The long, drawn out metaphorical explanation was unnecessary and frankly kind of condescending.

I’m not over here trying to be some champion of the electoral college and I’d be more interested in seeing a real push for ranked choice or one of its cousins.

The point I was making was that if you sat at home and didn’t vote at all, your chosen candidate would never see the inside of the oval office and I went into my understanding of why it is the way it is. Ultimately, voting under the current system is not entirely worthless as you seemed to claim in the original post I responded to.

We’ve had something like 59 elections in total and 5 of them involved the winning candidate losing the popular vote but winning the election by way of the electoral college. Only one of those elections - the very first - involved anything even remotely close to your example (but still not42.3% vs 31.6%). The other 4 had a difference of like 2% or less between the two leading candidates.

The electoral college was devised as a compromise between direct democracy and congressional voting and I’m sure it was done in good faith to try to make sure everyone was represented, but this system seems to truly show its cracks when we’re facing an insanely stark national split like we see today and there’s no argument that we should probably shake things up and get rid of it.

I mean, that’s not entirely accurate - a vote for a presidential candidate is a vote for the slate of electors tied to said candidate - effectively a vote for your candidate, albeit indirectly. Electors can, however, be required to vote according to popular vote as required by the state they’re electors in. Or they could have pledged to vote according to specific party. I don’t know for sure, but I assume state elector requirements override party pledges.

My understanding is that when it was devised, it was a compromise between direct democracy (which would honestly be potentially dangerous - how many people do you know where you can’t help but go, “Fuck… This guy can vote.”) and election via congressional vote. It certainly ain’t perfect and I have no bias towards it, but it’s a system like anything else that people tend to point at and blame when things don’t go their way or just ignore or even defend when things do go their way.

- George Costanza

If you’re envisioning a sloppily torn scrap of paper with “KILL EVERY1” scrawled on it with crayon, I could see where you’re coming from, but paper battle maps with points of interest/focus being used by a pretty primitive (comparable to who they’re up against) fighting force makes more sense, though.

If this was planned so tightly that they didn’t let the bulk of their fighters (or large swaths of lower rung leadership) know details until days (or less) before the attack, then it stands to reason they’d hand out infosheets. That seems to be what happened here.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-duped-hamas-planned-devastating-assault-2023-10-08/

They’re there… err… the remains are, at least.

Edgy teenager shit, probably.

Like drawing an anarchy symbol on stuff.

Pull off request, on the other hand (ha-HA!), approved.

Not like that bitch Stephanie is gonna be helping out with that anymore.

Alcoholism will do crazy things to people and their brains.

I keep going back to how the guy who wielded RICO so cleverly to wreck the mob, ran an effective “PR campaign” post 9/11 that dubbed him the “Mayor of America,” and was a serious potential presidential candidate ended up leaking oil out of his scalp in front of a landscaping place, being the mouthpiece for a sort-of wannabe mafia-esque organization and eventually getting bitchslapped with RICO charges himself as a result.

I think it’s one part alcoholism, one part grasping wildly for the glory days, and possibly one part dude just getting wackier with age. You can see the glory days stuff in action during his time trying to get the GOP nomination in 2008 and how everything with him was about 9/11. There’s probably a feeling of invincibility he has from the highest highs he reached in his life and maybe even a bit of smug “I know what’s best for this country, I was it’s goddamn Mayor for the love of fuck!”

Whatever it is, fuck that guy. Time to piss off, Rudy. You’re embarrassing yourself and the rest of us by extension.

These dickheads always think they can translate the power they hold in civilized society to the wild post aoocalyptic free for all. Makes you wonder what will be going through their heads when some brutish psycho decides it’s his turn and is about to stomp their heads into the tightly packed wasteland dirt.

Shrek is love, Shrek is life, Shrek is high fashion.

fair enough and fwiw, that’s what i was kind of echoing. “we’re” in mud slinging territory as a culture, but journalists/opinion-piece-writers/whatever are massive drivers of it.

I think in a lot of cases, it’s less about them having a lot of money and more about how they’re able to effect change using that money or the power/influence associated with that money. Unfortunately, this can often happen at a relatively large scale, like by upending a popular social media platform or disrupting the automobile industry (for good or ill) or discussing futuristic public transportation ideas to take the wind out of the sails of more realistic/attainable projects and efforts.

All things considered, I wouldn’t mind hearing less about these people - a lot less. We’re well into mud slinging territory and some of these dickheads absolutely thrive on that. I’m sure the worst of them feel egged on when the media talks about them so they say or do more crazy shit very publicly to draw attention from fanboys and detractors alike. Call it a vicious cycle… or a hyperloop or something.

In the gun world (the real world), I’m my own armorer. I don’t have someone on payroll who is supposed to be an ever-present expert to safety check, store, and catalog everything for me. I’m willing to bet that most of these actors may have never even handled a gun off-set… but I’m absolutely not against giving them basic safety training. It would certainly stand to reason.

I’m not so sure we’d convict the clown - but I also wouldn’t argue that the wealthy and famous don’t have their own lane when it comes to legal matters. Even if we didn’t convict the clown, Baldwin’s own road to vindication and absolution would be much, much easier.

And for the record: I don’t care about him in the slightest. If he got life in prison over this, all I’d care about is whether it was a just verdict and sentence.

Is there a clown armorer in the clown troupe who was supposed to diligently do his job and check that the swords are fake?

I’m not against making the clowns take a class about pressing their thumbs to the blade or trying to slice a piece of paper in half (checking that the bullets in the gun are crimped and, therefore, blank), but if the clown industry’s SOP is to always have a clown armorer on staff and one of the clown armorer’s main jobs is to make sure that all the swords are plastic, then who’s to blame here? Who even stored a real metal sword with the fake plastic clown swords? This is a massive failure in clown procedure.

I wasn’t aiming at crafting the perfect analogy. I wanted to capture the absurdity and fucking asininity of the responders comment.

The point is that it’s not up to either the bridge’s users (the actors in the film) to “take a safety course” - it’s up to the bridge designers/builders (the film set’s armorer if we’re talking about direct blame or the executive film staff if were talking about corner cutting or poor funding) to make sure the bridge (the prop gun) is safe to use.

If Baldwin is culpable for corner cutting as an executive staff member (and for example, hiring a shitty armorer to save on costs), so be it. I don’t give a shit about him. But being mad at someone for not checking a gun when the responsibility lies on a hired expert and this is just how Hollywood operates and in a century of filmmaking there have been a handful of freak accidents?

An architect designs a bridge. The materials include a number of steel beams that dont actually meet the support requirements for the bridge’s expected traffic. The bridge collapses.

This guy, to the survivors of the collapse: Have you ever even taken a bridge safety course?

Peter Santanello’s videos are usually really enjoyable and pleasant. He has a calm, respectful demeanor and he just goes to random places you usually don’t think about and just kind of shoots the shit with people. He did a couple videos a while back where he went to a couple of native reservations in like one of the Dakotas, I think, and they were an intensely interesting look into that life and culture.

His titles can feel kind of click-baity sometimes and I don’t always agree with his take on things, but I find him a really likeable and honest-seeming guy.

Funny, I just came off a 2-week task and it took 6 months. Just started a 3 day task… get back to me at the end of July.