Folks. Publicly traded companies will ALWAYS compare the expected value of breaking the law with compliance.

Say it costs $100 million to follow the law. Breaking it comes with a $300 million fine, but only a 20% chance of getting caught.

They compare a 100% chance of paying $100 million to a 20% chance of paying $300 million.

Average cost of following the law: $100 million

Average cost of breaking it: $60 million

If we’re gonna do capitalism (which I would rather we not, for the record!), we have to make that expected value calculation break in favor of following regulations. If it is cheaper to break the law than to follow it, you’re not just losing money by complying: you’re giving ground to your competition. Fines need to be massive. Infractions need to get caught and punished. Executives need to be held personally accountable. Corporations need to be dissolved. Fines cannot be just the cost of doing business.

So the citizens still have to physically vote even though there’s only 1 option?

Yep! Technically tho, they can cross out the name of the candidate to vote “no”.

See that little table to the right? They have to use the red pen sitting on top of it. But don’t worry, it’s “anonymous”!

Apparently in more recent elections, “no” votes just go in a separate bin?

It also appears to double as a census, since voting is mandatory. That same Wikipedia article says elections are watched by the inminban to keep an eye out for no-shows.

To be completely fair, there is apparently one position in local elections that can actually have two candidates. It’s mostly a figurehead that’s subordinate to the unelected mayor, but hey! Two names on the ballot!

Can’t find anything about how ballots are counted, though that doesn’t exactly surprise me.

To be clear, Kim Jong-un was not up for “election” in 2019. According to Wikipedia, it was actually the first time someone in his seat didn’t even bother with the sham.

Not like it’s a huge change, going from being the only name on the ballot to not even letting people vote.

Holy shit, I am totally guilty of this.

For those who haven’t yet read the article, the idea is that people interpret “80% of people prefer Pepsi Max to Coke” as “Pepsi Max is 80% yummier than Coke”, when in reality most of that 80% only slightly prefers Pepsi.

Basically a strong difference in proportion of people who prefer one option to another does not necessarily imply a strong difference in the average opinion between the two.

CNBC financial news channel anchor Joe Kernen compared New York to Batman’s crime-riddled Gotham. “ They’re taking Wall Streeters and making them walk out onto the ice in the East River, And, and then they fall through. I mean there is a class warfare that’s going on.”

“Raising taxes on people who have more wealth than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes is the same as murder.”

I cannot empathize with anyone who says that shit with a straight face. You’ve either abandoned any principles you may have had to spew propaganda, or are so completely delusional that you actually believe it.

Jesus Christ, yes, I am a comfort hunter. You think I get up at the ass crack of dawn every day for fun? You think I want to push buttons on a computer all day because I’m just weirdly into it?

No! I do this shit because I have to!

Fucking hell. I’ve already accepted that I have to make your company money if I want to live in a house. For the love of all that is good in this world, PLEASE do not make me pretend to like it. I’m already weirded out that you’re so into it.

Love that podcast! That’s how I learned about the corpse thing.

The obsession with animal corpses. The myriad bizarre diseases and conditions. The desperate attempt to bring back measles. The reckless disregard for public health. The unnerving face that dips into the uncanny valley.

Folks, I think RFK jr may be Pestilence.

Hi. I failed out of college, in no small part due to undiagnosed ADHD. I wanna offer a little pushback.

I can’t tell if you want to change society to be less punishing to neurodivergent people, or if your whole thesis is “People with ADHD have little to no trouble in society today”.

If it’s the former: not treating people who are struggling is not the way to change society. Accepting for the sake of argument that ADHD people “pay attention to different things”; paying attention to some things is critical to my ability to thrive. I would love to live in a world where I could just do what I thought was important and still have my needs taken care of, but unfortunately I’m stuck needing to pay attention to stupid bullshit I don’t care about in order to make a living, and that’s a tremendous struggle without medication.

If it’s the latter: Jesus Christ, talk to someone with ADHD.

And finally: I take issue with your metaphor at the end. What do you think is present in an unmedicated person with ADHD that is somehow missing in a medicated person?

I’m here for it. The purpose of protesting is not to wave signs around in a way that is convinient and easy to ignore. Protests are supposed to disrupt things, to get the attention of people in power. There’s supposed to be an implied threat: “Look at all these upset people who are willing to break the law. Be a real shame if they went from blocking traffic to dragging oil executives out of buildings!” A polite and legal protest may be great for movement building, but it’s ultimately the same as asking nicely in terms of power and demands. His only mistake, the way I see it, was not bringing more people with him.

Java. It’s familiar, it’s the one I use most at my job, and I’m not in love with any other language enough to choose something less pragmatic.

I was a weird 16 year old, staying up too late on summer vacation of 2011. I had decided that asking people their favorite dinosaur was the ultimate conversation starter, and had a working theory that the more unusual their answer was, the more interesting the conversation would be. People who said “T-Rex” were lame, but “Iguanadon” would be cool, something like that.

Well, she said “Pachycephalosaurus”, which was the first one of the night I had to look up. Naturally, I was enthralled.

We talked into the wee hours of the morning, where she (being a fellow dumb teenager) sent me her Facebook profile. Before clicking, I had decided that I would look but ultimately not accept her friend request, because stranger danger and all. But when I checked out her page, it turned out we had a mutual friend! A guy we both knew had started high school with her, and moved up the coast halfway through and was currently going to my high school.

That was good enough for me, and I accepted her friend request. July 7th, 2011, around 3am.

From there, we quickly turned flirty and started talking all the time. We weren’t anything official, but I told her I loved her within a couple weeks. One problem though: she was over 400 miles away, and I was still in school with no license.

To make a long story short, we were flirty on and off for the next three years until 2014, where we both decided “fuck it” and jumped into the special hell that is long distance dating together. I got to see her in person December 14th of that year after working at a grocery store while finishing up my associate’s degree to make enough money for a train ticket, and she was my first kiss.

Anyway, college sucked and long distance dating sucks even when it’s the right person. Fast-forward to 2020 when I finally have a car & some degree of financial stability, I moved 400 miles away to live with her & haven’t looked back. Put a ring on her finger March of 2021, and married her on the beach last weekend after knowing her for twelve years. She is currently snoring gracefully in bed next to me. 🥰

End of an era. I met my wife on Omegle.

Ugh, yes!

I feel like there’s kind of an unspoken social pressure to be more or less non-chalant about most conversation topics. Like you’ve gotta know that someone is cool before you can let your guard down and show that you really care about something without it coming across as off-putting for whatever reason.

But not politics! Caring a lot about politics is responsible! And if you’re to a point where you’re already talking to someone about politics, it usually feels like that pressure to be chill has already passed anyway.

Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There’s a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.