The long, drawn out metaphorical explanation was unnecessary and frankly kind of condescending.

I’m not over here trying to be some champion of the electoral college and I’d be more interested in seeing a real push for ranked choice or one of its cousins.

The point I was making was that if you sat at home and didn’t vote at all, your chosen candidate would never see the inside of the oval office and I went into my understanding of why it is the way it is. Ultimately, voting under the current system is not entirely worthless as you seemed to claim in the original post I responded to.

We’ve had something like 59 elections in total and 5 of them involved the winning candidate losing the popular vote but winning the election by way of the electoral college. Only one of those elections - the very first - involved anything even remotely close to your example (but still not42.3% vs 31.6%). The other 4 had a difference of like 2% or less between the two leading candidates.

The electoral college was devised as a compromise between direct democracy and congressional voting and I’m sure it was done in good faith to try to make sure everyone was represented, but this system seems to truly show its cracks when we’re facing an insanely stark national split like we see today and there’s no argument that we should probably shake things up and get rid of it.

I mean, that’s not entirely accurate - a vote for a presidential candidate is a vote for the slate of electors tied to said candidate - effectively a vote for your candidate, albeit indirectly. Electors can, however, be required to vote according to popular vote as required by the state they’re electors in. Or they could have pledged to vote according to specific party. I don’t know for sure, but I assume state elector requirements override party pledges.

My understanding is that when it was devised, it was a compromise between direct democracy (which would honestly be potentially dangerous - how many people do you know where you can’t help but go, “Fuck… This guy can vote.”) and election via congressional vote. It certainly ain’t perfect and I have no bias towards it, but it’s a system like anything else that people tend to point at and blame when things don’t go their way or just ignore or even defend when things do go their way.

- George Costanza

If you’re envisioning a sloppily torn scrap of paper with “KILL EVERY1” scrawled on it with crayon, I could see where you’re coming from, but paper battle maps with points of interest/focus being used by a pretty primitive (comparable to who they’re up against) fighting force makes more sense, though.

If this was planned so tightly that they didn’t let the bulk of their fighters (or large swaths of lower rung leadership) know details until days (or less) before the attack, then it stands to reason they’d hand out infosheets. That seems to be what happened here.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-duped-hamas-planned-devastating-assault-2023-10-08/

How do they account for a service like privacy.com which allows you to generate multiple dummy card numbers for a single card?

If the cost of subscription is, instead, the barrier to entry then all we’ll end up seeing is parties who have the resources for wide spanning scams or propaganda or whatever it is - and if they’re paying then they expect to profit or score gains in some way that justify their costs, which likely means they’re effective at what they do

They’re there… err… the remains are, at least.

Alcoholism will do crazy things to people and their brains.

I keep going back to how the guy who wielded RICO so cleverly to wreck the mob, ran an effective “PR campaign” post 9/11 that dubbed him the “Mayor of America,” and was a serious potential presidential candidate ended up leaking oil out of his scalp in front of a landscaping place, being the mouthpiece for a sort-of wannabe mafia-esque organization and eventually getting bitchslapped with RICO charges himself as a result.

I think it’s one part alcoholism, one part grasping wildly for the glory days, and possibly one part dude just getting wackier with age. You can see the glory days stuff in action during his time trying to get the GOP nomination in 2008 and how everything with him was about 9/11. There’s probably a feeling of invincibility he has from the highest highs he reached in his life and maybe even a bit of smug “I know what’s best for this country, I was it’s goddamn Mayor for the love of fuck!”

Whatever it is, fuck that guy. Time to piss off, Rudy. You’re embarrassing yourself and the rest of us by extension.

These dickheads always think they can translate the power they hold in civilized society to the wild post aoocalyptic free for all. Makes you wonder what will be going through their heads when some brutish psycho decides it’s his turn and is about to stomp their heads into the tightly packed wasteland dirt.

exactly. a little bit of elbow grease and greed is what got us all to the fairly awful future we find ourselves in, who’s to say it can’t get worse? never let the hope die. lol

I think there are a combination of factors intermingling, situations like the API backlash just jostle things a little harder and that’s when you see big spikes. Once a platform like Lemmy begins to see more and more traffic and, in turn, content, it starts to become a viable alternative.

Lemmy existed for at least a couple years before I joined, for instance, and I came with what I would guess was the biggest wave so far (June 2023). Provided the userbase can keep up a respectable momentum generating discussion and content, the next wave could be bigger or it could be more resistant to leaving because there’s enough content here to consume and interact with.

Reddit could take years to lose substantial portions of its userbase or it may shed some and stay solid, but Im not one of these people who obsesses over it’s ruin. If they survive long term, God bless, whatever, who cares. What’s interesting to me is seeing an alternative sprout up and actually generate traffic and start building a community, whether that’s Lemmy or something else built on ActivityPub or something else built on a different federated framework or even something else entirely that’s centralized… I think Lemmy is one permutation of this and it has undoubtedly got some traction.

I sometimes wonder if/when I’ll start getting random Lemmy links from people instead of ones to Reddit.

edit: I should also add that considering reddit is trying hard to get value on paper and probably still hoping to ipo, we probably shouldn’t put it past them be shitty once again at some point in the future.

exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i’d guess you could expect it to look something like:

• spike
• drop off
• plateau
• spike
• drop off
• plateau above the last plateau
• etc etc

sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.

Peter Santanello’s videos are usually really enjoyable and pleasant. He has a calm, respectful demeanor and he just goes to random places you usually don’t think about and just kind of shoots the shit with people. He did a couple videos a while back where he went to a couple of native reservations in like one of the Dakotas, I think, and they were an intensely interesting look into that life and culture.

His titles can feel kind of click-baity sometimes and I don’t always agree with his take on things, but I find him a really likeable and honest-seeming guy.