AI hasn’t really taken much, if any tech jobs so far. If anything demand for building and using AI has taken up a good share of the job market in tech.

The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for “entry” level jobs because they simply won’t pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It’s also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the “grunt work”, for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they’ll get it done faster and more reliably. You’ll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very few, if any, fresh graduates.

It’s short term thinking that’s going to fuck the industry in a generation when all the old school guys die or retire, the senior engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers move up to fill their roles and you don’t have enough Jr engineers to become the seniors, leads and managers. They’ll be trying to manage entire teams from overseas, trying to replace people with AI, which will never be a true replacement, and they’ll suddenly see the value in hiring new graduates, but there won’t be enough by then because they made the major useless. The few that exist will probably make bank straight out of school, though, as companies become desperate for them.

You’ve openly stated that you will vote for them no matter what.

No, I said I will vote for them while they are the lesser of two evils and while no one else stands a chance. If they shoot to the right, a d become functionally indistinguishable from the GOP, or if a viable and better alternative presents itself, I’m gone.

Ehh, not exactly. You think there is a higher likelihood than I do that third-party gains power spontaneously without any indication that they are catching up to, much less overtaking either of the two major parties. When the winds of progress start making themselves apparent and a new legitimate challenger enters the stage, I will, of course, seriously consider them. Until such time though, my vote will go where is has a chance to matter in the current election.

I also acknowledge, though, that the Dems are doing very little for me and other progressive currently, nor even for your typical liberal. Short of not actively trying to dismantle the US government and our democracy, they are not exactly a shining light in the darkness that is our current situation. But while they are the only left-of-Fascism party with any chance in the running, I will continue to do what I can to correct their direction from a position that matter to them, as one of their voters. At the very least, if nothing else, they MIGHT be concerned about losing me if they go too far too fast to the right. But if I already dont vote for them and they arent moving in a way that is likely to reabsorb my vote, they can just forget about me. Can’t boycott something you already dont buy.

The Green Arrow was always a leftist activist analog. The problem with a serialized shared universe that parallels the real world is that you can never actually fix the problems that exist in the real world or else you lose that connection to it, but that also generates frustration too.

Like “cool” you can punch all the bad guys in Gotham, but why aren’t you eliminating poverty? Why aren’t you reforming corrupt the local government and police force? You fight alien invasions, but what have you done about ethnic cleansing and genocide? What about nuclear proliferation?

It was kind of nice in Superman (2025) that they actually had Superman dip a toe into addressing large scale real world issues with the invasion he stops and then deal with the aftermath of it. But that was about as complicated as we’re likely to see that real world parallel get unless they just turn the new DCU into a wholly different sort of world, a near utopia but police by the whims of a handful of ultra-powerful metahumans.

There are things on the internet that are free and fine to use. VPNs are not one of them. They have ongoing hosting and bandwidth costs. They are not eating those costs without recouping them somehow.

Yes, they are competing for GOP voters, rather than trying to pull in leftists. When leftists are on the ballot, they get a ton of votes, but the Democrats spend their time shooting down leftist candidates, because they don’t want to actually change.

Right, we dont disagree about that. And that is maddening as hell. But, again, the way to fix that is by voting out the incumbents, the same old lifetime career men that just want to maintain their positions rather than to seek change. Refusing to vote for the entire party at all because of them just removes your voice, one of the more critical reformist voices, from the conversation, from the vote that ultimately matters.

They have a choice: Pick up the voters that aren’t voting for one of the big-two parties, or pull in the right-wing voters. Which has been more productive in the past few elections?

Hint: It’s been the former.

Again, we agree. The old guard are morons who are trying hold onto their old school party tooth and nail and are dragging it down. I want to take the party back from the old codgers and give them the boot. I want new voices, young voices, pissed off voices, and I get that by voting for them. I get that by making sure that the party itself isn’t incentivized to move farther right. I get that by participating in the debate and through advocacy. Not by abandoning them wholecloth because the DNC is corrupt, so my voice doesnt matter anymore. We have to change it from within.

I do wish that other parties were viable on a national scale. I do. But they are nowhere near it. By all means, vote them into office when it is between them and a dem. By all means vote your conscience when the stakes are low or the choice is safer. But if a right wing nut job is the likely outcome of a split vote, especially on a national scale, please for the love of god, dont split the vote.

Yes, they can change, and the fastest way to get them to change, is to make them realize that they don’t have my support until they start fighting for what I want.

The message they are getting is that the majority of active voters are voting for the GOP. They are not competing for non-voters or people that uselessly vote for third parties without a chance, they are competing for voters. If you are incentivizing them to change in any way, you are incentivizing them to move right and court more moderate republican voters. Your strategy is inherently self-defeating.

Functionally, they are worse than doing nothing at all.

That’s simply not true. Neither about how they are universally supporting Republicans and fucking people over as a whole, nor that doing nothing is better. They are individuals, not a monolith, and the party is built from those individuals, not a static set of policies, principles and practices. It can be changed if you do something about it. And doing nothing does not acheive that. Best case scenario, doing nothing results in the same outcome, worst case it causes the worst outcome. Doing nothing is a cop out that makes you feel like you took some moral high ground while ultimately either not mattering at all or playing into the hands of the people who would do everything they can against your ideals. If you want to effect change, particularly for the democratic party, support and advocate for a new candidate with better ideals and resolve (or even run yourself), then primary out the useless incumbents. Far easier to do that then to suddenly see mass third party support giving them power to make change.

You started this conversation by advocating for not voting for Newsom if he is the only candidate with a chance against the GOP. If your “other parties” have fractional support of the democrats come general election day, they’re not viable alternatives and your vote for them is functionally identical to not voting at all.

By all means, I 100% support advocacy for change, for reform, for new people and ideas in power. But we also have a shitty voting system that means you usually need to pick the least of two evils come election day. And you need to be practical and make peace with that. I wish we had something like Approval voting where there was no push to a two party split and everyone could vote for every candidate or party they like, and I would support voting reform in that direction all day every day, but that is not what we have now.

You’re right. Better to just actively or indirectly (through inaction) support the party that is currently actively revoking civil rights on a national scale, and planning to rig/end elections to stay in power indefinitely. That will fix the broken system.

Comic books, more often than not, have always been pro-social values, and largely pretty progressive. The movies water some of that down sometimes, but it’s always been there at the core.

Funnily enough, the “American Way” bit that the average non-comic book reader thinks has always been a part of Superman’s motto, and that conservatives whinge about when it’s not in there, is not only not a part of the original motto (which which was just “Truth and Justice”), but has actually rarely been a part of it, and almost never in the actual comics.

The first use of it came about in 1942 during WWII in the Superman radio show. This is after the US finally entered the war and basically all media became hyper patriotic. It should be noted, though, that there was a comic strip titled “How Superman Would Stop the War” in Look magazine from Feb. 1940 in which Superman carried Hitler and Stalin to the League of Nations HQ to be sentenced for war crimes. This comic earned Superman’s creators hate mail and death threats for suggesting we should be involved in the war at all. So, American hypocrisy was, of course, alive and well.

Similar to that wartime patriotism, during the height of the Red Scare in the 1950’s, the Superman TV show starring George Reeves reused the tagline to play up the American-ness of Superman.

It wasn’t used again until 1978 with the Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve. This is probably where the tagline really cemented itself into the general consciousness of the country due to the movie’s popularity with a wide audience. But even then, it wasn’t used again until 1988 in the Ruby Spear’s Superman animated series (not to be confused with Superman: The Animated Series from 1996) and one line of dialogue in the Superboy TV show.

And even after all of that, it had not appeared A SINGLE TIME in the comics books until it appeared on a patriotic cover in 1991, 53 years after its first usage. And even in that issue, Superman is not an America-centric character, but both demonstrates and verbalizes his commitment to helping and representing the entire world, not just the US. He rescues a foreign president and says, "I believe in everything this flag stands for. But as Superman I have to be a citizen of the world. I value all life, regardless of political borders.” 20 years later, he actually formally renounced his American citizenship, saying, “‘Truth, justice and the American way’––it’s not enough anymore.” This received much controversy, as you’d expect.

But there are many other variants on the tagline and those variants, collectively, are far more common than the “American Way” variant. “Truth and justice" (Fleischer animated shorts, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) “truth, tolerance and justice” (Superman serial, starring Kirk Alyn) "truth, justice and freedom” (The New Adventures of Superman) “truth, justice and peace for all mankind” (Super Friends), “truth, justice and a better tomorrow” (Superman: Son of Kal-El), etc. Even some tongue-in-cheek references to the controversy like “Truth, Justice… and other stuff” (Smallville), and “Truth, Justice… and all that stuff”(Superman Returns).

And none of it was ever meant to be anti-American. Several writers have chosen to use the the American Way tagline in recent years in the comics, and there has been zero pushback from DC for it. But it is not the standard and should not be treated like an expectation.

I very clearly said that I hope we are not stuck with him. Hoping that Dems get their shit together and act right or at least get out of the waybof those who do is a constant state for me.

I mean someone who will not literally destroy our democracy to remain in power. The bare minimum.

Good take. Maybe the Kamala protest abstainers will have a fresh enough dose of Trumpism to remember that halfway-kind-of-decent-sometimes is better than literally-the-worst-possible-decision-at-all-times. I hope we still have elections. I hope we are not stuck with Newsom as the only choice. But if we are, he IS the only choice, and even though he’s not nearly a progressive, he is far closer to it than whatever the GOP rolls out with in 3 years (whether it is Trump again, Trump Jr., Vance, or a new piece of shit far right authoritarian). We need to make sure he wins, and that means getting your asses to the booth. All of us. Even you.

Executive. Orders. Are. Not. Laws.

The far right racists made Nixon’s attempts at election rigging look downright folksy by comparison, I guess.

The coalition agreements between parties keep the third parties more active and viable for sure. And third and fourth parties (and independents) are much more viable in smaller scale votes like individual districts that leans hard away from one of the major parties (much easier to get a democratic socialist voted for in a district where the Republicans dont stand a chance and so you have no reason to worry about the spoiler effect). But even in Canada, the PM vote ultimately came down between Carney and Poilievre, liberal and conservative, didnt it?

I misread for a second and thought you said it has 1 usb-a and 3 hdmi(!!!). For when you need a 4 monitor set up, and a mouse and NOTHING ELSE! Lol

It’s not “splitting the vote” it’s just an election with more than two viable options.

Say you have three major parties, the left wing democratic socialists, the moderate left liberals, and the right wing conservatives. The liberals do not generally support the more radical reforms of the democratic socialists, and the democratic socialists think that the liberal policies are too ineffectual and do not address the source of the problems as they see it. But they ultimately agree on the general direction the country should be moving and both of them know that the conservatives stand against nearly everything that they they stand for, and in fact have been recently marching towards far more dangerous policies that need to be stopped now. This should all sound very familiar.

Now, polls show that the general public’s first pick for party representation have 25 percent support for democratic socialists, 33 percent for liberals, and 38 percent for conservatives, with 4 percent undecided. If everyone votes for their first choice, the left wing WILL lose and the conservative party will take control. Despite the majority of people generally on the same side, the left, they still lose. This is the spoiler effect.

So say, instead, that people that fall in the middle, politically more between the liberals and democratic socialists see the writing on the wall and decide to switch from support from the democratic socialists to the liberals to ensure they don’t lose to the conservatives. Now the vote goes 16 percent democratic socialist, 43 percent liberal and 41 percent conservative and the liberals win by a narrow margin. This happens a few more time, maybe sometimes with the conservatives winning because people get comfortable voting again for the third party and spoiling the vote again just enough to lose the election for both left wing parties. Eventually, most people realize that the democratic socialists have no chance of gaining a plurality and so apart from a small percentage of hold outs, they get very few votes. Now you have a two party system. This is almost ALWAYS how this eventually happens.

BTW, if you switch to Approval voting, those people get to vote as they see fit for as many parties/candidates as they see fit. Their could be dozens of parties/candidates running, and they could actively be running joint campaigns or endorsing one another and there is no spoiler effect unless a majority decide only to vote for one and only one candidate (which would be functionally identical to First Past the Post). In the example numbers, many of the liberals would have also supported the democratic socialists and vice versa. One of the two would have won (usually the more moderate party, but not always), and the conservatives would have had to compete with their joint efforts instead of letting them fight each other to the conservatives advantage.