Senators (in the US) are elected representatives of their state. Sen. Booker, through his 25 hour speech, brought his constituents’ message to the forefront, criticized the Senate, Democrats’ and his own failures to act. He got millions of people to look at Senate business as if he was a professional streamer which is usually boring stuff. The speech is Booker’s answer to “what can I do at this moment to make a difference?”, which hopefully will get others to ask the same of themselves.

It’s impossible to measure the true impact of the speech afterward, but it’s intended to inspire people to take action, resist the Trump monarchy, and cause “good trouble” where they can. Who knows whether this has had any influence on the Wisconsin Supreme Court which was a humiliation to Musk, or if it had any influence on the 4 Republican Senators joining Democrats to pass a resolution nullifying the false emergency against Canada?

Regarding your confusion and surprise, the person you replied to merely gave their reason why they bought it and supported a transphobe, and it was because this person’s sister requested that game specifically.

I know the question posed was mostly rhetorical in nature. But I’m not sure why you are questioning why someone is answering the question, and I’m not sure what kind of satisfactory answer you could get from anyone who had purchased the game (and supported a transphobe, yes, which I haven’t).

The rest of your comment is a legit response, but I’m only pushing back on the first sentence of your reply. Or even moving that sentence to the back of your comment to make it less charged. If someone’s going to answer a loaded question, let them, but get to the point about how misguided they are with their justification before you question the answer. That would likely make for a more constructive discussion. Unless you think that these answers are unhelpful in the first place, that we’re better off not hearing why people have done transphobic things with different intentions, and we should refuse to give them space to reflect, learn, then own up to their transgressions if they don’t come right out of the gate to apologize. Then sure, ignore what I said.

Are you going to retire in the next four years? Or take all your cash out into gold, quit your job, and go into hiding for the next four years?

If neither apply to you, you can leave your money in your 401k. Selling index funds right now is ultimately up to you, but in the long term time in the market tends to beat timing the market.

What I’ve read in books is: Building up savings itself is more important than whether the returns are +10% or -10%, early in your career, since it will fluctuate but tends to average up.

And remember if your national index funds, bonds or whatever market and government backed investments lose half its value, you have bigger problems on your hand of the state of your country at that point which having cash on hand may or may not help anyway.

That’s contraband in the state of Texas.

I think a lot of people are waiting for the first Civ7 expansion pack to be released, whenever that may be.

Civ 6 without R+F, GS feels like a completely different game. As an example, in vanilla you can expand anywhere right up to someone’s borders whereas with the expansion straying too far from your territory you could just lose it to influential pressure from neighbouring cities.

Note that the problem states that the outer shape is a quarter circle, information not provided in OP’s question.

Knowing it is a quarter circle is important because it allows us to validate that the bottom-right angle is 90 degrees.

Catching real criminals is hard. Pretending innocent people are criminals is easy.

JBL sounds like your audio gear, depends on what. Bluetooth, USB audio ot 3.5mm jack connections generally work fine without issue. (Installing PulseAudio Volume Control will help you with finer grained volume control). Some DACs that require custom Windows drivers might not work.

Gaming stuff, Steam will have you covered, Lutris, Heroic, or itch.io for non-Steam stuff. The one unintuitive thing you have to do once you log in is to go to Steam Settings and check the “Use Steam Play for All Titles”. Just like that, 75% of your library that only have a Windows version will suddenly be playable and you’ll hardly notice a difference: just Download then click Play, that’s it (maybe a bit slower launch time).

I would recommend Firefox or Librewolf over Chrome as you have done already, but you should know that Chrome and Chromium do work on Linux FYI.

You made an excellent cake, it looks just like what you were totally going for from the start:

Hey… You want to make a bit of money…? You should do what I did, get into Farming…

It made that patch of grass more attractive for dogs to piss on, for one.

If you want to read the story of someone’s experience trying to block all the big tech companies from their life back in 2019. Their first week was trying to block Amazon.

Edit: A big challenge would be if you wanted to avoid connecting to sites that run off of or have content served by AmazonWebServices. To do that for example, you’d have to click these archive links for Gizmodo instead of the direct links I did above.

archive ver for link 1

archive ver for link 2

• Hello, Bye
• Thank you
• Excuse me
• Sorry
• Do you speak [your native language]? [Native Language] please?
• Where is …
• Check in?
• The bill?
• How do I get to…?
• I am from… [your country’s name in the foreign language]
• Yes/No
• How do you say [word] in [foreign language]?
• The bathroom?
• the hospital?
• the hotel?
• Help me!
• Emergency!
• Payphone? Portable charger? ATM?
• Taxi stand, Bus stop, Train Station?
• Restaurant/Eatery?
• Water, Food, [Your dietary restrictions]
• More/Less, High, Low, Left, Right, Up, Down

Certainly, maybe you can make a new AskLemmy post for that.

They have slowed some appointments in House committees.

The Senate Democrats have stayed late to filibuster nominations

Democrats have repeatedly attempted unsuccessfully to enter federal agency buildings to investigate ‘what the Doge doin’

Democrats have an upcoming opportunity to refuse to pass a budget with the trillion dollar tax cuts that Musk and other billionaire are trying to somehow justify with every fibre of their being. This means that everyone in the House (including purple state Republicans) have to be in lock step, even 2-3 R-defectors will mean it doesn’t pass.

Democrats have been proposing amendments left and right, into the night… House members have suggested excluding people with wealth over $10M, $100M and $500M, all voted down. Senators like Andy Kim for example, have put on their Instagram pages, what they are trying to do.

Congresspeople are doing their job harder than they ever thought they would have to, but we should expect more.

I do think all the Democrats, should take more opportunities to visit their states to make people aware of what’s going on, what they’re doing in Congress to try to stop the worst stuff happening, and what ordinary people can do to push back as well. I think members should also boost each others message because probably pages like AOC’s have a lot more viewers from a district than their own district’s House Rep.

Trump during the campaign has said a lot of things during the campaign. Some very concerning, some things appealing broadly. Some things he has said polar opposite things at consecutive campaign rallies. (You can still see it happening now with the “Ukraine started the Russian occupation” then “Russia started the Russian occupation”). Some promises he hasn’t done a thing to keep, such as make life affordable. I think a lot of people were holding on to that promise.

A lot of other things he didn’t promise at all, he is doing, supposedly to bury the lede. Did he ever talk about Denmark, Greenland or Panama in his 2024 campaign? We know he likes tariffs but I think the 51st state BS came about after his election.

On thinking before you speak, it means this: if something is said that makes you want to respond right away, when you sense a physical reaction (of hurt, anger, sadness or wanting retribution), or you are in a situation where what you say matters a lot (an interview, a meeting with higher-ups in a company etc.), it’s a mental cue for you to block immediate responses which can cause you to run your mouth in ways you later regret. Instead, you actively make an effort to listen more, and consider your situation and the other people’s situation before responding. So it’s not a 15 second pause after each sentence, but a 15 seconds you take while the other person is going on about whatever before you inject yourself into a conversation or before you make your point when it’s your turn.

On interacting with your coworkers, they’re not your therapists, so you can talk about what’s new and the fortunate and unfortunate things that happen to you over the course of a week, but the basic idea is to avoid making your problems their problems when you do.

I’m of a more positive nature but I love to info-dump on my coworkers about my favourite topics. I try to offset that by involving them and asking their opinion, showing them cool things, and then taking the turn to let them discuss their own intersts and thoughts on things, and follow up with that. And I try to get a sense if they aren’t interested in talking at a particular moment or are losing interest in the middle of a conversation. EQ skills are about taking that pulse.

If you need a place to start: The idea is give and take, and it should be in relatively equal amounts. Would you be able to tell me what has been on the minds lately of Coworkers 1-3? Or have you spent most of the conversation about yourself and your issues? (#4 doesn’t sound interested much in sharing their personal life, so you don’t have to probe them on it).

Instance A defederating B or vice versa is the same result. Any posts on any inaccessible remote communities will remain and act like local only communities, specific to your instance.

Change one thing just because you can. Take a different way to or from work, whether it is walking (and leaving much earlier), or a different bus/train or car route.

Listen to your favourite songs… look at the birds around you. Borrow a book from the library and read it, one bit at a time. Make the choices in your life, deliberate and DIFFERENT. Break your routine. Feel human.

Then you can choose to join a casual sports team, a minecraft server, something else for human contact.