Will owls eat pears, or are they strictly carnivorous?

The most perfect and delicious of pears, even! Asian pears are manna.

Henry II

Yup. And in the meantime, work to support the change to government that’s needed to allow third parties a chance. Support Approval Voting, or Ranked Choice Voting, or whatever is being most successful at your local level. Lobby your representatives to eliminate the electoral college. Support NPVIC, especially if you live in a state that hasn’t yet signed on.

You said forget third parties. OK. Trump wants a 10% tariff across the board on all imports. He’s said he thinks the Israelis agent going far enough, and should exterminate the Palestinians. He’s already cost women choice over their own bodies.

So, yeah. Work for initiatives that will allow real change; and in the meantime, swallow your gorge and vote for the lesser of two evils, because that’s the only kind of vote that counts.

I make no excuses. We’ve seen what Trump presidencies look like; the last was bumbling and did massive damage to civil rights, the next won’t be. Project 2025 ensures that.

Biden’s biggest crime has been supporting Israel. His presidency was categorically and measurably better for the US than Trump’s. Aside from Palestine, he wasn’t a bad president. Now, if Trump wasn’t saying that Israel isn’t going far enough; if Trump were supporting Palestine, then there’d be something to talk about. But he isn’t, and he did terrible things to our country while in charge, and should never be allowed near the White House again.

The word has negative connotations, but I stand by it. I an not saying there result isn’t stronger, but if you extend cultural mixing out to the maximum - say humans and the planet survives another thousand years, and global travel is no harder than traveling to the next town over - what you end up with is homogeneity, and this would be sad, I think. Imagine it: the entire world speaking some pidgin derivative mashup of Mandarin, English, and Hindi, with essentially the same culture everywhere on the planet. Just as has already happened, languages are lost, because nobody speaks them natively anymore. All that’s left of the original cultures are some UNESCO sites and preserved old movies. I can’t say the world wouldn’t be stronger for it, but in the process, something irrecoverable is lost.

That’s a decent solution. I was referring to The Paradox of Tolerance. You can disagree with Popper, but it’ll take more that a couple of sentences in Lemme to convince me.

So, you’re on favor of enslaving robots.

Duly noted, H-#1D0146641.

Maybe. I’m not that suspicious, and I think even Jill would balk at that if she knew.

I don’t believe she’s intentionally trying to be a spoiler, or is immoral. I do think shed must be fantastically naïve if she thinks she’s doing anything other than helping Trump.

Are you aware of just how much money is hidden behind shell PACs? I’m speculating because I don’t have the resources to track down who’s behind who; who’s behind who on every contribution.

Individual contributions are safe, and it’s good for her that enough individual donors she qualified for matching funds. I mean, it’s a pretty low bar; $5,000 in (each of) 20 states, but, yeah, it’s good for her. It’s enough to run how many national ads, do you think? It’s nothing compared to the millions being spent by the other parties, and - you did make a good suggestion. I should go and see just where her contributions are coming from.

I’m not an investigative journalist, and my interest in this is so low even posting comments on Lemmy is taxing my patience. But I will say: better statisticians than myself have said that Ralph Nader had a significant spoiler effect on Al Gore; Ralph Nader gave the presidency to Bush. I contributed, because I was young, ignorant, and I hated Tipper Gore; and I voted for Nader.

Nader never had a chance; he didn’t come remotely close to being elected. By voting for Nader, I was helping Bush.

Bernie helped sink Hillary; his lukewarm endorsement, and the vitriolic intrangency of his base, tipped the scales. If the Bernie Bros had all voted for Hillary, history would be much different. We wouldn’t have an activist, right-wing supreme court - the single biggest damage Trump caused in his term.

As long as the US uses the Electoral College and First-Past-the-Post voting, this is the reality. Idealism will not fix it: voting for third parties won’t fix it. No third party will win even a single state, much less the election. And while I try to have patience with idealists, I don’t think the world can afford to faff about with people like Jill Stein. The world can’t afford to have younger people learn the hard lesson I did. Votes count, but only votes for major parties. Other voters may as well stay home for all the harm they’ll do.

Well, by your post history, you’re merely an antagonistic troll, but: you’re wrong.

I’m with you; I prefer date versioning for many things. Semver does work really well for things with exposed APIs; it’s a stretch to justify using them with user tools, and especially GUI tools. Semver is used to great effect in Go - which is how it should be use: mainly by the language’s module management system. Outside of that, it’s human readable, but like XML, its main value is to machines, and only secondarily to humans.

Calendar versioning is far more human-oriented, and so more useful for things without exposed APIs or module tooling.

@best_username_ever mentioned Semantic Versioning. It’s an actual spec. Not everyone follows it, and it doesn’t make sense for a lot of things, and far too many people are dogmatic about it. But it’s a good thing to read, and it’s not long.

A related, but not tightly coupled, spec is Changelog. Used together, and used correctly these two are nice for users.

Did they watch the same debate that I did?

My problem is that I absolutely loath gardening. I love the gardens; I hate the upkeep. Weeding, tending, watering, repotting, fertilizing, pruning… I’d rather clean toilets. It’s so hard on my back, I’m miserable being outside when it’s hot or humid, and we don’t control the weather.

Someone’s taking care of all that. It’s lovely… if it’s someone else.

I would not be surprised if a lot of money was funneled into third party campaigns during general elections by PACs of the two main parties as a spoiler strategy. I would be shocked if you tracked campaign contributions to the Green party and to Jill Stein in particular, and didn’t find that most of it came from some Republican PAC. If Jill can siphon any votes from Biden, all the better for the Trump campaign.

The Democrats probably do it, too, except Republicans locked out dissent with the “Thou Shalt Not Defy Our (current) God, or we’ll destroy your local race with vengeance next chance we get” tactic, and it works. Many Conservatives may disagree with Trump, but they’re all terrified little bitches of standing up to him because they’ll get dumped on an lose their jobs if they do. So there’s fewer spoilers for Democrats to fund.

But I’d be real money that most of Stein’s financing comes from conservative PACs, and that’s why you only see her pop up out of here gopher hole once every 4 years.

The Paradox of Tolerance says intolerance must not be tolerated.

Crush them. Brutally, if necessary.

Nothing he hasn’t seen before.

Because people fear having their culture and race replaced by immigrants. Even if they’re not overtly racist, few people wish to become a minority in “their own country.”

The US is famously a melting pot, and yet we still have a bunch of descendants of white immigrants from Europe who fear that South Americans will take over; that Mexican culture will replace good old-fashioned hodge-podge Western European culture. That their language will become less dominant. That they’ll find themselves strangers in their own country.

It’s usually an indistinct fear. It seems obvious from the verbiage in the dog-whistles, but white European immigrant descendants don’t want to become second-class.

Now, if we treated our own minorities well, they wouldn’t be so afraid. They wouldn’t be afraid that they’d be the ones with Hispanic cops kneeling on their necks; or that Hispanic immigrants would be living in giant homes and they’d themselves be the ones having to eak out a living as seasonal workers.

I think it’s not despicable to want to preserve your cultural heritage, your cultural language, and to have your country legislated with the values you grew up with; but people react poorly when they think it’s happening.

What I most despise in the Republicans in the US is that they’re advocating for preserving cultural values that never existed broadly in the US. The closest subculture to what they’re pushing is a return to the Confederate South: religion, and white supremacy. The Confederates got their asses handed to them, but the racist fuckers never gave up their values, most most Americans are blind to what their real agenda is. And they’ve been good insurgents, cleverly taking advantage of weak areas in our democracy to return power to a minority: themselves. It’s been said and it’s true: if America was a true democracy and we selected leaders by popular vote, no Republican under their current platform would ever be president again.

Anyway, getting back to your question: immigrants bring their own culture with them, and very few completely abandon it and adopt the culture and language of their new country. This dilutes the host country’s native culture, and people are afraid of that. In the US, it’s the highest form of hypocrisy, because our native culture displaced the indigenous culture, and now we’re afraid of someone else doing the same to us.