piefood

I use LUKS and backup to a usb-drive that I have at home. I rsync those backups to my work once a week. Not everyone can backup to their office, but as others have said, backing up to a friend/family member's house is doable. The nice thing about rsync is that you can limit the bandwidth, so that even though it takes longer, it doesn't saturate their internet connection.

I've known plenty of them. They sign up specifically because they want to do this job. Rember the dumb bullies from school? Imagine what happens when they grow up.

As someone who grew up fundamentalist-religious and right-wing, but then got out of it, it's becuase of a few things:

• You'd have to restructure a lot of your world-view, and that is very hard. You have to take a fundamental part of how you see the world, discard it, and watch a bunch of other values and beliefs come crashing down. Rebuilding from that is scary and hard.

• You have a lot of social investment as being part of the "in-crowd" of your community. A lot of your friends/family/colleagues/social-circle all keep reinforcing your beliefs. This makes it hard to step away from those beliefs, because you feel like you are betraying that community. Many communities will indeed abandon you, especially if you go to the "other side". You suddenly have to become the enemy that you've been rallying against.

• Sunk-Cost fallacy: You've already spent so much time and effort in this belief, that youre really hoping something will happen, and your faith in the person or system will be justified. Eventually it'll pay off if you wait just a little longer. Of course, "wait a little longer" ends up being years and years, and at that point you have more compounded mistakes that you have to admit to. This makes you feel like a bigger idiot than if you had just admitted your mistakes up front.

tl;dr: It's a cult!

Yup, look at things like Tetris. No story, no dialogue, no cut-scenes. Just a solid Core Gameplay Loop. Sure, I like a lot of the additional stuff, but if you make the Core Gameplay Loop fun, everything else is just window-dressing

Yup, we are mostly in agreement. I will push back on this though:

Because voting is one of the least effortful political action that can be taken

For a lot of people, taking a day off work, to spend hours in line at a polling booth, while voter intimidation is kind of allowed, is a lot of effort. Especially when you factor in that they need to spend time researching the candidates and issues they'll be voting on. I've lived in places where even getting registered was a huge pain, and took a lot of time. Where I currently live, voting is super easy, and I appreciate that, and I think it's less of an excuse. But for a lot of people, it does take a lot of effort, and I find not voting in those circumstances more understandable.

On the west coast. Most polls that I've seen show that those aren't progressive values, they are the vaules that most people have. The Democrats just keep chosing unpopular positions, because they care more about their donors than voters.

I'm not sure thats true. Many people had legitimate concerns that Biden was backing a genocide. I've never seen any stats showing that they were right-wing posts. Plenty of left-wing people were mad about that as well.

Hillary won the popular vote when she ran. I think most people abstained because Harris was a terrible candidate, who ran on terrible policies that went against what the voter-base wanted.

I mostly agree with you, which is why I voted 3rd party, and I still recommend that others vote. But voting can take a lot of time and effort, which most people are short on. I think a lot of people would vote, if they thought their vote counted, but with the two major parties we have, it clearly doesn't.

I see it as less of "I can't be bothered to make the effort; anything is fine", and more of "Both of you fight against what I want, why would I bother"

I feel like "lets stop bombing children", or "maybe people shouldn't go bankrupt because of healthcare", or "maybe the rich should pay their taxes", or "stop backing a genocide", or "we should probably get rid of torture facilities" are a far cry from "obliged to only vote for perfect candidates that they agree with 100% on everything."

I'm all for voting for a candidate I don't totally agree with, I do it every time. But lets not pretend that the Democrats are doing a good job of reaching out to their voter-base. There's a reason their current polling is so low.

Bad analogies are bad

Which I also find understandable. I disagree with non-voters, but if both choices are terrible, and fight against what you want, I understand why people wouldn't want to vote.

Maybe people wouldn't call him "Genocide Joe" if he hadn't backed a genocide. I always find it amazing that people blame the voters, instead of blaming the people with the power, the platform, and the money, who chose genocide over winning the election.