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.

That’s dragon damage

Circa 2012 my boomer parents had me job hunting in person AND hand-writing the cover letters. It got me two jobs so maybe it wasn’t the worst advice, but i would spend every day driving around and penning half a dozen letters for employers that, a lot of the time, weren’t even hiring.

Anyway, that (12 years ago) was the last job hunt i’ve ever done, it’s been nothing but networking and freelancing ever since

I thought eBay in this context meant second hand? Because here’s the thing: i think second hand means you save a lot of money but you get less choice and less convenience; but platforms are getting good now so both of these factors are mitigated.

Anyway, eBay being 1:1 with Amazon is good enough for me, and i agree that AliExpress in particular is now better than Amazon in terms of price and choice. I don’t even know how risky it really is, they can refun orders right?

I agree, but i also get a chuckle out of getting the meme wrong on purpose: this man held the same job title for 21 years, but something about being Principal Performance Architect sucked so much that he retired within a year and became a goose farmer.

Yeah, but that will be true for the electric cars made in the coming years, not the ones made in the past few years. People were right to be put off by the prices.

And even then, will these new cheap batteries be durable? I worry a lot about all these EVs becoming unusable in 10 years because the batteries are ruined, just like my 10 year old laptop

My brother once drove 60mph down a winding narrow mountain road one-handed while sipping tea. Cool story to tell now that i say it like that, but i can assure you it was not cool to be in the passenger seat at the time

there’s a class of “elite” people who can make decisions that negatively affect the literal lives of millions without worry

This has been true for as long as civilization has been a thing; in fact it’s less of a thing now than it ever has been, the elites have never had so little power.

Which is to say they still have entirely too much and i also hope he gets away with it

I want to live in civilization and i enjoy its benefits, so no, i can’t go around saying someone should be acquitted because the crime was based. We’ve collectively agreed to put the law above our feelings, that’s a good thing, i wish it was done more, so i’m doing my part and preparing to send him cigarettes in prison.

I’ve googled it for you: she’s going to be green for 28 to 45 days.

How much information do you actually retain?

So this means you hear your thoughts as if they were on speaker, right? I don’t, which is a form of aphantasia, which i also have.

I this is why i mumble to myself all the time, my brain has no speakers

I’ve actively moderated the Zootopia subreddit almost since its inception. We did a lot of cool stuff but, uh, moderating a subreddit is not the kind of thing you brag about. Anyway, i quit this year.

Also i have every single r/place-related medal because i helped organize artworks. That’s not any better is it?

That’s a lot of places in the world, you could pick random cities and have a decent chance of this being true.

Venice is another level because of the mass tourism and vacation rentals

Corsica, except Corsica is a French department

Enjoy being the only one posting.

Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable; the fewer users it has, the less useful it is. Reddit has more users than Lemmy. It’s that simple. People won’t start switching until everybody else switches.

Bluesky is only barely starting to compete with Twitter, and that’s after Twitter drastically worsened. Lemmy is a long, long way from competing with Reddit.

To me, it’s a matter of time. The structural advantages of the fediverse mean that it’s more stable on the long run; what i mean by that is, for-profit Reddit will get worse while Lemmy remains good, leading users to migrate here, so Lemmy will eventually outlive Reddit. And then along the way there will be a few big moments where Reddit really fucks up and a wave of people washes up on Lemmy. This is already happening, i’m pretty sure all of us here made our accounts after the Reddit API changes.

He failed to overthrow the American government and have his VP killed. And the reason he wanted his VP killed was because he wouldn’t help him overthrow the American government.

It’s undeniable that some very powerful people want US democracy dead, but from that to the actual death of US democracy is a long way

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

Quotes from the article:

According to Bloomberg, Murray told Lopez that Global Tetrahedron’s bid was a better option because the Sandy Hook families agreed to waive some of the money owed to them in order to pay off Jones’ other creditors. “I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors,” Murray said, per Bloomberg. “And under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.”

and

The only other bid besides the Onion’s was $3.5 million from First United American Companies LLC, the company that operates Jones’ online supplement store.

Yeah i don’t think it’s worth learning french for almost any reason, lots more people speak spanish