The article doesn't mention US citizens specifically, just US adults. But yes, the context and link make it clear it wasn't talking about South America, but even if it were, there's a table in the article that has a list of countries literacy rates. A cursory glance shows Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador as having higher literacy rates than the US.
I don't know how accurate these stats are, but it's interesting nonetheless.
See, this is the problem. Actually, serious policies (meaning, more serious than "drill baby drill" or "build a wall") are long, complicated, and boring. They don't fit neatly into a soundbite or a chant at a rally, so people who don't have the temperament or capacity to seek out and read such documents think the policies don't exist.
In seriousness, the solution is that Democrats need to be better at messaging by crafting policies that are understandable to their audience.
No, the problem is the medias (and campaign strategists) didn’t even try to communicate on these policies, and again thought social progressivism alone would do. That worked for a time in the early 2010s but they have yet to realize that when there are economic troubles it’s not enough to win elections, as this vote demographics show. No need to insult the intellectual capacity of the other camp.
It's not an insult, and I wasn't addressing either "camp." It's an observation that most people don't have the interest or ability in understanding government policy, and there isn't a good way to communicate the facts of the matter in a way that's accessible to most people. This is a problem of the media, who want everything broken into 30-second sound bites; but of course the media don't exist in a vacuum: they serve the media consumer, who won't listen to anything longer than 30 seconds, which unfortunately isn't enough time to explain the relationship between tariffs and inflation.
Voters demand simple explanations for complex realities, and simple solutions to complex problems, and as a result, the successful politician must fabricate simple explanations and simple solutions, even if they're wrong.
But Democrats gave simple explanations: “Joe is the sharpest he has ever been, the economy is the best you experienced your grocery bill increase is in your mind, no need to hold primaries and have your opinion we know this candidate is the best, etc… and if you disagree with any of this your are not smart enough”. I’m harsh but as a non American leaning left economically I found myself in disagreement many times this pas year but any criticism was met with huge suspicion.
Sure, there were many mistakes made by the Democrats' campaign. In your examples, the problem is not that the explanations are simple, but rather that they are obviously wrong.
EDIT: For fun, let's contrast the attitude of each campaign to its detractors. The Democrats say that people who oppose their strategies are dumb. The Republicans say that people who oppose their strategies are Communist pedophiles who want to destroy America.
I don’t disagree, but regarding your edit I’m not saying Republicans are not (way) worse, but that I’m hugely disappointed at Democrats. My hope was that instead of taking inspiration from Republicans they would lead an other way.
What many heard the Democrats say was that if you oppose their policies you're not only dumb, you're also a racist, misogynist, fascist, nazi, and a threat to democracy.
What was said, repeatedly, is that _Trump_ is a racist, misogynist, has fascist and nazi tendencies, and is a threat to democracy. All of which is true. Ask his former chief of staff.
I disagree with most GOP policies, but don't have an issue with people voting Republican -- I would have been okay with someone like Romney or McCain as president; I could probably even handle pre-MAGA DeSantis (wouldn't be happy but whatever, we'll live). But if people are voting for _Trump_ specifically, then either they hold the same values as Trump, or they're willing to sell out their values for a promise of cheap gas (that they aren't even going to get!). Either way it's pretty bad.
Multiple people on my social networks were saying something along the lines of "If you are voting for Trump, unfriend me because you're dead to me and I don't even want to talk to you about it." Notably I didn't see anything like this coming from the Trump fans. This is because those who have remained inside the Democratic Party have become so indoctrinated that the opinions of the Progressive Left are factual that they now see this as not disagreements, but a religious war. And they're coming unglued now this week because they used to believe that having the popular vote on their side for years meant that their Correct Side was being oppressed because of a malfunctioning democracy. This week, suddenly they have to either admit that they don't really care about democracy as much as their pet ideologies, or that their ideas are radical and unpopular because they're bad.
I'm glad that your conservative friends are so tolerant, but mine aren't. Plenty of conservatives have no problem calling liberals Satanist, anti-American, pedophiles. Just look around.
It didn't used to be like this. The tone of politics changed when name-calling, bullying, and hate became part of campaigning. The country is divided, and the source of the vitriol is one man.
The source is most certainly not just one man. Go listen to recordings of Rush Limbaugh. Or the parody at the start of Hackers. The party has been stoking this blind populist destructive rage for decades, and then channeling the frustration into support for their establishment candidates. Their monster got loose, they got Trump, and now we've got Trump.
As for the larger social relations context, this link posted elsewhere in the thread nailed it for me: https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/liberal-tear... (Excuse the crapwall, it doesn't seem to show up with javascript disabled). I will likely ghost everyone that is openly cheering for this. I'm just not capable of entertaining the gloating over populist destruction at this time. Perhaps in six months or a few years I will be able to forgive what they have done.
For context, I'm libertarian. I own a compact tractor and burn cordwood for primary heat. I find much of the overbearing "woke mob" tedious, and internally roll my eyes when I hear things like parents talking about how their kid is trying out a new pronoun every week. But the left would never have been capable of damaging the very bedrock of our society the way that so-called conservatives throwing their own principles into the trash has.
Thank you. I try. It certainly doesn't feel like I'm sane, especially this week.
I had a realization yesterday. This is just like someone close to you dying. The sudden unassailable loss. Walking around in a dazed brain fog going through the motions and not even knowing why. Things are now just different, and will never go back to how they were. But it made me realize that I myself will recover in spite of that, and this put me more at peace.
> now see this as not disagreements, but a religious war
Your mind is detaching from reality.
MAGA policies directly hurt some people. Let me say that again. MAGA policies DIRECTLY hurt some people.
They're not being your friend because you're conservative, it's because you're supporting policies that will hurt them. Would you be friends with someone who hurts you?
For example, I am a gay man. Conservatives across the country have been trying to undo protections around PrEP under the guise of religious freedom. The true motivation is inciting another HIV epidemic.
I take PrEP. I don't want HIV. I don't want my friends to get HIV. If you vote for these people, you are directly contributing to bodily harm to me and my community. I cannot support you, because that would be self-destructive.
But that's just me. Now look at abortion - many women know people or have themselves, required an abortion. Many have brushed with death. What conservatives propose will DIRECTLY harm them. Trump plans to chase people leaving states for abortions - this will actually, tangibly, directly, harm people!
You don't see this from "trump fans" onto liberals because the left does not propose any policies that will hurt them. If Kamala would've won, nothing bad would happen to conservatives. If we believe Trump, which I do and you should as well, then MANY bad things will happen to leftists. That's the difference.
Liberals aren't "offended" by Trump. Liberals don't have a problem with the "way he expresses himself." The problem is with his governance and policies that do real damage to people we care about.
The reason you don't see conservatives being similarly alarmed by liberal policies is because liberal policies don't hurt people.
To saying nothing of what he's done to American democracy. Before the election, there was plenty of hoopla about another stolen election. Then, when Trump won, suddenly that disappeared. What about the mailman carrying hundreds of ballots? Oh, I guess he's okay now. This exposes the hypocrisy at the core of Trump ideology: our election system is horribly broken except when Trump wins. That's not how democracy works and taking that attitude should be immediately disqualifying.
Also the majority do believe it about Trump, but they hand wave it away, or just don't care. And, in a minority of cases, they agree and enjoy being able to openly flaunt it. It's no coincidence that I see Confederate and Trump flags on the same properties.
Not too different than the Germans who voted for Hitler -- though in fairness to them, Hitler seemed pretty normal when he was elected, so you can forgive them for not knowing (and once knowing, it was too late). We already know what Trump is, so what's the excuse now?
I'm not sure there's a better approach for an incumbent administration. The alternative would have been, "Inflation is bad, but we're going to fix it if you elect us," which to the average voter raises the question: "Why not just fix it now?"
One option would be to reply with "out plans are measured in centuries, keep electing us and things will get better, eventually". But this would probably require to have such plans.
> they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.
You've hit the nail on the head. They "like Trump." They find him charismatic and entertaining. Democrat politicians are boring and starched. Politics is show business. Why can't the Democrats learn that?
Anyway, the two party system seems to breed extremes. I'd like to see ranked choice, same day, primaries, and abolishment of the slavers' electoral college.
Yes, we like charismatic candidates, but we don't run them.
In all sincerity, Jon Stewart is highly electable. More realistically, I think Pete Buttigieg would dominate the podcast circuit in a way that Kamala Harris dared not even try.
They can't learn this because this ideology is populism, and a lot (most?) educated people are against this type of campaigning.
However, we must admit it is effective and it would do the democrats good to be more populist. It's just hard to be populist without resorting to emotional appeals, propaganda, fear mongering, misinformation, etc.
That's not what I'm saying. Populism represents an ideology about policy, i.e. do what the people want. My argument that "Politics is show business" is about the presentation of a campaign, not its content. One can use a persuasive presentation to market any policy viewpoint, populist or not.
Trump's campaign has alternately incoherent and destructive policy proposals, but the narrative he presents is exquisite (without being necessarily true): "A popular and successful businessman selflessly sacrifices his own comfortable lifestyle to bring common sense to politics by sweeping away greedy bureaucrats and wasteful institutions, along the way surviving assassination attempts, criminal charges, and a malign media campaign to discredit him." It's a great story, with heroes and villains. It's easy to get swept up in that story and want to be part of it. Certainly Trump's experience as a TV star has given him insights into crafting a narrative that engages with people.
The Democrats' have sensible policy but virtually no narrative. At best (as someone tweeted, can't find original source now) the Democrats are in the position of defending imperfect institutions. The Dems blow loads of money on ad buys, but what they need is writers to create a story that engages people emotionally.
> What the average voter hears: I don't care about any of that. Prices were lower under Trump and he's a businessman, so I'll vote for him so prices go back down.
Yes, and critically: "I trust Trump when he says it's Biden's fault, so I'll vote for him."
It doesn't matter how correct the interlocutor is if the average voter doesn't trust them. Unfortunately, most people place trust in people who appear sincere and unrehearsed, which is the opposite of how much politicians behave, where a "starched, bland, rehearsed" style is traditional. Trump is improvised and chaotic, which people mistake for genuine and trustworthy.
Also simplistic answers are easy to understand and sound thruthful. Whereas complex answers sound wishy washy to probably the average worker class member.
You really do need to adapt your message to your audience. If I'm explaining tech issues to my mom or in-laws, I over-simplify and analogize. If I'm talking to a team member, I'm direct, and specific. If I'm talking to management, the applicable buzzwords and narrative building towards organizational goals get high priority.
Exactly. Nerds (like me) appreciate complex explanations from politicians, but if a politician tries to explain causes of inflation or the subtleties of diplomacy to an average voter, it will be perceived as digressive and unnecessarily confusing.
We also actually saw very little of Biden during his presidency even during his 2020 campaign. The glimpses we did get often looked alarming regarding his fitness. Then the debate and it couldn't be hidden anymore. Many took this to be the evidence we were lied to for 4 years and don't know who is running the country, which caused the admin to appear very untrustworthy.
> Not enough to dissuade the people that like him from voting for him again.
Then apparently trustworthiness isn't a desirable property for a politician among the American people. What incentive does an aspiring politician have to be truthful if Trump can get elected?
Regular Americans don't have any idea what's going. They don't know what inflation is, or what is causing it. They only know what they're told, so what matters is who they listen to. (Look at recent polls that show that Republicans feel that they are heavily impacted by inflation, and Democrats much less so.) Unfortunately, the traditional sources of information have lost the trust of a large body of the American people, so they look elsewhere for a source of trust, and they find it in a charismatic con-man.
Trump spent years pretending to be a businessman on TV, and that skills pays off at his rallies and his interviews, where he perfected the improvisation that rubes mistakes for sincerity. Any other politician speaks in rehearsed clichés, which Americans have been accustomed to, and which they associate with dishonesty, even when they're telling the truth. It helps, and does not hurt, that Trump says crazy shit that keeps people entertained. I don't believe that politics should be based on that kind of thrill, but apparently it is.
Trump's actual policy proposals are mostly nonsense, but it doesn't matter. If you want to compete with him, you have to to be (a) interesting and (b) persuasive.
The election results don't make much sense in terms of serious policy. Voters worry about inflation: they vote for tariffs? Voters worry about democracy: they vote for the guy responsible for J6? Voters are 50% female: they vote for a SCOTUS that care less women's issues? The only issue where a vote for Trump coincides with voter concerns is immigration.
It's easier to explain this election in terms of "Trump seems confident and strong... Harris seems scripted and phony." The closest thing to a real issue is probably the impression that "Democrats are a bunch of radical woke communists"
Go to any middle school in America and figure out who the popular kids are. It's not the ones with good ideas on how to improve education, or even to get Xboxes in every classroom - its the hot, mean kids with charisma who make the other hot mean kids laugh. Its human nature to want to be in that in-group. When you ask them why they vote a certain way, they say something about the economy or trans kids or whatever, but IMHO it's much more primal than any of that. The dems are still campaigning to the greatest generation but society has regressed and America is just one big middle school right now.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this, and it’s worth reflecting on.
Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges, and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.
At a time where there is armed conflict spreading across the world again, this kind of personality is appealing to a large portion of the population, and understandably so.
> Trump survived an assassination attempt, a series of questionably motivated legal challenges,
Sure, but he was plenty popular before all of that. The appeal, imho, is in the calculated appearance of sincerity and toughness... from a guy who is in reality embodies neither of those qualities. Both the assassination and legal challenges amplify the appearance of toughness. The "mean kids" comment is spot on.
> and then leaned into showing up for hostile interviews during the campaign.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Joe Rogan and Theo Von are pretty far from being hostile to Trump.
Any such calculated attempt at appearing tough would break down when a bullet barely missed your head. His reaction of staying on stage and encouraging the crowd would be quite hard to fake.
> Any such calculated attempt at appearing tough would break down when a bullet barely missed your head. His reaction of staying on stage and encouraging the crowd would be quite hard to fake.
No, just years of improv training.
As a reminder, this is a guy with the thinnest skin imaginable, who literally cannot tolerate any criticism, has never exercised or done physical labor in his life, and has never faced any challenge he couldn't buy himself out of. It's all an act. Sorry to hear that you're just as gullible as the majority of voters.
Talking down to the majority of voters is a large factor in why the democratic party lost this election. The US needs a strong democratic party just as much as it needs a strong republican party. Dems gave us the modern concept of a weekend, public services that are vital to social mobility, and many more things.
Rather than resenting a large part of the nation for their vote, my hope is that we all practice humility and reflect on the truth regarding why this happened and not just chalk it up to "over half the country is stupid".
Not the GP, but I have a workflow that depends on the functionality in x11vnc, which allows me to script sharing of individual windows, regions, or desktops. AFAIK, nothing comparable exists in Wayland, and there isn't even the possibility to bring something like that to non-wlroots environments. So I'm stuck on X11 for now.
There's really nothing that can be said then but I personally use `waypipe` like this `waypipe ssh user@127.0.0.1 sway` so that I can run remote sessions and it works amazingly. I sometimes use it to run GUI apps like thunar on my home laptop with tailscale when Im not at home. its basically `ssh -x`
Check out waypipe. It's not compatible with every piece of software, but when it works, it's like one of those magic "run x application over the network" legends except it actually works well.
Any editor, to be fluid and quick at today's screen resolution, needs hardware rendering. The days of drawing things pixelwise, especially any complex formatting, are noticeably slow.
busybox hexedit is an editor. It's fast for viewing and editing in hex. No GPU required. No need for ncurses either. toybox hexedit adds optional colors.
Yes, if you ignore what I wrote and cut the conditions short, you can change the conclusions. Yet I still don't think you're understanding how even console hardware tends to work.
Busybox hexedit is not drawing pixels. What do you think is drawing those glyphs on the screen? Very few font renderers are pixel based software, even for tiny systems, since that's slow (and font blitters are soooo cheap to embed).
Another way to see it - where in the hexedit code is the font drawing? In busybox? Oh, it relies on something else to do it, and even most of those are hardware accelerated. Here's the hexedit code [1]. Start there, walk back through how it prints, how that is implemented in busybox, how busybox defers that to hardware, back into various supported platforms, look at the chip sets, and voila... Hardware accelerated in most cases (I don't see one offhand that does pixel writes any more).
Pretty much all console hardware now is hardware accelerated. If you log into a device and run SSH from a larger machine, those glyphs are hardware accelerated.
So which combinations do you claim have no hardware acceleration (and if possible, meet other conditions I actually listed, like modern screen resolutions)?
Textmode on pretty much every laptop since the beginning of time uses a GPU to draw characters in textmode. GPU doesn't mean NVidia, it means graphics accelerator, and they've been used since the 1970s or earlier to turn ASCII characters into glyphs onscreen.
The earliest IBM PCs and compatibles used hardware acceleration for textmode, and those ancient BIOS interfaces and successors are still used to draw characters, not pixel by pixel, but with hardware acceleration.
So whether or not you like it, whether or not you understand how your laptop actually works, you're almost certainly using a GPU to render textmode.
The MIPS router that I connect to via SSH does not have a GPU. Nor does the laptop I use to connect to it. I am not a gamer and I have never purchased an expensive graphics card. The first "GPU" went on sale in 1999. In that time period, I used VGA textmode^1 to do hex editing. I still use textmode today. I do not run X11/Wayland/whatever. I do not use a terminal emulator. I am not interested in Unicode; I deliberately avoid UTF-8 where I can. In all the time i have been using computers, I have not needed hardware acceleration for editing hex. I do not forsee that changing before I die.
Your laptop most certainly has a GPU, even if it's not a dedicated one. All modern desktop environments use GPU acceleration, it's just that integrated GPUs are good enough for anything but the most demanding games. They are also enough for ImHex
The first GPU went on sale decades before 1999: all personal computers used dedicated hardware to accelerate text mode - none of them could early on draw pixels fast enough to draw a screen of text at anything usable for text editing.
All laptops use a GPU since the very first PCs used BIOS routines to access the graphics card, which, surprise surprise, accelerate textmode to make it usable. You're proving my point.
Same goes for pretty much any MIPS router that connects to a screen. List your make and model, and I'll find the docs showing you how the GPU in it is used to draw characters in text mode.
Even the term "text mode" is a holdover from those 1970s era cards: they had dedicated graphics modes where you draw pixels, and hardware accelerated modes called textmode where ASCII bytes get drawn, by hardware acceleration, as characters.
The UI is built using Imgui (hence the Im prefix) which is a Ui framework for computer graphics programs.
Though, a couple nits:
1. An OpenGL requirement doesn’t necessitate a GPU. There are software implementations of OpenGL but they tend to be rather mediocre at best for performance.
2. Many platforms now assume some kind of GPU. It’s fairly rare to need a GUI tool without also having a GPU available. Of course there are niches for it, but those aren’t also likely to be running a hex editor and tooling locally.
'GPU' doesn't mean discrete, power-hungry graphics card either (not that you said it did).
OpenGL calls for basic desktop rendering can be reliably handled by the integrated graphics in the CPU. In which case OpenGL can almost be viewed as a parallel instruction set / DSL.
> There are software implementations of OpenGL but they tend to be rather mediocre at best for performance.
This is because OpenGL is made so that you need to run a program to calculate color of every pixel, even if all you want is to copy a glyph. Obviously it will be slow unless you have hundreds of core running in parallel. Software implementations should either learn to convert shaders to non-parallel optimized loops, or something other than OpenGL should be chosen as a basis for rendering GUI.
Also, ImGUI (which is an immediate mode toolkit) is a weird choice for GUI program, isn't it better to use retainted mode library that updates only parts of the window that have changed?
Which to me means "Tap water is safe and effective" is a broad statement that doesn't consider pollutants outside of PFAS, which vary depending on the regional water treatment system and how they are operated from region to region.
"safe" and "effective" means different things between different regulating bodies.
In short, you can initialize an array like this, by specifying each element in order:
However, you can also initialize specific array elements: "BASIC compatibility" mode uses the above syntax.reply