to Musk, which seems to be targeting the least reliable voters while also using the least reliable canvassers. It’s no wonder Musk resorted to buying votes petition signatures.

    Harris has a stronger lead among women than Biden or Clinton did, and the gender gap in turnout so far is also higher in the previous elections. In addition, Harris is leading among voters over 65, a reversal from previous elections and particularly important because they are by far the most reliable voters.

    And the news cycle has not been kind to Trump this past week. It turns out that insulting groups that make up a sizable chunk of the voting population in certain key swing states isn’t a good move. Will it make a difference by Tuesday? Hard to say, but it sure as hell isn’t helping him.


    None of this is terribly solid, it’s just trends and indicators, no one should be getting complacent here. But it’s enough for me to feel cautiously optimistic that Harris will be able to secure Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, with a reasonable chance of picking up at least one more state.

    If the Republican gotv gamble backfires and their election day turnout advantage doesn’t fully materialize, we could see more states flip. More importantly, it could be enough to flip the House (currently a toss up) and maybe even hold the Senate (requires defying expectations in at least 2 out of 3 races, so a long shot but not impossible).





  • “A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”

    So, no they didn’t know the “deepest secrets” of the lore 20 years ago. One guy had vague notions in his head, and they only actually fleshed it out when they were working on Inquisition.



  • We need a tax that kicks in when anyone gets a total compensation that is some multiple of the poverty line and some other multiple of the lowest compensation given to anyone working for their company (including subsidiaries, contractors or part time work extrapolated to full time, and not including overtime). The amount should take into account both the lowest pay and the distribution curve of pay, so that the worse the pay inequality is the higher the tax goes.

    Suddenly, the only way the executives can actually get the benefit of those bonuses and stocks is if they’re raising wages across the board as well.