I’m not sure it was ever about respectability. I think he just didn’t have his shit together to actually be president. Campaigns usually start making transition plans long ahead of the election.

The other thing was that he didn’t have as much of a stranglehold on the Republican Party in 2016. It was still very possible to be a politician in open opposition to Donald Trump. So when it came time to pick someone, he couldn’t pick and choose proven loyalists. He just had to choose from among ranks of people who may or may not be hostile.

I’m not sure if this goes in “The Onion” or “Not The Onion”.

From what I hear, one of the most important guardrails last time was the 5S system: smile, say sure, subsequently shred. Trump lacks focus and follow through for anything except his core interests, so some of the people close to him apparently got away with simply not carrying out some of his more boneheaded demands.

All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.

They’re still helpful in sorting out a 600 calorie meal that’s going to keep someone on track to lose weight versus a 1200 calorie meal that is going to make them gain weight. Even if it’s not exact, it’s a useful guideline.

Wonder Bread is just gross junk food. Also, if you consult the label again, it’s worse than that. The 5g added sugar is for 57g of bread, so it’s nearly 10% sugar by mass.

There are good brands here. I usually get Dave’s Killer Bread. It still has some added sugar, but there are varieties with fairly small amounts.

I was ready to hear something like a story from someone who had signed onto a medical trial and was upset the trial was ending. Nope, instead an absurdly short support period that seemingly is fed by the same culture of replacement over repair that has infected our economy.

I am a very narrow supporter of eugenics. Specifically, I am against any further breeding by Elon Musk.

I nominate Vivian Wilson.

Muskrat? They really are repulsive creatures.

I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.

That happened at my university, though not to someone affiliated with the university. He was trying to break up a fight. He had a gun and it fell out its holster. He was grabbing for it as campus police were shouting not to. They shot and killed him. While you can argue about whether the police response and training was appropriate, one thing is definitely true. If he had not had a gun on him that day, he would not have been killed. A country awash in guns is not a better country, despite what the “a well armed society is a polite society” people claim.

Fortunately, I have a Charge 4. And there has been some enshittification since Google bought them up.

Fitbit for fitness trackers. I had one of their smartwatches and never found it useful. The trackers are stripped down versions that do everything I need and have a week of battery life.

Yeah, that definition of “master” is different than master/slave from what I can tell. Think the master copy of an audio recording. There are plenty of perfectly legit uses of “master,” but there’s no reason to use master/slave in this day and age. It was stupid to start doing so to begin with.

!brandnewsentence@lemmy.world

I work at a university IT department. It’s been a struggle with our auditors to loosen up the password expiration requirements. At least with the students they let anyone with 2FA to go without password expiration, which acts as a nice little carrot-and-stick. But for staff it’s two years (2FA always required), regardless of password quality. I’d rather be able to base password expiration on password quality, personality.

LessPass and similar software has some problems. Things like you can’t simply change your master password, you must then recompute and change every site. It’s also not strictly stateless, since you need to know which password iteration you’re on and the user name. Full fledged password managers also typically provide other secret management features, like API keys, SSH keys, credit/debit cards, and identity cards.

What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?

Fascism in modern political discourse is whatever the speaker dislikes. Any relationship to fascism is wholely unnecessary. Calling people out on misuse of the term is fascism.