No, fireworks are cool and fun and people enjoy them.

I actually agree with your last sentence. it’s a no-win situation for the democrats and there’s a seemingly growing contingent that thinks the best loss they can take is one where a new candidate or set of candidates are introduced to the electorate.

polls are wrong all the time, you’re right. what does it look like if against all odds, biden wins? the man has shown himself to be incapable of cognitive function. should voters fall back on trusting his cabinet and handlers “our competent administrators, their unelected sycophants” style?

hes facing significant opposition from the other branches of government and even at the end of his life when faced with a supreme court ruling that gives him the legal go ahead to enact his administrations policies he won’t do it.

that’s not looking like a great second term. if he lives through it then they’re the do-nothing democrats who can’t accomplish their agenda and abandon their constituents, if he dies then they’ve got kamala who would be very funny but is incredibly disliked.

the democrats are between a rock and a hard place right now because they ran on trump being a dictatorial fascist who will crown himself god-king and now that hes going to win they’re at fault for cynically using the threat of fascism to get votes instead of building the kind of base to oppose fascism that one and a quarter centuries of history would dictate or being the boy who cried wolf if it turns out there’s a peaceful transition of power in 2028.

basically there’s no way forward with their current messaging and platform because when trump wins and institutes american fascism (it’s already here, but i’m typing from the perspective of democratic strategists) they’re naive buffons who pissed away their time and resources trying to get people to vote for an inadequate candidate on a shuffling the deck chairs platform and when trump doesn’t send the brownshirts into the streets and has a largely uneventful second term theyre the people who pissed away their time and resources on a candidate and platform which aren’t up to the challenges we face because of orange man bad.

they’re done for and the best possible outcome is an uneventful trump presidency with a smooth handover complete with “restored faith in our electoral process”. in that case it’s best to go ahead and start getting their benchwarmers out on the field to find out whos up to the task in 2026 and 2028.

There’s also a cost to transitioning to the new technology.

Normalizing arbitrary size removable media makes physical exfiltration much easier because no one is asking why you’re using an illegal technology in the government building.

Floppy disks are not able to identify themselves as a keyboard and release a payload of keystrokes on command, or hide entire soc computers complete with network adapters.

There is also the matter of retraining on an institutional scale, and if you think it’s as simple as “put this into the computer, not that” you’re woefully underinformed.

Just as an aside, it’s pretty fraught to compare a language transition caused by centuries of forced resettlement to switching the kind of computer thingy government employees use over the course of two years.

The people calling for Biden to drop out are supporters of his party, the democrats, who recognize that he’s unfit and incapable of winning. They want him to be replaced by someone else to increase their party’s chances of victory.

No one is calling for trump to drop out because he’s looking more fit in comparison to Biden and he’s projected to win. No one would call for a candidate to drop out when they’re in the lead if they support that candidates party.

Criminal allegations, true or false, don’t enter into it because America has a two tiered justice system where the wealthy and powerful are less beholden to the law than the rest of us and because presidency requires the violation of myriad international laws, norms and human rights.

The job title might as well be War Criminal in Chief and none of the allegations leveled at trump are disqualifying.

Well that’s dumb.

The government can use whatever system it wants, and if there aren’t components on the market it can justify a make work program to domestically produce them.

Governments were able to run perfectly well without high density removable storage, why is it necessary now?

Why would it want to get rid of floppy disks?

Magnetic disks. The person who said ssds hasn’t tried it. Spinning magnetic disks lose their data much more slowly than any ssd cell.

Even 3.5” floppies do better than ssds.

Jokes on you, not thinking!

If you got a messed up Linux I’ll help you with it.

If you are upset with Bidens chances, Bidens genocidal foreign policy, bidens too little too late climate policy or bidens xenophobic foreign policy:

Consider voting for a third party that actually has a platform and politics that aligns with your own.

Now that it’s clear the democrats won’t win. Now that it’s clear the only people throwing their votes away are the ones who carefully, tactically, thoughtfully attach their support to the democrats. Now that it’s clear a new American political formation has to emerge.

Take this opportunity to record your needs in the only way that cannot be ignored, glossed over, deepfaked or otherwise denied.

Voting won’t be enough, but it’s the start to a new alignment within the power structure we have. Be kind and understanding towards your neighbors.

lol the Nobel prize in economics was lobbied for by the Swiss central bank, its endowment and cash prize are funded and managed by the same and the winners get picked by the Swedish academy of science.

Maybe the fake Swiss bank prize is not the qualification to lead with.

i’m not.

if you want to understand why the history of racism against irish americans after the wave of immigration in response to the manmade famine doesn’t factor into racism irish americans experience today (none, zero, irish americans do not experience racism today), read my top level comment.

the defining factors are that irish americans were integrated into white supremacist power structures and black americans weren’t, that st. patricks day isn’t treated with any reverence in the united states and is instead one of the big four drinking holidays and the negative stereotypes of irish americans from the 1800s don’t survive today in word or in deed.

i chose not to touch on the lingering economic impact of racism against irish americans as opposed to racism against black americans because they’re in two different universes. one was largely dismantled before any of us were born and the other is still systemic and pervasive to this day.

Irish people are white and therefore cannot experience racism.

Irish people are white.

They didn’t start out that way in America, because race is a social construct used by the state to achieve its ends and when a shit ton of Irish people were coming over to the United States to escape the manmade potato famine the terms of their acceptance into American society was that they’d be doing the shittiest work.

American society dealt with this contradiction by adopting the racial pseudoscience that put Irish people below “real whites”.

Whiteness isn’t something innate that can be measured objectively (although pseudoscientific methods claim to be able to do so!), it’s a basic subjective measure of where one stands in the white supremacist power structure.

The white supremacist power structure informs all sorts of stuff like can you get a loan, can you get insurance, do you need to be more afraid of dying to the cops than usual, how loud can you play your music, pretty much every aspect of life in America.

After Catholicism became more widely accepted in the us, and a shit ton of Irish people became cops (so that the white supremacist state could surveil their communities) Irish people were eventually considered white.

Black people in America aren’t white. That might seem like an obvious thing to say, but it’s important to be clear that the process of integration that the Irish immigrant wave went through was never really offered to black Americans.

A person could argue that we are living through that process right now and I think there is a process of integration going on but it’s not making black Americans part of the broader white American group but instead giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital. That’s a significantly different deal.

Anyway, there’s this thing called racism, which is where a society uses the completely made up category of race to discriminate against groups of people to achieve its ends.

Some examples of American racism are slavery, segregation, redlining, the treatment of agricultural workers, the treatment of rail workers, etc.

What’s important is that racism is when a society (or its members) discriminate against some group. There is power in the discrimination and it’s being used against a group.

If a bank decides not to lend to white people it doesn’t hurt white people because there’s literally all the other banks that they can go to and get loans. There is discrimination being used against a group in that example, but it has no power over them because they’ll just go to all the banks that (and I’m quoting directly from a Bank of America sign here) don’t “serve coloreds”.

Okay, so why am I saying this? We’re talking about food!

There’s an old stereotype that black people eat watermelon and fried chicken. There’s a long and storied history to the food stereotypes of black Americans but I’ll spare you the tangent and just say it’s visible in all sorts of Jim crow and segregation era media and arts and crafts stuff.

If you got one of those “antique mall” type places you can probably see some of it there.

During and before Jim Crow and segregation, those stereotypes were deployed to depict black Americans as at best ignorant country bumpkins and at worst subhuman apes.

So to serve the stereotypical food of a racist caricature on a day that is intended to remember the freeing of the last slaves is at best thoughtless reproduction of a racist stereotype and at worst malicious intentional reification of a racist stereotype!

But why isn’t it racist to serve corned beef on saint patricks day? Well for one thing, saint Patrick’s day isn’t seriously celebrated as a remembrance of Irish American culture or the experience of immigrants almost anywhere in the us. It’s one of the big four, a drinking holiday with a dress code.

It’s also not perpetuating harmful stereotype to run a homemade Reuben special on saint Patrick’s day. No one bites into a Rachel and thinks “lol, those dumb micks are only good for driving spikes, drinking and swearing allegiance to Rome” or “if only they could multiply the way they multiply, maybe they wouldn’t be so poor, sad!”

Now that’s not to say it’s racist to prepare or eat fried chicken or watermelon. As a southerner I got strong feelings about both.

But pretty much it boils down to Irish people are white.

E: I fucking made a stupid ass mistake and substituted greenwood for the freeing of the last slaves when describing the context of Juneteenth. My dumbass brain was going “tell em about how greenwood and Parrish street were about giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital, instead of equality under white supremacy” over and over again the whole time I was writing this stream of consciousness ass post and when I couldn’t find a place to shoehorn it in the ol’ brain took over and did it anyway. Thanks to fryhyde for pointing it out!

Dialectic. It’s a way of understanding and squaring contradictions.

wikipedia on the subject.

Heck of a bluff. I don’t see how the us government can expect to sell the threat of expanding an unpopular foreign war in an election year.

Wait, is that 9/11s music I hear?