I mean, it’s all very subjective, so “too much” for you seems to be what is a good amount for everyone else…but realistically, I don’t think this is a legitimate complaint since you still need to be able to make all these adjustments anyway… it’s just a matter of the way the adjustments are being made.

All a touch screen changes is that it can play host to multiple functions depending on context…but it loses much of the visual recognition and almost all the tactile feedback of a physical control.

And while vehicles keep getting more and more complex for sure, I feel like when I’m riding in a more touchscreen heavy vehicle, that screen is displaying the same static set of controls 99% of the time…and at that point, the flexibility it offers is largely irrelevant, and the tradeoffs mean giving up a lot to get very little in exchange.

They get really spicy!

Disagree.

Personally, I feel the problem is absolutely touchscreens.

I’ve only got five senses, and taste and smell aren’t helpful in a driving situation.

Of the 3 left, sight is the most important for the most important task: driving.

For other tasks, sound is best used to alert or remind about something, and is frequently diminished as a driving aid by music.

That leaves touch and sight for all remaining tasks.

Touchscreens are, despite the name, effectively 100% reliant on sight, since there’s no real tactile feedback to enable the user to make eyes-free adjustments. To use a touchscreen, you have to take your eyes off the road to see what the screen says and make your selections.

While some are better than others, I also feel like touchscreens are still embarrassingly and frustratingly prone to errors, missed touches, and generally not doing the things the user intended, requiring even more eyes off the road to undo whatever actually happened, get the interface back to the place you want it, and try again, hoping that this time it’ll work.

My mid-teens vehicle has a mix of a medium sized touch screen for the entertainment unit but physical controls for climate, driving, and a few of the entertainment adjustments, and while I was all about the advanced new touchscreen when I bought it, I find it’s my least favorite part of the controls this far along in ownership.

Implying anything needs to be proven in court when the judge is a Trump appointee.

Agreed.

Ultimately, polls are simply unable to account for the demographic of “doesn’t participate in advance polling”, and Anthony they attempt to do to account for that glaring weakness is guesswork.

Since he owns the Post, it is very strictly speaking “his business”.

On one hand, I’d love to see the Post endorse Harris, but on the other hand, I do feel that the owner of a company absolutely should have this level of control over their own company.

It might be different if he were compelling the paper to compromise on it’s integrity or something, but simply preventing his own paper from endorsing a political candidate is absolutely something that he should be able to do.

Please note that this isn’t a commentary on his immense wealth, or the role of the ultra wealthy in America…simply an observation on what a business owner should be able to do with their own company.

He’s been alive longer than Hawaii and Alaska have been US states.

I mean…so is my dad…and he’s not even to retirement yet.

I wouldn’t have a problem with a (healthy, sane, responsible, democracy-minded) president in their 60s.

Hell, given those conditions, while I wouldn’t love the idea, I’d be okay with a president in their 80s too.

But my main problem is that Trump ticks exactly zero of those boxes.

Indiana?!

Whoever suggested that she go spend time in a solid red state where the opposing VP was from needs to be tarred and feathered.

You sure they’re feigning?

It’s like you’re mentally incapable of reading a comment and responding to the words in it.

I’d be totally onboard with a system where they ran it as a tax incentive to vote. Better yet if it were a flat, fixed amount.

Like, in every precinct, you get your name checked off in the voter roll when you vote. It makes no record of who you vote for, only that you did, in fact, go to the polls and exercised your right.

Somehow export that data, send it to the IRS for cross referencing, and at tax time, if you voted in that year, it adds $100 to your tax return. Not a percentage of your income (which benefits the wealthy more than the poor) just a flat amount that basically is the government thanking you for voting. If you didn’t vote there’s no penalty… there’s just no reward.

…that said, this system would depend completely on having election day become a national holiday with businesses closed, etc. Or at the very least, mandating that employers nationwide must schedule every worker for a half day, maximum, on election day, with the other half day being a paid holiday…which would cause an absolute uproar in American politics.

Exactly.

My thought when opening the post was basically, “Can you imagine the depths that American corporations would sink to in a market where they can totally conceal the flavor, size, quality, etc. of their products until after the sale, and not have anyone from the company present, making them totally immune to any negative feedback?”

Presumably the companies behind these things in Japan are at least delivering a somewhat acceptable food item. I wouldn’t be surprised in any way to find an American version of this thing dispensing literal dead rats.

Share your art, not your fart!

It’s really impossible to keep this brief, but I’ll try to keep it understandable:

The EC is a body of “electors”, who serve as an intermediary body between the direct democracy of a popular national vote and the actual selection of a president. Their purpose is literally and intentionally to serve as a middleman, both to give a safety net to the ruling classes to make sure that whoever wins an election is someone they approve of, as well as to install a system that takes a national popular vote and basically applies an overlay to it…an overlay that leaves the process open to manipulation, stacking the odds, etc.

I’m not just saying this as a criticism of the system (though it is), this is the explicit purpose of the existence of the system.

Now to the nuts and bolts:

The US has a federal government with three branches: the executive (headed up by the president and including all of the various “Departments” like the departments of State (handling all diplomatic affairs), Defense (the military), Justice Department (FBI), Interior (National Park Service), Education, Agriculture, Homeland Security, etc.

Then there’s the Judicial Branch, which is the federal court system, spearheaded by the Supreme Court. In addition to criminal trials involving federal crimes, they also have the responsibility of deciding on whether laws or actions of other government bodies are constitutional. If not, they have the authority to strike them down.

Last there’s the legislative branch, which is responsible for creating laws and deciding how to spend money. Within the legislative branch, there are two bodies: the Senate, and the House of Representatives. This is because when the government was being created, states were much more independent than they are now, and there was a serious disagreement over how not only the people, but also the states would be represented in federal government.

So for the House, the number of Representatives each state sends is (roughly) proportional to that state’s population; ie. a state with more people living in it will have more representatives than a state with fewer people living in it. The specifics have changed over time, and the way this system works is another issue, but that discussion is for another time.

However, smaller states, and (especially) states with slaves were concerned that even though they had a serious impact on the nation, they had a small voice in government. They wanted a system where their state was on equal footing with more populous states. Where just because they had less people (and by “people”, in that time, they of course meant “land owning white male people”), they wouldn’t have less power.

Thus there were two concessions given to these states to get them to join the union:

First, the three-fifths compromise: when determining population (to see how many representatives each state could send to the House), states were allowed to count each slave living in that state as three-fifths (0.6) of a person. Yes, these slaves, who their states regarded as property any other time, and who sure as hell weren’t allowed to vote…were nonetheless to be allowed to count toward how much voting power their owners would have.

And second…the Senate. The Senate is the other house of Congress, where instead of determining members by population, it’s much simpler: every state gets two. Regardless of population. This puts the smallest state on equal footing with the largest in the Senate.

And since both chambers of Congress (the Senate and the House) must pass a bill in order for it to become law, this is why it’s so hard to get anything done for Congress.

SO!

Now that we know about the house and Senate and why and how they are the way they are… what’s that have to do with the electoral college?

Well…the number of electors from each state are determined by adding up the number of Representatives and Senators that the state sends to Congress. So a small population state like say, Wyoming has one representative because very few people live there…and they get two senators because they are a state and all states get two. 2 + 1 = 3. So in a presidential election, Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes. For a more populous state, like my home state of Pennsylvania, we’ve got 17 representatives. Adding our two senators to that means that Pennsylvania gets 19 electoral votes for president.

Adding up all these electoral votes, it works out such that whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes wins the presidency.

So you might be thinking, “Hmm… sounds like proportional voting and democracy with extra steps… what’s the big deal?”

Well… there’s two issues going on:

First: It’s only proportional in allocation, but not so much in casting those votes. Of all 50 states, all but two (Maine and Nebraska) are set up such that whoever wins the state wins all of that state’s electoral votes. So take my Pennsylvania for example: we’ve got about 13 million people living here. Obviously not everyone can vote, and not everyone that can vote will vote, but if next month, let’s say all 13 million of us vote…if 12,999,999 people vote for Trump and 1 person votes for Harris, Trump wins all 19 votes. That makes sense. However, if Trump gets 6,500,001 votes and Harris gets 5,999,999 votes, that two vote difference means that Trump still gets all 19 votes. We don’t split them so that he gets 10 and she gets 9. Winner take all.

Not only does this distort the popular vote, but it also has the effect of making a narrow victory in one area the same as a landslide in another.

Second: With the way votes are allocated, the fewest that any state can have is three (one representative and two senators). Even if ten people lived in that state, they still get three votes in the electoral college. Meanwhile, with the way congressional laws work, states with bigger populations do get more representatives…but as a state’s population gets bigger and bigger, even though they get more electoral votes, each of those votes encompasses more and more people.

So looking (approximately) at Wyoming and California: Wyoming has a population of 582,000 and gets 3 votes, California has a population of 39,000,000 and gets 54 votes. That means that every vote in Wyoming represents about 194,000 residents, while every vote in California represents about 723,000 residents.

Doing the math, this means that every vote in Wyoming carries about 3.73x more power than a vote in California.

So in summary: the biggest criticisms of the electoral college are:

1. The lopsided way votes are allocated in the first place.

2. The winner-take-all system awarding the same number of votes for a landslide and a narrow victory distorting the actual voting numbers.

3. The lopsided allocation resulting in a situation where some Americans living in low population states having dramatically more power than others, based simply on where they live.

Of course these issues lead to lots of other weirdness and wrongness…for example: with the winner take all system, candidates don’t even try to win states that are projected to safely go to one candidate or the other…they focus all attention on “battleground” states where the election is set to be close, ignoring millions of people nationwide because they happen to live in a state that’s not competitive. A national popular vote would eliminate state political boundaries and make everyone’s vote matter equally.

Likewise, this is how you end up with a case like 2016: more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump…but those people lived in the wrong states, so basically she won by bigger margins but the margins meant nothing because he won narrow victories in more areas…so even though more people wanted her to be president, because of the electoral college, he got enough votes in the right geographical areas to win the presidency with fewer votes.

None of which was the point of the question, but thanks for the added perspective.

I’ve only ever gotten a sticker twice…plus you can buy rolls of them online.

Hah!

Good one!

Having worked retail in my younger days it’s maybe the worst role I’ve ever had (tied with the sales aspect of a job I had later on in my career).

Shit pay, shit hours, ever changing schedules, horrible management, toxic work environment, frequent abuses of employees (shit like working long hours with no breaks, surprise shift extensions because someone else called off, etc.), ridiculously petty rules and policies, etc.

The idea of any sort of pay for anything other than working the equivalent hours (or more…retail is notorious for trying to get free labor off the clock) is a fairy tale.

Midterms: “Are we a joke to you?!”

Exactly.

The solution here should be the federal government going, “Ooh! Good catch on that! Here’s a law mandating that private employers give paid holidays for all federal holidays! Thanks for looking out for employees!”

How are you going to have evidence of voting?