Harris was the path of things slowly getting better. Wages finally overtaking inflation.

Given a couple years, we would all be in a better place.

Trump’s tariffs will drive up the price of everything. The last few years of inflation and greed will pale in comparison.

And egg prices will still go up.

Catastrophicly so.

No, it won’t change the minds of his base.

But there are people he wouldn’t consider his base, that also tend to vote conservative, who were actually offended by some of those jokes. And then realized that hey, Trump and company are white nationalists, and that means that no minority will be safe.

It’s a tiny minority of Trump supporters, but as close as this election could be, that’s more than enough.

Now, Trump is planning on stealing the election anyway. Via disrupting or delaying certification of votes past December 11th, Which then means that there will be incomplete slates of electors, which means the election goes to the House, and each State gets one vote instead of the house itself voting.

They’re going to try to use Section three of the 20th amendment.

If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President-elect shall have died, the Vice President-elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President-elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President-elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice President-elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

Fun times to live in…

That one came out of left field.

Trump was taking a premature victory lap, and hires a comedian to warm up the warm up the crowd, and the proceeded exactly like Trump wanted.

And then everyone suddenly wakes up and says wait, these hate spewing assholes are actually hate spewing assholes.

All because one comedian didn’t use the code words.

I like vector pinball as well.

If someone poured a shitload of money into it, and had actual humans on quality control and some writing… You could generate a setting with a bunch of NPCs who have generated back stories and connections and shit.

And it would still come out as some of the blandest of bland as for as game went. But hey, a bad game is better than no game right?

Have you checked out Live from Emmett’s Place?

Live jazz streamed every week.

Lenin betrayed the revolution. You mention the banning of the political parties. While it’s true that they “took up arms against Sovnarkom”, you’re leaving out the part where Lenin used Sovnarkom to coup the newly elected government because his party didn’t win.

Again, Lenin was flat out wrong. But I don’t think he ever actually cared about Russia ever reaching the true Marxist communist utopia. Lenin cared about power first and foremost.

He built up that dictatorship, and then handed it over to a monster.

Tried a bunch, but tried wrong.

The Lenin model of communism is inherently flawed for one simple reason. An Authoritarian Communism is an Impossibility. It cannot exist by pure definition.

The true ideal communism is a stateless utopia.

So yeah, the Lenin model is flawed to the point of uselessness. Or worse because any authoritarian government is going to kill its own citizens, while also being a low grade threat to neighboring countries.

No. The only path to true communism is via democracy. And there are countries that are moving in that direction.

Two main methods, the first is with a fishing pile like normal. The second is to get down into the water and feel up under the bank. If you wiggle your fingers a catfish will latch on, and you can just pull it out by hooking your fingers into the gills.

Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.

Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.

Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.

After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.

It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.

STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.

Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.

Changing the voting system so that third parties are actually possible.

You need a cardinal voting system, otherwise you’ll fall prey to Durverger’s Law and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.

I favor STAR, it’s the best system designed to date.

That “waste product” isn’t just thrown away.

They’re still hydrocarbons. Which are used in other places or burned for fuel… Which isn’t actually all that great for the environment…

Actually, tossing the waste product in a pit might be better, environmentally speaking.