Still Vreni on Bluesky

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Last October, Ron, a 55-year-old construction analyst for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was furloughed for 43 days as the Trump administration took a sledgehammer to federal agencies’ budgets under the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

“We voted for Trump, not realizing that he was going to slam as hard as he did, but it was on day one when he sat down, right after inauguration, and started signing those executive orders and just trashed us federal employees, it was a kick in the teeth,” Ron said.

“If people would just listen and research and do something other than just listen to Fox News, we may all be better off, but it's going to take an open mind and an ability to say, ‘I made a mistake,’ because once you say you made a mistake, you can turn the ship around,” said Chrissey Kelley, 50, a stay-at-home mom.

Speaking out against MAGA cost the Kelleys relationships with friends and family members who support Trump, but in sharing their story, they hope to inspire others having doubts about the GOP. 

“It's okay to be wrong. You made a mistake, it was a bad choice, but it's not the end of the world. We can fix it. We just got to ride it out and hold strong and support each other through it,” Ron said.

. . . Chrissey said she became a Republican as soon as she started voting.

“You were just a conservative. There was no thought behind it. You listen to Fox News, and you listen to conservative outlets, and you're spoon-fed,” Chrissey said.

Ron, who served in the military for 25 years, said the 2008 housing market crash left him “really disillusioned with the Democratic Party.”

When he couldn’t find work in Detroit, he moved to Georgia. He supported Republicans because he associated them with bigger spending on defense.

Ron said he supported Trump with donations, bumper stickers and the “whole nine yards” of MAGA.

“I bought into the lie about the stolen election and all that, and I thought January 6 insurrectionists were actually patriots,” Ron said.

“I just remember being content with thinking that he was what we needed, and he was going to drain the swamp in Washington until he got into office this third term, and realizing that I was dumb as a rock, and I believed everything that I was spoon fed.”

. . . “Just watching the policies of what's happening in our world today unfold one by one by one, I just started drawing up very different conclusions and found out that I was clueless, and most people are today, but now I'm awake and looking at it for what it is, and I cannot believe that he had my support,” Chrissey said.

“It's lie after lie after lie.”

Ron said he now votes for Democrats, and Chrissey said she considers herself an Independent but has voted for Democrats three times now, something she “never thought in my entire life” would happen. 

“The road we're headed down now, if we don't turn this truck around, we're so close to going off the edge of the cliff that we need to stick together,” Ron said.

“We need to put our country back together. It might take decades, but don't give up. We need to be vocal. Stay strong, and follow our laws and Constitution, and hold strong with our values, not the values that the MAGA claims that we have, but the values that we've had in the past 250 years from the founding of the country til Joe Biden's era.”

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sauce

I know I'm not the only one who feels like I'm getting visually assaulted everytime I drive at night. It was bad 10 years ago but now, it seems like headlight manufacturers have a deal with insurance companies and optometrists to make the lights as bright as possible. Is this ever going to stop or is there some kind of race in the headlight industry to see who can reproduce the power of the sun first?

I was too lazy and sore to do the things I should be doing. Previous owners had this pegboard but left no hardware. I finally got the hardware so today I drank beers and did this instead of assembling my garden fence.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1159425/ronny-chieng-s-f-ck-ai-speech-met-with-cheers-from-harvard-graduates

Extra.

“Can I just say fuck AI, fuck AI, fuck AI?” the comedian, actor, and rotating host of The Daily Show asked in his keynote speech during the Class Day celebration on Wednesday. The crowd at Tercentenary Theatre, made up of the graduating Class of 2026 and their friends and families, answered him with a roar of approval.

I was too curious and broke the seal. Will actually try to use it, probably for the rare full /home backup every 2 or 3 years, since it needs external power and is probably not that fast. I'd date this artifact late 2000s? It might have USB 2, making it fast enough.

Weird though that I'd buy this and forget about it forever. It definitely cost enough to matter to me back then.

Crossposted from https://lemmy.zip/post/65160131

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/47200357

One critic called the move “petulance beyond measure.”