i like to sample music and make worse music out of that.

  • 1 Post
  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • 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.











  • 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.


  • I don’t know if you’re chiding me or not, but in case you are: I quite literally put myself in their shoes in the post you’re responding to.

    And for the record, without going into the horrifying details, I lived a very similar situation at a really nice hotel on a work trip. I had the luck of being alone and able to clean it up on my own without anyone noticing but for that 45 minutes where I frantically ran to a 7/11 to buy paper towels and hand sanitizer as a stand-in for proper cleaning product and then frantically cleaned it up like MacGuyver was just handed a single thread and a thimble to diffuse a bomb, I dreaded more than anything that someone would see before I had a chance to take care of it.

    I agree that it would be cruel to treat that person any differently because they had an unavoidable accident that caused all this, but people suck. And even if everyone was super understanding, I’d still be absolutely mortified as the person who did it.