Hotspur

Is that the same Charlie Stross that writes the James-bond-meets-Cthulhu-IT-worker books?

I remember when I learned that jeep Windshields fold down not because it’s a cool lifestyle thing, but because it allows you to stack them on top of each other in the holds of liberty ships… didn’t have to worry about roll bars in ww2 I suppose.

Unless we get a blow-out for either candidate that cannot be challenged, which does not seem likely based on the polls and battle lines, even if we have a Biden-esque victory for Harris, I’m fairly unsure of what will happen next. I personally doubt full on Civil War like in the Garland movie, or the actual civil war, but I would expect all kinds of shitty legal tricks, possible Supreme Court involvement and of course, stochastic and targeted violence, particularly towards immigrants and minorities. In other words, win or lose, I think the US may be in for a bad time. Hopefully I’m working in my assumptions here and it is somewhat more boring.

To better answer your question though, assuming things don’t completely fall apart: the two sides already don’t mix much, which is part of the problem in the first place. We’ll get more govt inaction due to gridlocked congress, probably more defense spending and some states, in the absence of federal legislating, will continue to take a larger role as they have been doing already in the recent era.

So basically more of the same, on a not-great trend line. Something has to give at some point, it’s hard to imagine how you could put the genie back in the bottle now, particularly with overall conditions in the world due to late-stage capitalism and climate change constricting each year.

Bulbasaur has curves, jeep is a series of boxes. So very possibly bulbasaur wins.

I also have seen zero ads, which struck me as weird. But also, I bet they count free game codes to content creators, sponsored streams and the like,so maybe a lot of the money was spent targeting streamers, tick tok and YouTube—a bunch of the people I subscribe to have been hyping cod zombies. Granted many of them played warzone a lot so it didn’t seem that weird to me.

Yes strongly agree. I realize there are extremes that are very unpleasant, but I also tend to think that the way things are organized at the work/society level is not intrinsically the best or the most efficient or whatever. Like, it’s a compromise that selects for certain kinds of outcomes, and those things may not be necessarily good or important.

Or just to put it simply: I generally like how I am, and I don’t really see what’s so great about fitting into dominant work/office culture. The fact that I’m not a good little office drone isn’t a downside to me…

Yes exactly. I’m super effective under deadline, with tons of crap flying my way. Problem is, it’s hugely damaging for me to operate in that state for any long period of time. After burnout for the nth time, I made a decision to switch jobs to something way lower stress (which somehow also paid better). I struggle with the low pressure sometimes, but my god am I a happier and healthier person most of the time.

Also: why would they expect people with ADHD to get better. It’s a fundamental baseline in how exec function systems work in our brains. You can mediate it with medication and practice better routines and habits to avoid some of the worse aspects, but until we can physically manipulate neurology at the cellular scale, I doubt you can cure it.

According to the totally unintentional and legit executive leak, they stacked 100 them!

Well said-I feel the same.

That is kinda brilliant

Yeah I could imagine that. I’ve also been fairly impressed with it for making something more concise and summarized (I sometimes write too much crap and realize it’s too much).

I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:

1. It ignores the very real number of voters who chose not to vote democratic or vote at all simply because of Clinton as candidate.
2. it ignores massive mistakes made by a hubristic campaign that couldn’t fathom losing to trump.
3. it supposes that people that voted green, would have gritted their teeth and instead voted Clinton, which is not a safe assumption.

Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.

I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.