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A combination of first-past-the-post and winner-take-all systems for nearly all elections, coupled with the Electoral College for the presidency.

First-past-the-post is a system wherein only the plurality candidate wins. Here is an example:

• For a given seat, be it a president, senator, representative, or local office, assume Party A wins 40%, Party B wins 30%, Party C wins 20% and Party D wins 10%.

• Despite a majority of voters preferring someone other than Party A, Party A wins and everyone else loses. This is first-past-the-post voting, and with no other considerations given to the other votes, makes it a winner-take-all system.

• The majority aren’t happy with this, but the other parties continue running their candidates and continue losing because Party A wins the greatest portion of votes each time.

• Because the other parties can’t even win any power, there’s no “coalition” or “alliance” that can be made to shut out Party A.

• Party B decides to take advantage of everyone’s dissatisfaction. They adjust some of their policies to be more favorable to Parties C and D to attract some of their voters. This is the closest thing to a “coalition” that the first-past-the-post system can achieve.

• During the next election, Party A wins 40%, party B wins 42%, Party C wins 12%, and Party D wins 6%. Party B assumes office, starts fulfilling their agenda, a lot of their voters aren’t completely happy, but at least Party A isn’t in power.

This illustrates how only 2 prevailing parties come to be, because it is not possible to win an election in the US unless you obtain the most votes.

For the presidential election, the electoral college is a winner-take-all system determined by the limited pool of national electors.

• Like all other offices, the presidential election is still first-past-the-post. Only the candidate who wins the most votes wins the election, everyone else wins nothing.

• For the presidential election, the only votes that matter are the electoral votes. Each US state is assigned a certain portion of electors which is based on population but is often very disproportionate in practice (due to a capped elector total nationally, and minimum elector thresholds for less-populous states).

• Each elector is 1 vote for the president, and the electors are supposed to vote based on how the citizens of that state voted. This is the distinction between the electoral vote and the popular vote.

• With limited exception, this is also a winner-take-all system, meaning all the electors for a given state must also vote in line with one another. If a state has 10 votes and the election is 51% Party A and 49% Party B, all 10 electors must vote for Party A even though it’s almost a clean split down the middle for the popular vote.

• This results in cases where even if a majority of voters nationally prefer Party B, Party A’s candidate could still win because they won more electors.

• Accepting the system is unfair but being unable/unwilling to change it, the two prevailing parties try to game the system any way they can to swing things in their favor. They identify a handful of states where leads are very narrow and focus all their attention there. These are swing states.

Why do people hate third parties/why do they never win?

• For the reasons illustrated above, a third-party can never win any significant amount of power under the current system.

• When a race is even remotely close, small factors like people who choose to vote third-party instead of supporting one of the other two parties can turn the tide in a swing state, and thereby turn the tide nationally.

• There is a trend of third parties getting financial/promotional support from political groups that are actually opposed to their policies, but are using the third party to attract votes away from their main competition for a given seat. This is called the spoiler effect.

This outlines how, under the current political structure of the US, there can never be a successful third party in government outside of local grassroots elections, and why there is so much hostility towards third parties. Third parties aren’t there to win, they are propped up by larger political interests who use them to take votes from their competition.

This is why you may often see “A vote for a third-party (e.g. Jill Stein) is a vote for Trump” during this election, because the Green Party is being primarily supported by right-wing interest groups this election despite being one of the more “leftist” options on paper.

I once had this pizza topped with tortellini, glorious.

But I also like the burrito pizza the place down the street from me makes, they use like a black bean base for the sauce and it’s so good.

Greek style pizza is otherwise the norm here and I generally prefer it to the charred mess that is “authentic” New York style pizza.

I’d also say sign fatigue (plus general fatigue) is a thing. When you go to an airport security line there’s like these giant signboards stood up like the 200 Commandments, each with a mix of pictures and walls of text of for things you’re not allowed to bring on a plane. Or some things you can check and not carry on or you can carry on and not check. And you’re also expected to know all of that while you are in transit, stressed, and maybe also sleep deprived.

Too many signs to properly pay attention to them all.

Ahhh, so they “mischaracterized” it. That makes it okay, then.

Hey, it shows up in people’s “All” feeds as well. I’m not subscribed here and I saw this post (but I do also already use Firefox).

OP did you put a typo in your title to bait the prescriptivists?

Seems kinda messy to be shooting salt all over your living space, though.

That second picture looks AI generated, why is it backlit?

He seems like the kind of person delusional enough to claim that he invented the portal that transports you from one end of the flat world to the other to explain why planes can cross the Pacific.

Cult of personality. Do as their new Messiah does.

I think you’ve got the right idea, but may be overthinking it just a tad.

The golden rule is just a proactive step when meeting and dealing with new people. Since you can’t know how others want to be treated from your first interaction, you fall back on the golden rule. So you offer to help someone, they tell you they’d prefer to be left alone, all good. Now you know.

Basically, it’s not just “If I were in this situation, I would want to be helped, so I’m going to keep offering to help.” It’s “If I were in this situation, I would want people to be understanding and gentle, so I’ll listen to what they have to say and, if they ask for help, do whatever they need.”

Where people get caught in the weeds though is often the difference between being “good” and being “nice”, so you’ll never have an objective answer to the best course of action. Just this general guideline to hopefully steer you in the right direction until you can figure the rest out on your own.

Google Assistant/Google Now (RIP).

My phone 10 years ago used to have a component called Google Now on Tap which would show me useful information like where I parked my car, when my next appointment is, what my commute looks like, what the weather is going to be, etc.

It was so context aware and good at predictive algorithms, I never really had to do more than swipe left to get what I needed. But of course now that’s in the “Killed by Google” graveyard because it didn’t enforce enough “engagement” with apps and services that could feed you ads.

In general, I find Google Assistant to be less helpful overall and worse at understanding what I am trying to do. It used to be a daily convenience for me, but now I can’t remember the last time I ever bothered with it. Not to mention every time you use it these days, it has to throw in a “By the way,…” suggestion that just feels like an ad for itself, because it is never related to anything I want to do.

Pokemon for TV, movie would probably be Laputa.

Which is a bit silly to me, in that any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity (to iterate on form until creating their supposed “perfect image”).

God being a human who was also his own father is fine, but the suggestion that evolution could be part of god’s plan is where we draw the line?

I don’t mind questions being somewhat focused or topical. But the ones I don’t like are “Here is my long-winded opinion on x, what do you think?” or “Here’s a random article or other thing I found on the internet, thoughts?”

If it’s a post asking opinions on a recent event, that’s one thing. But I think the soapboxing should be limited. There’s more that a post should need to actually qualify as a discussion-fueling question than just the fact they ended a sentence with a question mark somewhere in their post.

Thoughts?

It’s like asking why people smoke.

Is it bad for you? Yes.

Is it a burden on society? Yes.

Is it addictive and does it make you feel good? For some, yes.

Fuck everyone in Japan that defends the war atrocities the government committed. If this seems like a harsh take, it is only proportional to how abhorrent those atrocities were.

That shrine should be burned.

If you set it to match social security age, the old fucks who want to stay in power will just up the social security age.

That does look better.

For the drag and drop space, however, would a simple “Right Click > Open In” not be easier? Or just dragging the file over the application on the taskbar?