TwinIon

It'll be quite difficult to prove actual malice, but I think they might have a real chance.

Does this suddenly make him willing to compromise or vote to convict?

At the beginning of lockdown I caught up on a bunch of games that I'd bought and never finished or never played as well as a few that I picked up really cheap. A lot of single player action/adventure stuff. I played through most of the Assassins' Creed Series, a couple recent Far Cry games, FF7R, Last of Us 2. I played through Black Mesa and replayed Half-Life 2 so I was ready for Alyx. Then my tour of unfinished games took me back into Destiny 2, which has since eaten up hundreds of hours since. If there was one game that defined my time in quarantine, it would be Destiny. Especially for that first couple hundred hours, there are endless things to chase after. I'd just gotten to a point where I felt like I'd gotten most of what I was after when Beyond Light came out, introducing a whole new set of stuff to chase. I still expect to put time into it going forward, but I don't think it'll be quite the same kind of time sink it was for a while there. There are a bunch of single player games I'm looking to get through. Valhalla, Fenix Rising, Cyberpunk, and I now have a PS5 coming, so Miles Morales is now on the list as well.

To oblivion and beyond!

I've seen a few seasons of most of the CW superhero shows and I think I'm done with them unless this one deviates heavily from that formula.

Finally got an order in through Best Buy. Should be here by Tuesday if all goes well. Definitely the hardest it's been for me to get a gadget in a long time. I've been subscribed to twitter feeds and notification apps and discord channels since launch. Looking forward to giving it a go.

I'd disagree with that simplification. If I were to distill it to one sentence it would be that I think easing the passage of legislation would be an overall good thing, even though it would mean passage of a lot of stuff I don't like. Right now most of the GOP doesn't even have a policy agenda. Trump didn't run on one. When he did win and they had the ability to pass whatever they wanted they still couldn't get it together. I think it's quite possible that if we re-do 2016 but knew going in there was no filibuster the GOP might actually have written some bills. Maybe they'd have put forward a real ACA alternative. I doubt I'd have liked anything they would have passed, but a democratically elected government should be able to actually govern, and a huge part of that is passing a policy agenda through legislation, but it hardly ever happens now. The way the Georgia runoff was framed, it was basically a choice between a government that maybe accomplishes something vs one that is all but guaranteed to never pass anything. I'd be much happier with a government that tried things more regularly even though that would obviously mean a lot of stuff happening that I disagree with.

This piece in the Atlantic is short and worth a read. It makes the argument that while we've seen heightened condemnation of Trump's federal execution spree, the far larger execution program continues to be those done with drone strikes. In 542 strikes, Obama killed 3,797 people (including 324 civilians), and while it is thought Trump further accelerated the program, the lack of transparency makes it impossible to verify. The article brings up the case of American journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem who believes he is on a secret kill list and has survived five separate drone strikes. His case continues to work it's way up the court system, as he sues the federal government asking for due process. In order to get that due process, he wants to know "(1) whether the government had made a determination to kill him; (2) if yes, if it actually tried to kill him; (3) the process by which the government decided to target him; (4) the factual basis for deciding to target him; and (5) whether he was still a target." Last week the US Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling that he does not have standing in this case, because he can't prove that these bombings were actually US drone strikes. Adding transparency, reducing, or ending the drone program would be a significant step for Biden to right one of the more significant wrongs of the last three administrations. I hope he decides to do the right thing.

When I hear arguments against killing the filibuster I get the impression that they largely boil down to some fear that the US Senate will suddenly adopt the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things," but I don't really think there's much chance of that happening. Other arguments largely boil down to "well, the other guys will be able to pass things when they're in power," and to that I largely say "bring it on!" I want government to be elected on the premise that the democratically elected officials will pass the policies they ran on. Right now I feel like we see so many on the right run on completely empty policy proposals. 2016 was the perfect opportunity for them to pass whatever they wanted, to replace the ACA they so bitterly hated, but they didn't have a better plan, only shallow opposition. If we changed the power structure a little bit and suddenly there was a higher expectation that if you won control of the government you'd actually be able to enact your policies, I think there might be more actual policy debate and more consequences for enacting policies both good and bad. As it stands, I get the impression that most people (myself often included) don't expect many real policies to get enacted, because so little opposition is required to prevent it. The only real issue that I have with making policy easier to implement in general is that we currently have a situation where one party holds wholly outsized influence compared to their voting population, and when they have power they actively seek to prevent or otherwise manipulate the actual democratic process to hold onto power they otherwise might not. Of course, the fixes for that (ending the electoral college, voting rights acts, etc.) would largely come from legislation that wouldn't get passed without ending the filibuster.

I want to believe that McConnell's further obstructions will convince the necessary folks to get rid of the filibuster, but I won't hold my breath. There's nothing about his time as majority leader that indicates he's willing to work with the Dems or compromise on basically anything that matters. I don't know what else he could possibly do to demonstrate the necessity of ending the filibuster.

It was on the ballot again last year and it passed with 52% of the vote.

I don't really think it makes sense for people living in the US to lack the representation that comes with statehood. Especially during the last four years, we've seen the power that states still wield. So overall I'm in favor of DC Statehood. Still, I don't feel like the people in DC are terribly underrepresented or otherwise forgotten, at least not to the extent that people in Puerto Rico are. Assuming the people in PR support statehood, they should be a priority.

Freakonomics did an episode about Mattresses a while back. It's a weird industry.

I'm seeing the Q threads saying they were duped, but I'd love to know what % of the Q faithful fall off the train now. How many will believe the inevitable theories that this is all still part of the plan and Trump is really pulling all the strings behind the scene? With Trump out of office, surely they'll shed many of the more casual followers, but given the decentralized nature of the whole conspiracy and the deplatforming of so many groups/followers, I feel like it'll take a while to figure out how many are still believers.

This is Marvel spending some of that goodwill they've been working on over all these years. It's not bad, but with essentially no indication as to where it's going, I'm largely sticking with it because it's Marvel and it must be going somewhere. It's quite a bold decision to launch the new Marvel Studios Television with this show and these episodes in particular. You'd need some serious confidence to assume your audience will stick with you, and that's exactly what Marvel has. If nothing else, I'm glad they're trying something different.

I hope they put a Blue Lives Matter sign on the door. Also, wonderful detail that they'd go use the restroom at Obama's place, and that even Pence isn't so petty as to prevent the people keeping him safe from using his toilet.

The house already passed the bill to increase checks to $2000. I don't think it's always been well worded, but I'm confident that the promise has always been to increase this round of stimulus to $2000, never to send out $2000 on top of the recently passed $600.

I found this kinda funny: Pirate Bay Founder Thinks Parler’s Inability to Stay Online Is ‘Embarrassing’ I do think it shows an incredible lack of foresight on behalf of Parler that they didn't see this coming and prepare for it in the least. You could maybe argue that Gab was rightfully caught off guard, even though there had been examples like 4chan/8kun/TPB they should have learned from, but Parler launched about a month after Gab got deplatformed. It's incredible to me that they didn't think it could happen to them. Honestly, I think the difference between something like Pirate Bay and Parler's ability to stay online is that the Pirate Bay was a "tech" organization, and Parler is not. It makes a lot of sense to build most new companies on existing frameworks and platforms. Why hire smart tech guys that could build a hosting infrastructure when you can just sign up for an AWS account? Why build a software stack for auth when you can use Twillo or a payment stack when you can use Stripe? Why have any in-house tech knowledge when you can outsource it to companies that have already solved those problems? If I was trying to sell widgets online, there probably wouldn't be any reason to do any of that. My core competency would need to be the creation and distribution of widgets, not the boring tech stack that my store runs on. However, if you build your entire company around the idea that this is the place for terrible people to say terrible things and not get punished for it, you have no right to be surprised when some of that content gets you in trouble. 230 might protect you from the government, but it's not going to give your company the knowledge base to stand up your own servers.

I've already seen posts saying they might have to wait for "a little while" after inauguration before the mass arrests and Trump's second term to start. Never underestimate their power of self delusion.

I'm aware that he doesn't need to have committed a specific crime. I was just thinking about all the jokes about how (should he be removed) it's only a few years too late, and wondering if there were other times that a theoretical reasonable congress would have impeached him.

If we had an honest, functional, and non-partisan congress during the whole of the Trump presidency, at what point would he have been impeached? There's been so much during these last four years it's hard to keep track. He's been dreadfully incompetent, hyper-partisan, consistently cruel, repeatedly bowed to enemies and inflamed allies, but other than these two impeachments, I'm having a hard time thinking of something else specific he should have been impeached for, but I feel like there must have been something. Tax fraud maybe?

I'm guessing it'll be a Destiny style experience where you have these relatively small spaces on multiple planets, but I hope that's not the case. I've put hundreds more hours in Destiny than Division, but something I really like about the Division games is that they feel like more expansive locations. It helps that it's mostly one single map, rather than a bunch of different ones, but locations in Destiny feel small. Still, I don't see how you make a big Star Wars game and keep people on a single planet, and if you have multiple planets, I don't know how you make each one sufficiently big. Hopefully they find a way.

Amazon's response to Parler was filed Tuesday and while I'm no lawyer, I think they have a pretty good case. I can't find a great twitter thread breaking down the important bits, but apparently Amazon has been repeatedly telling Parler that they need to better moderate their content, for months. Parler hardly changed their moderation at all, relying largely on "volunteers" and at some point admitting to Amazon they had a backlog of 26,000 reports they hadn't gone through. So Parler's contract with Amazon stated they couldn't host much of this content (which Amazon provides examples of you can see in the above linked Verge post), Amazon warned them they needed to clean it up, Parler did nothing significant in response while holding a public position that they wouldn't be, and ruling in favor of Parler would effectively be forcing Amazon to host speech that is heinous, against their own TOS, and arguably against the law. They also address the Twitter antitrust issue, noting that Parler doesn't even suggest that Amazon and Twitter conspired, that there is no such communication anyways, and also that they don't even host the Twitter feed portion of Twitter, so any comparisons to Twitter content is irrelevant anyways. It's no shock, but I think Amazon has better lawyers than Parler and it seems the facts are on their side.

So we got a 3060, but no 3080 Ti? Bummer.

This Essay in the Times is worth a read in general, and (among many things) it makes a good case for why we would see Mitch think Impeachment might be a good idea: [The essay outlines two types of Republicans: those concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power (gamers), and those who think they can break the system and hold onto power (breakers]