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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Gore’s presidency would have been a continuation of Clinton’s, who were aware of the threat potential posed by al-Qaeda. So if/when the now infamous Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US memo landed on his desk on August 6th, 2001 - or the even earlier “UBL [Usama Bin Laden] Threats Are Real" memos from months earlier; they would have been taken seriously and acted upon.

    Instead Bush’s response was to fob it off disinterestedly, saying: “All right. You’ve covered your ass”

    So yes, learning from earlier failings - a theoretical Gore presidency would have taken these threats much more seriously, and could have prevented the thousands of deaths of 9/11, and tens of thousands of deaths in the subsequent wars.



  • Or literally never, ever connect your TV directly to the Internet (seriously, don’t do it).

    My Apple TV does an infinitely better job than the half-assed built-in native apps; more services are supported and for longer, features are properly integrated, and the additional smart phone functionality (AirPlay, AirPods sync etc.) is a godsend in a busy household.

    Plus the added bonus of not risking my network getting compromised, and one less company collecting and selling data about me to unscrupulous marketers and shady middle-men.


  • I honestly think it will not live up to the levels of hype that the community will build itself up to.

    Coupled with my suspicion that the single-player game will be as barebones as possible, with the goal of funnelling as many players into the next iteration of GTA:Online as quickly as possible, to sell more Shark Cards.

    The good news is that in the end I’ll either be proven right, or pleasantly surprised.




  • If/when it happens, so be it - I’ll eat crow. But for the time being, Apple at least has long set/surpassed the standard for support lifetimes.

    At some point, you just have to have a little bit of faith that not every company is going to immediately screw you over the first chance they get; otherwise you’ll never end up buying anything (new or otherwise), with the fear that the moment you do - they’ll drop support.

    I mean, some companies do deserve that level of scepticism - but honestly, for all their other faults Apple is not one of them.










  • I know this is WhitePeopleTwitter, and not a direct ask; but the easiest way is to tackle it from the wake-up time, rather than forcing yourself to try and fall asleep at 10pm.

    Pick a day with few responsibilities, (e.g. Saturday ) that way you won’t be too negatively impacted if you don’t get enough sleep. Set MULTIPLE alarms to 6am to force you out of bed; proceed with your day as normal, minimise screen time and bright lights after 9pm, and go to bed at 10pm.

    Make sure you keep waking up at 6 am and don’t nap/go back to sleep; brute force your body to adapt. It should work as quickly as in 72hrs.



  • Democracy is fragile, and requires buy-in from a majority of politicians to maintain.

    The GOP have been evil for longer than you’ve been alive; and their grand scheme has always been “to shrink the Government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”. They are not in a position to do it.

    The Trump presidency brought to light a flaw in the existing systems, that a lot of processes and regulations weren’t sufficiently bound by law, but rather protocol.

    In that, one bad actor with support from their political party could ignore norms and standards set previously to withhold judicial appointments in an election year to deprive Obama of a seat, and then completely ignore that precedent when it happened again to Trump, giving him a 3rd appointment after one term.

    Could/should Biden try something similar? Perhaps, and in some ways he is (student debt forgiveness) - but he now faces an uphill struggle against an openly hostile Supreme Court which has already proved to have no care for precedent either (e.g. overturning Rowe v. Wade).

    Just remember, it takes a lot less time to destroy something, than it was to build it in the first place.