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

No, that’s “predestination.” You’re thinking of a medical condition one had before they signed up for an insurance policy and then got denied coverage for.

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.

Hah, fair enough. I’ve never been there, but I’ve always wanted to try living somewhere in the PNW at some point. This is clearly a him problem and I wonder if being a working stiff would have begun tainting his view of NY with time, too. He doesn’t realize it, yet, but what he’s doing in that regard is looking back fondly on his college days.

I feel bad for this dude, but not for the reasons he wants me to.

Nearing 40 and being pretty staunchly no-kids, I always got along great with all of the devs and admins I work with who have kids and we find plenty to talk about. I always thought what I do for a living is pretty cool, but I certainly never expected that to be my ticket to getting laid or being praised as some big-brain special boy. This dude felt one-dimensional because he is one-dimensional. Maybe he just never really spent the time developing his personality and maybe its time to do that now. It’s one thing to love what you do, its another entirely to make your job your identity - you gotta bring more to the table in social situations than shop talk and Squid Game.

As for complaining about a routine… I mean, that’s unfortunately how being an adult works for 90% of us. We have jobs, we often end up kind of worn out even if we sit at a desk all day, and it can suck - you make the best of it and break the monotony as best you can. If he wanted to be in the remaining 10%, he probably should’ve put in the effort. Those folks he mentions at Y Combinator, or starting nonprofits probably busted their asses to break through. Even content creators who put out quality content often are often run ragged from overworking. Did this dude think staying in NY and taking a 9-5 there would have magically given him extra energy?

Fuck outta here with this garbage, Business Insider.

[…] but subscriptions for software-based new car features will continue, according to a BMW board member.

I wonder what they’re going to try to nickel and dime people over next. I mean, if they’re offering internet service/access or other things that are an ongoing service, fine. That’s mostly fair… but if they’re charging you to flip a bit in the car’s internal database (or even worse, a central database somewhere that keeps your car’s data) but the feature is installed in your car and costs BMW nothing to enable it, then ewwwwwww

Took a deeper look at the article…

[…] BMW says it will continue to offer subscription-based services but only for software options, like driver assistance and digital assistant services, which is completely understandable.

Hahahahahaha no. For the most part, absolutely no.

Oh man, the first time I ever ran into the inodes issue I was still a squirrely, eager young admin and not the broken, cynical shell you see before you. That one fucked me up for a solid day and change.

The issue occurred following regular maintenance work on the servers, the company said, adding that it would review its maintenance procedures.

Two people with knowledge of the matter had told Reuters the malfunction occurred during an update of the automaker’s parts ordering system.

Uh-oh. Someone forgot to uncomment include /etc/logrotate.d and bounce the service, didn’t they.

Probably because most of the people at his net worth are pushing for RTO so he’s the exception to the rule.

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.

I think i have the 13-year badge. I visit maybe a few times a week when there’s nothing left to doomscroll on Lemmy. I was never really a huge contributor, in posts or comments, but now I’m purely a lurker and I spend maybe 15 or 30 minutes in a single sitting on the site instead of a few hours cumulatively throughout a given day.

With that said, the overall quality of content and discussion had been going downhill for years at this point, I just didn’t have anywhere else to go that provided the same dopamine hit. Lemmy doesn’t do it quite as well, but once the Reddit API controversy kicked up and a ton of people started actually using Lemmy, that helped give me a good reason to spend time with it since there was activity. I’m honestly not sure if Lemmy is the future but I’m willing to stay if it’s a road to the future… and I’m willing to try out new platforms and communities before I find something that I feel fits me as well as Reddit did for so long.

I kind of miss 2010-2013ish era Reddit (minus the bacon/narwahls stuff which kind of felt forced to me), but hoping something like that comes along would probably be along the same lines as wishing I could get the same near magical feel and interaction out of IRC as I did in the mid to late 90s/early 2000s. These are one-and-done things. The next thing that elicits that kind of homey feeling will probably be something entirely new and not a clone of the OG thing.

I ended up just flipping to T1 to get past it so I could finish the story (and then flipped back immediately after and never had an issue again). Since then, I’ve gotten some legendary gear that would have probably carried me (specifically, a piece that gives me a pretty big barrier as soon as I hit an elite or higher that lasts 10s and can pop every 30s - its gotten me out of a few scrapes already; got another piece that bumps my skeletal mages by 2 and they freeze shit near instantly if they actually focus on one target)

I’m actually starting to look at other classes for when I wrap the main story (so I can just skip it with subsequent characters) - sorc looks really interesting, but I’m not sure how well it’ll play with the controller. Or, rather, how happy I’ll be personally with it on controller.

So it seems. Guess I’m going to be forced out of solo play one way or another. I suppose I should be glad I have at least a couple of friends who are also enjoying the game. haha