Just look at the numbers. Harris will probably finish 15 million votes behind Biden 2020. Those are people who could have voted, but didn’t.

Nobody is under the illusion that Trump is better for the situation in Gaza than Harris.

But, too many left-leaning voters feel they have to “take a stand” by staying home or voting third party. I have several friends who did exactly that, even though it’s abundantly clear that staying home is effectively a vote for Trump.

Meanwhile, NOBODY on the conservative side is doing that shit. It’s been true since the Reagan era, the conservatives put aside any personal distaste they have, and they get behind their candidate.

I mean, there’s a whole lot that went wrong, but the big one was subverting the democratic process with primaries that didn’t really pick a popular candidate (2016 and 2024).

The primaries are the time for the candidate to energize a base of support. Harris has never energized anybody, and it was silly to think that affection for Biden would carry her.

Conservatives vote in force to signal their loyalty to their chosen community.

Progressives stay home when they perceive that their community doesn’t chose them. Harris’ vote totals at the end of this will sit somewhere below Biden 2020, for that reason.

Ah, excellent point, thank you.

Check the label before you drink it, especially if you’re watching your sugar intake for medical reasons.

Umm. How would checking the label help? If the drinks were labelled correctly, there would be no reason for a recall.

Ah, Wikipedia makes it really easy to list by per capita representation.

The top 10 in “lowest population per electoral vote”:

 Wyoming
 Vermont
 District of Columbia
 Alaska
 North Dakota
 Montana
 Rhode Island
 South Dakota
 Delaware
 Maine

Well I did link to it in my response.

The NPVIC has a number of problems. The biggest one is impermanence: Many states, faced with assigning their electoral votes to the least popular candidate in their own state, will rush back to the their halls of legislature to gut the compact.

I mean, can you really see the progressive legislators in MA or CA assigning their electoral votes to a conservative winner who got whipped in their own state something like 60-40? The only states willing to enforce the NPVIC are the states whose internal popular vote mirrors the national popular vote.

Yeah, it’s a hopeless quest. Truly eliminating the EC would require 3/4 of state legislatures, an almost impossible task when the majority of states would be effectively voting against their self-interest.

Effectively neutering the EC only requires that the states with 50% of the EC votes agree to follow the national popular vote. But, it would be a fragile detente, since any state legislature could back out and break it.

It’s also really good for making sure that whoever wins the most acres of land gets a huge electoral boost. Because that’s important.

Is it? The most disproportionate representation in the EC belongs to the people of Delaware, last time I ran the numbers of EC votes per capita.

State population is all that matters. Very small populations still get an EC vote for each Senator, which is the root of the problem.

Women can be victims of women too, though. Look at how many mothers have subjected their daughters to genital mutilation, for example.

I think it’s pretty reasonable to say, “please don’t use exclusionary language that implies some victims are more valid than others”.

Know Your Meme has reasonably complete coverage.

Is this even news? Surely the list of politicians who’ve opposed this or that spending measure, then gone on to demand disbursements from the same pool of money, is very long and bipartisan. I’d go so far as to say it’s his job and responsibility to get as much for his constituents as he can, no matter what his official or personal position on the bill.

For Democrats, the usual culprit is military spending – they’ll speak against it on the floor, then demand contracts and base expansion in their own state.

And when politicians do refuse disbursements on principle, as some Republican-led state legislatures did around welfare expansion and COVID-related spending, we ridicule them.

Dunno why you’re surprised. Dude is a consummate performer with a large songbook of his own.

Here he is singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” with the Foo Fighters.

Here he is doing voice and drums on Highway to Hell.

The man owns the stage.

Currently, PopOS although I’m not really that enthusiastic about it.

What? Why would you choose that over Baptist Church of Missouri SynodOS, you heretic?

Your AI is glitching

Supporting data from The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/05/what-to-do-about-americas-killer-cars

Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.

The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fweZsmH4Tw

So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.

It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.

The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.

• Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.

• And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.

I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.

• Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.

Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).

The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.