I like coffee, Philly, Pittsburgh, Arabic language, anything on two wheels, music, linux, theology, cats, computers, pacifism, art, unity, equity, etymology, the power of words, and getting high off airplane glue. Will use Adobe Illustrator for food.
You still need states to ratify what was passed during the convention anyway, and even then, it has to be ratified in 3/4s of states, and 9 of the top 10 earners in the US economy are solid blue states with strong blue state governments. 🤷
Not a stupid question. Our government is confusing. It’s basically still being carried out verbatim, and the entire thing was built and architected in an era when the fastest anyone could travel is by speed of wind.
In the US, government is generally federalist, meaning, each state is its own independent entity (legally speaking) with the autonomy to describe, create, and manage laws specific to their culture in their state. This boils down even further with municipal zones, which are typically related to city or township governance (covering shit like local police, trash, fire, streets).
Each state has the power to define both its voting districts, as well as the way they vote. For example, states in the West traditionally had fewer people over sparser distances, so traditional paper balloting was foregone in lieu of ‘caucusing,’ which is literally about measuring the amount of bodies or the scale of voices.
In the early 1800s (roughly 40 years after the founding of the country we know now), a man named Eldridge Gerry figured out that it was technically legal under federal law to flip the way districting happens on a per-state basis — instead of people choosing their district, the district chooses its voters.
So, over time, Gerrymandering proved to be one of the only successful ways to gain an edge in a population where conservatism was shrinking and leftism and socialism were building in popularity. It has continued simply because it is a foundation of power in our bicameral (two parties) system.
Just FYI, it is so named “Gerrymandering” after Eldridge Gerry, as well as the fact that his resulting districts looked on a map like a slithering salamander.
Not for nothin’, but there is an entire college discipline dedicated to this called “Conflict Resolution.” People trained in it are the ones who tend to get sent by the UN to an accord meeting to negotiate for peace or for mutual use of a contested resource.
It’s a whole corner of Sociology with journals and everything.
It is beyond disgusting to me that this is the society we want, not just tolerate.
Google Pixel 9 Pofessional. It’s the slightly cheaper version, on account that it got a little burned at the factory.
“Aur”? Says here in my notes something about “Pacman” but that can’t be right…
I will echo the other poster and say that all anyone has gotta do is CTRL+R in their minds, and replace gendered general addresses (“bro, guy, my man, me mate, girlfriend, mama, baby, girlie, gurl, woman, miss, ma’am, mister, etc, etc, etc”) with the word “friend.”
Easy, simple, quick, uses pathways in your brain that already exist, and it’s just something that makes people feel good and included. Sure, maybe it’s a generic greeting at first, but I think eventually people will actually start softening their hearts and making more random friends that way. 🤷 Nothing wrong with a little more sunshine in a world where fucking everybody feels like a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit.
Y’all are way overthinking it. Just say “thanks dawg” to everyone you meet. It even works on dogs!
I also will petition the masses to entertain my personal hill to die on: “dude” is a gender neutral term, and can be so again. As the 1900s-era philosopher Keluardo Joharæon Rice Mitchell, “I’m a dude, she’s a dude, he’s a dude, cus we’re all dudes, hey!”
I guess, but you will lead a lonely life if you can’t find common struggle with people in different scenarios than our own. We can easily lose our soul with these endless purity tests — for some reason, Leftists, progressives, and liberals seem to be constantly on the lookout for the next Jesus Christ, who will just simply energize voters by consequence of, I dunno, magic or some shit.
Neil Young is still a working musician who needs to get his face and music in front of as wide and as general of an audience as possible — why wouldn’t they be where people are? That’s what makes this stand so important. Homie needs Facebook and Insta and still said no.
Well, it’s not like Ted Nugent is writing any new music. He probably doesn’t have anything better to do anyway.
see ya in Philly, Trumpy.
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can’t run the middleware, it would just go “oh you must be a printer, c’mon in!”
I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents’ neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p
Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing… Good memories.
Ah I am not sure. I just assumed it was W3C.
My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.
It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.
It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.
Honestly it’s a little staggering how much better web video got after the W3C got fed up with Flash and RealPlayer and finally implemented some more efficient video and native video player standards.
<video> was a revolution.
Godspeed, you hero of gyros, you hoagie heroine, you rigoletto of Ruebens…
i am old in terms of internet years, and Bill Gates really is living proof that billionaires can essentially destroy the lives of thousands and thousands of people to gather their wealth, and then spend the autumn of their years choosing which countries or causes get a splash-out of the unfathomable excess, like a little kinglet.
i am happy his money helped fix stuff in the world. but that’s called “catching up to what has been expected of you for 60 years.” he does not get a cookie for working out of the Andrew Carnegie playbook.
so the media doesn’t know where they’re going and report on their treatment or conditions, or, hell, who was even in the groups deported.