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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I don’t want to pay once and own it forever, I want to pay once and then in a few years when it’s gotten buggy or incompatible or whatever I pay you some more money for an upgrade. If I use it a lot maybe I pay you more often, if I use it rarely maybe I pay less often, if I’ve got a lot of bills this month maybe I put it off a few months.

    That’s really it - I’ll happily give you more money occasionally if I keep using it, but the burden of stretching that revenue so that you can make your payroll every 2 weeks ought to fall on you, not on me, and if you sit on your ass and barely make any changes for a year I shouldn’t be stuck paying you the same monthly fee while you do that.








  • There are a couple sneaky ways states are trying to get around this.

    The biggest one is the NPVIC - basically, states representing a majority of electoral votes (considerably fewer than the 3/4 required to ratify a constitutional amendment) would enter into an interstate compact agreeing to award all of their electoral votes - and hence the presidency - to whoever wins the national popular vote.

    It might be struck down as unconstitutional, but it also might not - states have a lot of power over how to allocate their electoral votes. But even getting to the needed 270 electoral votes is a stretch; we’re currently at 205, but that includes most of the low-hanging fruit, because populous hard-right states like Texas tend to view the current system as favoring Republicans (and indeed the 4 presidents in the last 150 years elected despite losing the popular vote were all Republicans) and so even if a popular vote would bolster their national influence they’re still against it. And the non-Republican-dominated states that haven’t entered it yet - MI/WI/PA/AZ/NV/GA/NC/NH - are all presidential swing states that enjoy outsized influence under the current system and have no incentive to disrupt it.

    So realistically, the only way to eliminate the electoral college would be for a Democrat to win the electoral vote while losing the popular vote, thus gaining support from hard-right state legislatures eager to delegitimize the election winner.






  • It’s just companies and influencers, nobody else is posting much there. And half of the influencers are only there to try to get you to follow them somewhere else. (feed is absolutely crammed with Taylor “not wearing a mask outdoors in 2023 is literally genocide” Lorenz hawking her new YouTube channel and I don’t even follow her)

    Meanwhile Mastodon continues growing steadily, and I’m getting as much engagement there as I ever did on Twitter with maybe 10% as many followers.