Man, it pains me to agree with JD Vance on anything, but we really do have the lamest opposition party. All they’re good for is performative bullshit like this. We’ve got Gestapo black bagging people on the street and dragging them off to foreign torture prisons, and the best the Dems can do is mock Trump for wavering on tariffs. It’s truly fucking pathetic.

I’m really struggling to understand how this could have happened. It’s not like sailing ships are speed demons. The average speed for a sail ship is like 7 knots, or about 8 miles per hour. Let’s say this bad boy was getting a strong gust of wind and got up to like 15 knots; that’s still only 17 miles per hour. Bridges, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, typically don’t move. Also, their height above the waterline is part of the public record. You can look that shit up. I just did a google search on “brooklyn bridge height above waterline”, and it says 135 feet. Super simple, took literally 5 seconds.

If you are sailing a giant, slow ship through a waterway that has a very famous bridge covering it… how the fuck do you decide to do that without looking it up first? And as they were approaching, they could have been like: “Hmm. That bridge seems low. We should double check our figures, and then turn around maybe if it looks close”.

I just… the level of sheer incompetence on display here is fucking staggering.

Makes me wonder about the connotations behind Emily Dickinson’s family name…

Everyone knows he’d grab a monkey by the tit

Hello, new favorite phrase.

I was doing some construction work this past weekend, and encountered some wiring that I did about 20 years ago. I spent the first 5 minutes complaining about the crazy asshole who wired it up, knowing full well that it was me. I am in this picture and I do not like it.

And that alone would be enough, but add to that the fact that they cost about 100 grand a piece, and yet they are essentially held together with bubblegum and shoestring. Bro, you paid a year’s worth of salary for the average middle class person to drive around an ugly, falling-apart piece of shit created by a fascist. Yeah. We’re gonna point and laugh at your dumb ass.

Well that’s not true. You’re very pro-genocide, as long as it’s against Palestinians. That’s pretty political.

Also, in case you’re not familiar, this is referencing a tweet from someone whose neighbor told him that his cats keep getting eaten by coyotes. He asks the neighbor how many cats he has, to which the neighbor replies that he just goes and gets a new cat from the shelter every time. So the guy says “sounds like you’re just feeding shelter cats to coyotes”, at which point the neighbor’s daughter starts crying.

Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.

I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.

Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”

If Biden had decided to keep running, I can almost guarantee you that enough of the party would have rallied behind him that he’d get the official nod next month. He absolutely could have continued stroking his ego at the expense of the country. Eventually, however, enough people talked him out of it and made him see that he was probably not going to win, and he needed to step aside for the good of the country. Regardless of whether he did so willingly, or kicking and screaming, he made the right choice at the cost of his ego. It seems like a really small thing, but you’ve got to remember that presidents are, as a rule, huge egomaniacs. You kind of have to be to get into that position in the first place. To an egomaniac, putting anything above their own desires is a big deal.

It’s not a particularly flattering picture of him, but he will absolutely be remembered for putting America first.

Oh, on the contrary. His entire 2016 run was just because he wanted to stick it in Obama’s face after Obama humiliated him at that White House correspondents dinner. You can see him sitting there in the audience, just seething. For a raging narcissist, humiliation is one of the worst things in the world.

I think you’re severely overestimating the average intelligence of the population.

Basically a complete teardown and overhaul of the system. The biggest problem is that seats in congress are not proportioned representationally. For example, in the UK, if a particular party receives 5% of the vote, then roughly 5% of the seats in the House of Commons are assigned to members appointed by that party. In the US, if a party receives 5% of the vote, they get nothing. Additionally, the US is further hampered by the fact that we elect our president directly instead of going with a prime minister approach, where the minister is appointed by the party or party coalition that won the election. Because of this, there is a lot of pressure placed on voters in every election to vote for the candidate they hate the least, since if they don’t, there’s a good chance that the candidate they hate the most will become president.

If we had a representational vote, on the other hand, people could feel free to vote for whichever party most suited their political tastes, knowing that they will have a chance at being represented in the government that follows the election. Often times, a single party doesn’t win enough votes to have a majority in governments like this, so they have to cooperate with other parties to form a coalition government. In situations such as these, sometimes small parties can play a pivotal role. For example, in the 2017 UK general election, the number of seats needed to secure a majority was 326 (650 seats total, need more than 50%), but the Conservatives only managed to get 318 seats. They were able to team up with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), however, who had gotten 10 seats in the election to form a Conservative-DUP coalition government. So the people who voted for DUP in that election got some extra concessions from the new government because the Conservatives needed them.

Because the US system is an all-or-nothing affair, where we are concerned only with someone winning a plurality rather than a majority of the votes, it necessarily will degrade into a 2-party system over time no matter how many parties you start with. It’s just a mathematical reality. For example, imagine you have 6 parties, and the vote breakdown is as follows:

• Party A: 38% of the vote
• Party B: 32% of the vote
• Party C: 12% of the vote
• Party D: 11% of the vote
• Party E: 5% of the vote
• Party F: 2% of the vote

In this situation, voters would quickly realize that party F doesn’t have a chance to win going forward. So they’re more likely to vote for a party that doesn’t align as well with their politics, but that actually has a chance of winning in future elections. Maybe they give their votes to Party C, for example. Over time, this effect is carried out again and again, and the numbers of people who vote for the two biggest parties reach a sort of equilibrium, with all of the other parties dying out or having next to no votes. Because the people voting for Party F get nothing if their candidate loses, they are heavily incentivized to settle. So, in effect, our current political situation is a result of the systems we chose, and their effect on game theory.

I’m honestly not sure what you’re getting at with this statement. Idaho has a Republican governor, a Republican Lt. governor, a Republican secretary of state, 2 Republican senators, 100% of the US Representatives for Idaho are Republicans, and 80% of the state senators are Republican.

Is there something I’m missing here? Can you explain why Idaho is in any way something other than a perfect example of why voting very much matters? As far as I can tell, voters in Idaho seem to overwhelmingly favor Republicans, and so they get Republican policies.

I’m completely mystified by how you can look at an example where a 280 vote margin led to an attorney general who refuses to prosecute people in her state over a tyrannical law, and then go: “no, but see - voting doesn’t matter!”

I mean, there’s ignorance, and then there’s willful stupidity.

Oh hey - catturd2; isn’t that that sycophantic piece of shit who fawns all over Elon Musk every chance he gets? Maybe it’s a different catturd2 on bluesky.

Edit: Actually, yeah; it does look like it’s a different person entirely:

I recently read Neil Stephenson’s book called “Fall”, in which a significant chunk of the novel is set about 30 years in the future. At that point in time, large swathes of America are referred to as “Ameristan”, because they are break-away territories ruled by evangelical warlords. It feels surprisingly prescient.

Ah, a fellow “Cracking the Cryptic” lover, I see.