Don’t get me wrong, I’d love 3rd party representation, but the way it works right now in this country, they don’t stand a chance. They exist today as spoilers, I mean, how effective is Jill stein for anything outside of an election?

What I’d like to do, is get dems in place, then pressure the shit out of theme through the primary process, through town halls, through letter writing, and all the ways we can manifest our power. Pressure them to get ranked choice voting, then we can start focusing on third parties. There is NO republican support for this, there are several Democrats who do (Mpls uses it now).

The problem is that in this country there is no automatically issued national id. To get one costs money and takes time, something the demographic they are trying to prevent voting does not have in abundance.

Also, elections are run by the states in this country, and most do already require a proof. My state requires a utility bill, or ID, or something that proves you live at the address, which are tied to voter roles. So the ID thing is a red herring mostly, and non-citizen voters are usually limited to tiny fractions of percentages if any. It is not an actual problem, just a useful one.

Both sides are bad, but both sides are not the same. One shows time and time again they are scared of their voters and will change course with enough pressure. The other one only puts pressure on us under the heel of a boot.

Yes, both suck, but we are not getting anywhere with this stupid flip flop between two awful options. You take the less bad one, then work really fucking hard to get better people to replace them. Don’t keep falling for this one weird trick bullshit, where one cultish figure that claims to solve it all will get the nod in an effort to “try something different”.

Third parties are useless, unless we can get ranked choice. Until then, we play the fucking game, not keep flipping the board every few years.

That is pretty much spot on to the real thing.

Refreshing to see someone get it, and put it so simply. Agreed, I’m all for incremental change, when it’s the only option. Go for the big wins when there is legitimate opportunity, but it takes work to get them. The biggest piece people miss is those opportunities start locally, and in primaries.

Most these days just want to vote, nothing else, so they check out until it’s time to pull the lever, and then they just bitch and moan about the shit sandwich they have in front of them.

Every time I hear a song from that game, the world starts looking like Minecraft.

Lumines! All of them. I might go home and see if my PSP or Vita still hold a charge (and I can find the games).

It really does. My own absent father has been trying to make this trope a reality. Maybe if he made some effort to be a part of mine and my children’s lives.

Sorry dude, you’ve ignored me for 30 years, you’ve seen my kids a half dozen times, and it was always due to my effort.

That is one of my most used phrases. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started telling someone something simple, 10 random side conversations later, maybe I’ll remember to get to the point. It’s there that I hit them with “short story long” and then finally wrap it up…

So it’s working as intended. It’s always been the Hotel Cloudifonia.

I used to be a good tipper. I still am for genuine service, but the default “tip every transaction” has pissed me off enough that unless you personally handled my food, or performed a service for me, I instantly stab 0.

I was a a baseball game the other weekend, they had a self service kiosk for bottles of soda, a glorified vending machine. It had a default 18% tip added to the transaction that I had to drill into a menu to zero out. Fucking bonkers, not a human in sight, just a couple of sensors and a credit card terminal.

Tip culture has gotten way out of control since Covid, I’m refusing to participate anymore.

Pretty much. I’m a data hoarder, to a degree. My homebuilt, Ship of Theseus NAS is about 15 years old, and it contains data going back over 20. I save everything I produce.

I figure that one day, this data of mine will be fed into a system for future use, in the vein of how they construct people in the Star Trek Holodeck. So, I feel it’s up to me to curate that data, and be sure it’s accurate and reflects who I am.

These days it’s obvious that it will eventually be turned into training data for an LLM, but then at least, my data will have some structure and personality to it. Maybe someday a joke will be cracked for someone that came from a pattern I established. Probably not, but one can dream.