• 4 Posts
  • 103 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Yeah i don’t have that kind of experience, so me troubleshooting parts would drag on forever. And then they could break months down the line.

    In my experience, when buying second hand you trade time and effort for the price; being able to fix things means more time and more effort for even more savings. That’s what this really is.

    I guess there’s something to how little i understand computer hardware making me imagine it as more fragile than it is






  • I have a passing familiarity with the politics of a couple countries, and they all fit this pattern: their constitutions say nothing of a two-party system, they don’t even say anything about parties at all. People just choose to create political parties, and then those parties coalesce into two major parties.

    The reason that this happens is because people, from voters to every level of politician, look at the rules of the game and make tactical decisions; their tactical decisions cause a two-party system to emerge.

    The USA is a really extreme case of this; in Europe there are more parties, and they even very occasionally come to power. Current french president Macron broke a decades-long streak of two-party governance in his country.

    Further viewing material:

    What is tactical voting

    Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting

    The Alternative Vote Explained

    My takeaway from this is that there are things that can be done to improve the voting system, as suggested in these videos; but i don’t even like representative democracy at all, i think there’s better solutions in direct democracy (referendums and such). Representative democracy was designed to put elites in charge, voting was initially reserved for land-owning nobility. Extending voting rights to more people doesn’t change what the system is designed to do.






  • I don’t think it’s funny, more like it feels good to see an atom of justice done for once. One murder changes nothing, it has no value as far as changing the system, but the symbolic value is through the roof.

    Here’s the thing: even if we change the healthcare system tomorrow, they get to keep their billions. We can change the system, but there will be no justice because one of the principles of our legal system is that justice isn’t retroactive. So seeing one of the guilty parties killed is an example of retribution that is very rare and exhilarating.

    Just not funny per se






  • So i agree that the second Trump administration is going to suck in most every way possible, like the first one but worse because they’re prepared this time.

    BUT

    I think people overrate a government’s ability to influence the conditions in a given country. I think a country is made what it is by history, geography, technology, sociology, ideology, economics, and the accumulation of small decisions over centuries.

    If the Trump administration wants to end democracy in the US, or if a hypothetical based administration were to attempt a switch to ranked choice voting, both ideals would be impossible to implement because our ideals are limited by practical reality. Both would fail regardless of being good or bad changes, because radical change is really hard when the conditions aren’t met for it, especially when it’s opposed by the rest of the country. If the country just isn’t ready to transition to fascism right now, there’s not much that Trump can do to make it.

    We talk a lot about how powerful people changed the world, but i think far more often they’re just the embodiment of a societal trend, and they couldn’t change the world if they weren’t. Change isn’t done by powerful people but deeper movements in humanity, with powerful people riding them like a wave.

    As to where the deeper movements in humanity are leading us right now, i refuse to guess, trying to predict the future is the best way to look like an idiot