i would love more parties and more choices. If we could get something besides FPTP voting that would be great.

I do mean just a saucepan with some water in it. I ended up getting an electric kettle…

You are still missing who votes. You seem to think you vote, but it is really the state that votes.

Uh… no, that’s my point. If electors are selected by a popular vote, that’s the vote. Very rare for electors to switch candidates.

This states thing is a questionable proxy system. We are sort of, theoretically, a republic of states. Sure. However, it’s a flawed system that isn’t quite relevant to how the country has developed. It’s silly to act like a system invented 250 years ago will always be the best or most effective. The founders of the country didn’t expect for the systems to never change. They also didn’t expect a party duopoly and hoped to avoid the current situation.

Anyway, it’s clearly not purely a ‘states vote’ situation since it votes are weighed by population. A pure one state, one vote situation would be like that. Texas Republicans recently had a brilliant idea like that where each county would have one vote, which is obviously absurdly anti-democratic - imagine 4 million people in Houston having the same vote as 72 people in some tiny county.

I’m obviously aware of electors. They’re selected by what you called a ‘popularity contest’.

A ‘fair vote for president’ is not really what I’d call the electoral college. Why would my vote count for more in Wyoming than Florida? It’s not consistent either. Large states still have way more power, so I’m not sure what that’s solving.

Okay, glad we can agree on swing states. How could that change under the current system, though? I guess small population states are never going to be as popular for campaigning as places where you can go visit 20x the population in just one city.

The left complains about this system because gives conservatives power disproportionate to their actual numbers, while we are still nominally a democracy. If there was anything like reasonable bipartisan legislative work, it might be better, but things have become so contentious. And yes, I don’t expect to see it change because conservative states would have to choose to give up power.

A popular vote is something people who do understand the Constitution or the power of the states.

I can’t parse that sentence.

Being president isn’t about being popular. It is about the states picking the person to represent them.
We are a representative government. We are not a boy band where popularity matters.

What? Within each state it’s a popularity contest.

So you’re saying popular vote or ‘boy band popularity contest’ is fine within each state, but not for the whole nation at once? What’s the difference other than that the electoral college is imprecise? We have to disproportionately select electors where people in North Dakota count 3x as much as people in Texas or California? Why’s that? The Senate is already bad enough where 30 million people in Texas get the same weight as 4 million people in Oregon or 700,000 in North Dakota. I don’t see why selecting electors by popular vote and then having them vote makes any difference other than as a charade to pretend states are independent.

The idea that the US is a coalition of independent states made sense over 150 years ago or 250 years ago, but not so much now. As much as say, some idiots in Texas fantasize about it, states are not free to leave the US and it’s no different than any country made up of provinces.

I would be more fine with the electoral college if the number of electors was updated to match growing populations. The system also is super lame in how it makes the entire election come down to tens of thousands of votes in ‘swing states’.

My Australian friend thought I was a complete barbarian for heating water for tea on the stove in a pot

I like how you act like you really believe these things and that they make sense.

that’s true, there was that, but then on 4chan it became “pepe says kek on doubles” and then “meme things into existence” and then it got all twisted with meming trump into the presidency by saying kek a lot or something, and that sort of ruined it

it was related to trump bullshit involving Pepe being racist around 2015-16

wow, that’s something I was happy to not have heard in a while

The corrupt liberal propaganda machine in Tishomingo covered it up 😤

It sure is awful that we’re at a point where people like Musk and Theil are working with a demented rapist conman to put someone like this 3 hamberders from the presidency.

The eyeshadow is not really a problem, I guess, except in the context of his other views. If he just was like “yeah I grew up with emo” or “I like the cure” or even “I think it makes me look cool”, that would be one thing, but instead we’re just supposed to overlook it like some people accept that his running mate is a pasty pink person with pig eyes who paints most of his face orange.

So you think the Oklahoma town canceled their football for… ?

prob just secondhand meth smoke given the demographic

It does seem pretty wild how widely it’s prescribed given anecdotes like that. I also a knew a guy who had been taking it for over 10 years and clearly was wildly addicted.

This is another headline phrased as if the program is exclusively for undocumented immigrants, while it’s actually for anyone and the issue is whether to require a SSN to apply. Last time, it was about housing assistance and Fox did the same thing. However, Newsom ended up vetoing that anyway (as mentioned in this article).

I had a friend whose mom was prescribed Ambien. I think it was the first time I’d ever heard of it. She said she kept having experiences like waking up in bed with empty bags of flour and jars of mayonnaise, so she stopped taking it.

My guess is Iranian Republicans thought of this scheme. I mean, Iranians have a lot better things to think about right now.

In the past, definitely. I’m not sure what the current system is.

Realistically, might as well read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager as it knows a lot more than I do. I had a pager for several years and have done network programming, that’s about it… i have an insulin pump that people often mistake for a pager though, ha. It makes me look pretty cool.

They’re sent like a phone call. Afaik there is no confirmation on the network whether the device received the message.