Monument

My shitpost response is that I personally plan to be sluttier.

My serious response is that social media needs to be more social.
I hate Facebook because it’s just an advertising platform, but I don’t know what is going on if I avoid it. I wish there was a way to just share social calendars with all my friends. Like - I want a group tracker that one-click adds stuff that I find interesting. I want to only see stuff certain folks have added to their tracker, and have the ability to share with folks what stuff I’m sharing to share, vs what I’m sharing because I’m actually going to attend something. Make it easy to connect with folks, not advertisers.

The really funny thing is that I’m in a heterosexual couple. My wife is bi, but the closest I tread to the rainbow is polyamory.

It’s not even a good insult!
Oooh. I’m going to associate you with a group that has shown incredible resilience and generally embodies such dastardly values as embracing their true selves, seeking or building community, respecting each other, valuing mental health and self care, and living in defiance of what is expected of them.
I’ve been given more insulting compliments.

I have dogs. (And a cat that hisses at the mailman, so - a dog.)

We all sleep naked. Not under the same blanket.

All I see are under-evolved crabs.

That’s fair. To be honest, the thing that sort of put me back on my heels about him was learning about the TBI - that explained his pattern of behavior. However, I can definitely see the point about not wanting the recognition via the license plate, or the reminders of harder times.

After months of a mostly one-way back and forth, I really just was looking to poke back at him and was grasping at low-hanging fruit in the moment. Kinda glad I saw an alternative option once it opened up.

There’s a guy on our dog walking route that put up several Trump flags last year. My wife and I actually wound up having an interaction with him because he was spying on us through his cameras and got mad that we referred to the flags as embarrassing and said that Trumpism was a cult.

By mid-April, he’d pulled down all the flagpoles and didn’t even take the flags off them, just laid the poles with flags wrapped around them in the dirt by his driveway.

In May I actually talked with him. Initially I had no intention of trying to be nice to him - he just had done something sort of shitty a few days before (encouraging his dog to bark at our dogs). I was going to be like “Look, if you wanna call me gay slurs over your ring camera, that’s fine, but don’t encourage your dog to be hostile to mine.”
But somehow he tied his dog to military service, and while I was fully prepared to connect the lack of a veteran license plate to his statement to call him a liar and a Reddit ninja, he fielded the license plate question and said that he’d suffered a TBI that resulted in an appreciable percentage of brain dying, and that made him unable to be rational when he felt any sort of threat or insult. So he didn’t use the military plates, because he’d had negative experiences with motorists while using them.
I don’t know if I believe that - it seems dumb on the part of the other motorists. But I’m not willing to keep pressing for the sake of picking a fight. I’ll throw a barb, but not over-extend myself. It’s just not worth it.
So I listened, and we chatted - for like an hour and a half. My wife left after a few minutes with the dogs. We talked about politics, the world, our community, and how fucked everything is. He supported Trump because of the 2016 (Obama) economy. He believes in women’s rights. He is conservative, anti-immigrant, and believes in stronger policing. I told him I believe in increased social support, so folks like him can get out of the VA benefits trap. I told him I think the way to stronger communities is through stronger schools and increased civic engagement - more pride, less punishment. He even asked if we’d be willing to help train his dog better, because he notices that ours don’t bark at other dogs, and don’t pull on their leads. I told him I’d have to think about it, and ask my wife, since she’s the one who really had the patience to get our dogs where they are.

We parted - not as friends - but certainly not as enemies. Just - neighbors with a better understanding of each other.

Tell us when you figure it out, because we’re all equally fucked.

My finger hurts and I spent the last of my gumption posting this comment.

Go on without me. Text my wife. Tell her I’ll be

Edit: I misread the comment I replied to as “But did you write that comment?” but it appears they said “How did you write that comment?”

I leave you with this, my final gift:

It’s weird that 4 people are in there for rape.

Like - I’m excited about sensors that uses higher frequency versions of this for health monitoring. I think that’s a perfectly valid use. But also, in my use, I’d be installing it as an IoT device on a network I control, feeding data to services I own.

This use - where it’s opt in for now, until they figure out how to monetize selling how much time you spend in front of the TV, in the kitchen, bedroom, or bathroom (paired with ‘anonymized’ data about what you’re looking at online in each space) is creepy as fuck.

Why this is unneeded

Citizenship is already required to vote in state and federal elections. Every state currently maintains its own voter rolls. These voter rolls are administered at the state level and how citizenship is proved occurs according to state laws.

Why this is bad

This database represents a breach of state autonomy to administer their elections.
Some localities do not require citizenship to vote. This database could disenfranchise voters in those localities.
This represents a huge target for hackers, and given that every municipality will have access to it, there are a lot of potential ways in which it could be compromised or manipulated. The federal government is rife with inaccurate information, and is often understaffed to address the issue. These issues can and will disenfranchise voters. States and municipalities are better equipped to handle their voter rolls.

How this will be abused

This database will be used to both verify citizenship, and for election officials to upload who is registered to vote in a given electoral area. This will lead to its usage to disqualify people who are registered in multiple areas. If - 31 days before an election, someone uploads a list of conservative or liberal voters from a purple area such as Florida or Ohio to the rolls of another state using hacked credentials, then it’s very possible those people will be disqualified from voting and may not know until they try to cast their ballot - shifting the balance of the election.
With the Supreme Court recently discarding birthright citizenship without clarifying who qualifies for citizenship, a sufficiently malicious actor could ensnarl the electoral and legal system with arbitrary claims that people’s parents were not U.S. citizens.
Invariably, the data from this will be used to stalk hapless people — either by electoral workers, or by anyone, once it has been hacked.
And, speculatively - what happens if the scope of this morphs to a ‘voter eligibility’ database, where it tries to ascertain if someone is eligible to vote on additional criterion, such as criminal history? Will it be plagued with errors, such as not registering expunged records, or applying one state’s laws to another?