• 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • Instead of store hours like this:

    • Monday 6:00-18:00
    • Tuesday 6:00-18:00
    • Wednesday 8:00-18:00
    • Thursday 6:00-18:00
    • Friday 6:00-18:00

    We can have store hours like this:

    • Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
    • Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
    • Wednesday 0:00-10:00
    • Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
    • Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

    Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

    And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

    It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

    It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

    Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.







  • My post exactly decried a broken system. I called it a systemic problem! And in fact, it is the people who try to solve it by voting third party who are not realizing the system is broken such that doing so only hurts themselves. The only way to fix it is to figure out a way to have a new voting system. I even gave an example of an alternative one!

    I think your response really underscores how we got to the situation where everything in politics is just soundbites and insults and pithy slogans. Actual reality can be wordy to talk about, but people like you can’t be bothered to read it! And then you reply with a new pithy insult like “Blue MAGA”. Take a second to think before you react!


  • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlYes, but
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    11 months ago

    If that dude’s outfit was animated and played noise, and the guy jumped in front of whatever I was looking at and wouldn’t go away, and sometimes he put random shit in my pockets or got me sick, then I’d hate that guy just as much as internet ads


  • Here is the nuance that is missing:

    First-past-the-post voting systems inevitably trend to two-party systems over time. We see it play out in election models and we see it play out in real life.

    One reason this happens is because, in this sort of system, voting for a third party candidate that aligns more closely with your views rather than the best choice of the major party candidates statistically increases the likelihood that the candidate furthest from your views will win. A significant, sustained third party that is more to your liking than the Democratic Party would ensure easy GOP victories for as long as all three parties ran their own candidates, even if the GOP never won an actual majority of votes. (We saw Bill Clinton win both elections in the 90s with much less than 50% and no candidate getting 50% due to a major third party candidate).

    Another reason is that even if societal circumstances lead to a third party doing well enough to win it all, what you would end up with is having one of the existing major parties collapse, you’d be back to two parties, and the new third party would become watered down into ultimately the same thing it replaced. We’ve also seen this in American history.

    In summary, there is tremendous systemic pressure that causes the two-party system. It’s not that our politicians are tricking us and politicians in Europe under different election systems can’t or won’t do the same. If we changed our voting system to e.g. Ranked Choice, not only would third parties be possible, they would be inevitable. But if we don’t change the system, then voting third party is like forcing two strong magnets together that are trying to repel. Even if you’re able to do it briefly, it’s completely unstable and will correct itself as soon as possible.

    The oversimplified version of all this is “voting third party is voting for Trump”. I can see why it’s frustrating because it’s not literally true — however, anyone who is interested in maximizing their best interests, i.e. by having the winner be someone as good as possible, is statistically increasing the chances of the worst candidate winning by voting third party over preferred major party, while our voting system remains in place.

    So ultimately, a slight rephrase to “voting third party instead of Democrat helps Trump win” is true.











  • It’s funny that we call these words “loanwords” that we “borrow”. That implies they don’t belong to our language and that we don’t have the right to modify them however we want; it even implies that eventually we’ll return them to their language of origin. It would be much more accurate to say these words have been acquired, incorporated, or assimilated. That’s what languages actually do with words they get from other languages.

    Personally, I enjoy the organic nature of the exchange of words between languages. Different languages and cultures treat foreign words differently. Some try to stick as close to the original pronunciation as possible, and some happily alter the word. This can even be handled differently by the same language and culture at a different period of time. For example, in English we have the words “gender” and “genre”, both borrowed from the same French word at different times. The older one is pronounced in an English-sounding way and the newer one is pronounced as close to the French way as possible. I find this kind of stuff very amusing.