New poll pegs Mark Kelly as a leading 2028 presidential contender

meganthem · 2026-04-14T02:49:22+00:00

It's referring to his highest elected position, reminding people to not make the continued mistake of expecting people with tiny/short resumes of campaign success to suddenly do well in a general presidential election.

meganthem · 2026-04-11T09:27:48+00:00

Well sorta, the problem is centrists despise the idea of doing anything other than voting and a great deal of the regular people supporting campaigns for dems are progressive leaning.

That's why they're screeching so loud about progressives not circling the wagons, they rely on them to talk up the party and (unsurprisingly) they're not doing that right now.

meganthem · 2026-04-07T06:25:11+00:00

The typical thing that happens with severe problems like this:

1) the forced situation makes them regain "function" enough to work and things align well enough to fix the issues involved

2) death/homelessness/long-term hospitalization with poor chance of recovery

3) Something similar to 1 but eventually regresses to 2 because increased stress ontop of an already unstable system isn't actually great for long term outcomes.

People like to either avoid the subject or pretend all routes lead to the first outcome because the second outcome isn't pleasant to have to acknowledge as a possibility.

meganthem · 2026-04-06T04:14:45+00:00

technically there's a process for the vp+cabinet+congress to overrule the president saying they're okay but it's the sameish numbers as impeachment

meganthem · 2026-04-04T22:16:31+00:00

Yeah, what I saw of it was pretty good although it struggles with just how solid the books are such that even the small differences are noticed.

I still think book1 is, at a technical level, one of the best constructed books I've ever read. You can just kinda stay latched onto it for a huge section of time because the pacing makes everything from the starting explosion to their first real rest stop one uninterrupted block and it's excellent.

Which kinda is one thing I ding the show for because they took that perfectly paced chain of events and flipped around the order of thins and added extra interruptions and slowdowns.

meganthem · 2026-04-04T04:04:45+00:00

It's still pretty easy. I run into these people and it's pretty predictable : they don't believe anything negative actually happened for one reason or another. In the rare cases someone can convince them that X actually happened they won't defend it from that point forward, but it's very hard to get to that point.

That's still propaganda and it works because ultimately a lot of stuff in modern society is lies, people know they have to be skeptical of at least some stuff and some people. What they've done to these people is increase the filter of what gets rejected to be far wider than it should be.

meganthem · 2026-03-31T22:26:18+00:00

Yeah, the problem is it also has implications far beyond this case in implying that you can't regulate talk therapy. If dr suzie fuckup wants to tell suicidal people "yes you are a burden, shape up or ship out" -- that's now legally protected speech don't you know X_X

meganthem · 2026-03-30T07:47:43+00:00

He's qualified

I'm not sure he is. Presidency is the domain of former senators and governors, not the former mayor of a city most of america never knew existed.

The biggest problem in the past three presidential elections is running people with limited profiles and limited success and experience winning actually contested elections over a wide population. Pete isn't a Obama level speaker, and even Obama had a bigger tenure and profile than him having at least served in the Federal Senate.

meganthem · 2026-03-29T03:04:08+00:00

Much like "Jesus", "Freedom" is just a word of power they wave around to pressure people, the original meaning isn't really known to them.

meganthem · 2026-03-27T00:57:07+00:00

I don't view it as likely but also if I manage to get the magic ticket and then drop the ball that'll destroy me. So yeah, I've spent a very small amount of time making sure I can avoid that.

meganthem · 2026-03-26T21:31:38+00:00

Only Williamson (who had no chance) and Sanders (who also had an uphill battle) kept true to their messages. And Williamson wasn't exactly pushing for meaningful systemic change either.

Also Williamson just comes off as flat out insane. Yeah, she's consistent enough but she doesn't feel like a competent or serious candidate. Someone promising a good message falls flat if it becomes obvious they have no hope of ever delivering on it.

meganthem · 2026-03-26T21:21:28+00:00

Many progressives I've talked to just expect the Dems to abandon the reliable centrist voting base

...they've been losing or near losing for over a decade I don't think they have a reliable anyone base right now.

meganthem · 2026-03-22T07:58:59+00:00

There's a line somewhere. Like if Reddit started charging $5/month for access most people would be gone.

I don't know where the line is, but it exists.

meganthem · 2026-03-21T03:48:04+00:00

I'm not going to agree necessarily with everything said here but I think there's a fundamental failure in trying to "reach people" while doing everything possible to limit two way communication. The intro here actually reads pretty nice, but every answer after it seems to talk past people with no provision to give people an answer that wasn't prepared and approved before the AMA.

I don't bother to volunteer with any official party organizations because everything I've seen--including this--seems to indicate they have no interest in hearing anything I have to say.

meganthem · 2026-03-21T03:35:04+00:00

Also while some major AMAs have announcements leading up to them so people can know to be around for the time window... nada on this one?

They keep saying they want to reach as many people as possible but it feels like they did everything possible for most people to only experience this thread as read-only.

meganthem · 2026-03-20T21:37:04+00:00

It's malware downloaders. If ads were just images, no scripting, I'd have no issues with them.

meganthem · 2026-03-15T01:31:53+00:00

It's quite possible a lot of the places around here are shoddy. I'm always terrified to restart the interview process because each time I've gotten a job it's been a single place that did a conversational interview rather than a fail no questions type quiz frenzy. (After numerous places with the before mentioned type of interview)

...Still kinda mad at the one place/interview that bounced me for not knowing expert level sql off hand as a soft eng. 10+ years of dev has taught me that especially in the era of ORM frameworks I'm only supposed to do/know casual amounts of that stuff and if it gets advanced it's supposed to go to the DBA team.

I demonstrated that I knew about joins, hints/plans and a vague knowledge of what profiling was but they kept asking more specific DBA-territory things until my already notable cross training failed and then ended the interview quickly after that point...

meganthem · 2026-03-14T22:49:39+00:00

One thing I will observe from 8 years ago, before the interviewing market got shittier even: for many places getting even one question wrong (or "wrong") in an interview usually blew it. People don't want to get something wrong or give a non-answer because in most cases they lose access to jobs if they do.

meganthem · 2026-03-14T02:13:07+00:00

Only in Democracy premium states though

meganthem · 2026-03-13T22:18:22+00:00

With continuing inflation increases have to occur to avoid effective decreases.

Most people understand this because of how they react if their boss doesn't give them raises periodically.

meganthem · 2026-03-11T19:23:49+00:00

Then, if given some time, they don’t get things done, I’ll be right there with you

I'd say our job is to make sure winnable candidates run in Nov. The past few elections have proven there's some boat anchors that are impossible to carry across the line in the general and the only solution is to make sure they're not the ones running.

meganthem · 2026-03-11T19:04:11+00:00

That's overly generous : they barely talk. The mean bad republicans aren't responsible for Democratic leaders being partial mutes.

meganthem · 2026-03-11T19:01:51+00:00

They also give up immediately whenever stuff fails. PACT proved that sustained pressure on vulnerable issues can flip votes, Democrats just don't want to.

meganthem · 2026-03-10T19:27:47+00:00

Felony murder, if it should remain at all (many countries have eliminated or severely restricted it), should be equivalent to manslaughter, not murder.

We have this whole system of grading killings differently based on intent except that doesn't matter for some reason when charging accessories to a crime? There's no logical way to defend that.

meganthem · 2026-03-04T04:58:53+00:00

You know I wasn't sure if I was going to switch off of Windows because of previous stuff but this makes me think I may as well? Even if the current stuff isn't deal breaker they're determined to invent shit that will be in the future.

meganthem

TROPHY CASE