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

I can’t remember what it was specifically, but friend basically ruined a major plot point in Witcher 3 for me fully knowing I was a good ways out from discovering it on my own. As a kneejerk reaction and knowing he was about 20 or 30 hours into Fallout 4, I told him who runs the Institute and what relation that individual has to the protagonist.

He was angrier than I was because I had assumed Witcher 3 turned out the way he revealed, but my spoiler absolutely blindsided him. He never ruined anything for me again.

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/

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

I assume the accepted copout is something along the lines of, “You can thank us for making enough noise that they backed down. Sheepdogs, sheep, blah blah something something…”

For real. I still regularly lose the “make my own vs. takeout” battle, but a nice evening drive is better than paying $80 for a $40 2-person meal.

Holy fuck did we finally sell Florida? I wonder what sucker bought it.

PSA: At every Exxon Mobil I’ve been to, when the screen on the pump starts vomiting up ads as you’re pumping your gas, if you tap the 2nd button from the top on the right side of the screen, it mutes it.

Enjoy your peaceful gas station visit.

I find it crazy that I didn’t really have any real male role models, but the media I turned to ended up being guys like Henry Rollins.

The “finding myself” period of my life pre-dated the existence of this manosphere/shallow-ass-masculinity shit, but the archetype has been around for far longer and there were plenty of slimy douchebags to look up to. Sometimes I wonder what spared me.

I actually got this solely in YouTube shorts, but without having viewed anything related to it. Every few Shorts I scroll through, I’m met with something plucked straight out of the alpha/sigma/HKV trashbin and I’m assuming it’s because I likely got demographic’d. It frankly kind of pushed me away from the whole feature - not much of value was lost since a lot of Shorts are just teaser trash that gives you a portion of a story designed to drive you to the channel.

Oddly, my regular, non-Shorts recommendations are fine.

Sneako and his “I’m a little teapot” lookin ass with those goofy ass ears. Holding a dickhead like him or the Tates up as some sort of goal to strive towards is synonymous with “rock bottom.”

I get it - like I understand the mechanism behind why some younger dudes become infatuated with these figures. It’s the same reason boomer housewives get into the Law of Attraction or why people who don’t have a single fucking clue think Trump is going to fix everything if he could just get one more term in office… but I don’t get it.

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.

I feel like this was a missed opportunity to use Dhalsim for the fire one instead of Sagat.

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.

Can’t believe he chose THAT instead of just wishing for more wishes.

My background is not on STEM and I was always passed the notion that without roots in hard math I can’t go far in programming.

I swear this is some BS repeated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I got told pretty much the same when I was younger - don’t believe it. It may have been true to some degree at some point in the distant past, but it’s outdated advice at best.

Your main general skills when it comes to writing code are the ability to think logically and to think about abstract concepts. Creativity and imagination can definitely help. The ability to keep organized in your thoughts can also go a long way. Just about everything else comes in the form of knowing the language you’re working in, exposure to common coding and software design principles, and knowing your coding environment.

Math can figure into a lot of different types of programming careers… Shit like writing video game engines and other complicated things that model physics and stuff come to mind. But it’s not so much that math is intrinsic to programming, but rather that those types of software just require a lot of advanced math.

For example, I’m an automation engineer. It’s just a sysadmin who writes a decent amount of code. Most of my programming work revolves around sending requests over our company’s local network to servers or internal websites to do shit like remotely power up or shutdown machines or trigger a task or open up work orders. There is very little actual math, if any, in the entirety of my work.

At it’s core, programming is just the storing, moving around, manipulating, and keeping track of bits of information. Especially in a language like Python (which is my primary language).

EDIT: I should probably add my background isn’t STEM either. I’m a two time college dropout who got a break 14 years ago and left the restaurant industry to go into the tech sector instead.

Nostalgia? I’m nearing 40 and all I have to do is switch out “room” with “home office” to make this applicable to me.

Shrek is love, Shrek is life, Shrek is high fashion.