Exhibit A: George Santos

Ranked Choice Voting (or ANYTHING with preference polling) would be vastly better than our current system. It would enable 3rd parties to thrive without being nearly the spoilers they are now.

Every voting system as it’s flaws and edge cases, but our current First Past the Post system is a trainwreck crushing the Republic by degrading into two majority parties (as it demonstrably always does) and then letting other countries and dark money prop up spoiler candidates to hurt their opponents.

We either fix our voting system or we eventually lose the Republic.

It wasn’t fun, that’s for sure.

… It’s nice, though you’re still driving a two ton weapon, but now you’re used to it.

What a wonderful world that would be. Fingers crossed.

The Amtrak system in the US shares rail, and is low priority, than freight trains. Basically, passenger rail has always been a side business for the train companies the US. It is subsidized and used as a bribe by the federal government to even try to keep a passenger rail service alive.

That means our trains are often kept as slow speeds to stay behind freight trains, and will be stopped to wait for freight trains if some is off schedule. The routes are also mostly only rated for 60mph speeds, so even at full speed you’re barely keeping up with cars on the highway, and then you add in stops at every podunk town that slows it down even more.

Until the US invests in a separate passenger rail network that can support consistent speed and schedules, it will remain on par with similarly under developed nations for rail service.

There’s also the very muddled announcement that to make it you’ll need to change trains at some small town.

Or, they just decide to not stop at your station, so you get to hop off past your station and ride a train back the way you came.

All that said, it’s still a miracle from God compared to the crap we have in the US.

Okay. Regardless of what it really is or not. I’ve decided I’m not voting for President Biden in the next election. Nor Hunter Biden. They’re both off my list as candidates.

With varying degrees of regret. Some cities named to keep the right of ways, so rebuilding is more reasonable, others gave/sold it off and now they’re double plus fucked.

Most of the pre-1950’s trams were private, and not city run. The cities that took them over and kept them running are looking really smart at this point.

My city is about as smart as a box of rocks.

Ah, the replacement mythos, blended with White Fascism and Christian Nationalist chaser. All badness all the way down.

It sounds like Twitter is hosting their services on several cloud platforms or replication services that weren’t blocked by Brazil. So, users in Brazil just hit the 3rd party platforms and kept going like usual.

Is that Twitter’s fault and/or on purpose? Don’t know yet, but services like Akamai need to make sure their hosting Twitter doesn’t get them banned in Brazil across the board.

International relations are often tough to build, especially when one side is quite rude and then wanting special benefits afterwards.

The UK cut the ties, so the EU has more say in how relations are rebuilt. The UK had a ton of special exemptions and their own national identity in the EU then many other members and the UK still freaked out about how oppressed they were.

The EU doesn’t really owe the UK anything that’s not in still existing agreements and if the UK wants a relationship they’ll have to come to the table bringing something, not just hurling demands.

I’m just really glad that the UK leaving the EU didn’t devolve into armed conflict. That’s a pretty normal arc for such a big relations change.

Who would have guessed that she’s corrupt? Strange that she’s acting just like her right wing anti-Constitution bosses on the Supreme Court. I wonder how that kind of corruption trickles down.

The right has been trying to destroy schools since they were founded hundreds of years ago. Secular, public education is an anathema to the racist and religious indoctrination required to maintain right wing communities.

This is very much a two birds, one stone moment for their agenda.

This voting season has a very different feel from 2020. I’ve been trying to understand what’s up.

Because there’s not the same kind of public displays of right wing movements, I feel that it seems like a safer situation on a large scale. The tradeoff is that the right wing nutjobs don’t have the same public visible groups to join and yell about life with. They’re likely going to be much more likely to lash out through terroristic acts and to be more individually violent.

So, while there’s not nearly the same quantity of truck convoys of deplorables driving around waving flags, that same energy is going to be distilled into a more potent sludge of evil under the surface.

Your perspective might be why I enjoy microcontroller work. I love getting to know everything about the system, reading hardware documentation, and getting the low level parts to work in a highly deterministic way.

I use ATTiny85 cores when a ESP32 costs almost the same, but the 85 only has 256 bytes of SRAM and five I/O pins so I can track it all and ensure it will do exactly what I want.

Christofascist timeline is a go.

The same meme with “wiring and lights” at the top. Then you descend to motors, transformers delta-y phases, RC and RL circuits, op amps, BJT circuits, reverse bias what?, differential equations, and eventually signals and systems.

The summary that I liked from the last post was “python is the second best language for everything”. There’s always something specialized and better for every given job. But, if you want one tool that’ll do a solid job everywhere, python is your go to.

Plus the estimated million+ who smartly fled Russia in the first year of the war.