I mean… none of that actually helps a third party at the presidential level. Or even addresses spoilers. Going to address your points out of order to make my own

If not, the candidates with the fewest first choice is eliminated, and those that voted for them, they move on to their second choice picks.

So… the third party candidates get eliminated in the first round. Because they cannot compete with the two big parties in terms of campaign funding. Assuming it doesn’t end in the first round because…

If a candidate gets the majority vote in the first choices they win outright.

So the republican wins because there is one right wing fascist running against a dozen flavors of Left wing. Or the Democrat wins because all the third parties were a negligible percentage of the vote to begin with.

I HAVE seen proposals that change the ordering so that a third party “can’t” be a spoiler (I forget the specifics but basically it is removing the small percentage votes first and only comparing once you downselect to N candidates where N is usually 2) but…

People confuse the idea of making a third party candidate viable with minimizing how much you are pissing away your vote by voting for a third party in the presidential election. Ranked choice is great for the latter but it still has many of the same spoiler problems without additional changes. And, arguably, would increase the impact of third party spoilers if one party over-splits. I continue to point people toward the mess in France where basically all the Left wing parties had to unite and make a coalition to MAYBE stop the right wing fascists.

Personally? I would much rather we abolish the electoral college and just do a popular vote. That will have a MUCH bigger impact on third party candidates because it suddenly becomes viable to run a national campaign where you convince maybe 15% of the overall populace rather than needing 40% of each county just to end up on the politico map. Because the latter is what really screws over third parties at the presidential level because they just don’t have the money or resources to sway enough counties to get any meaningful electoral college votes. And ranked choice alone has no impact on that.

It depends how you look at it.

Ranked Choice is not going to make a third party viable at the presidential level. Simply because the other two parties have orders of magnitude more funding to campaign and make sure people know and “like” their candidates. And, depending on the implementation of ranked choice, it may still result in splitting the vote.

At the congressional representative level? Ranked choice has a lot of benefits there. But that is also the level where third party candidates are still viable under the current model.

The reality is that most of the things people want out of ranked choice we already have out of the primary system. Wide range of candidates run in the primary on each side. Primaries exist to figure out who The People like and to let the party down select. Done right, you have what would otherwise have been “third party” candidates who suddenly have a LOT of influence within the party (see: Bernie Sanders in 2020… less so in 2016) because they get a lot of influence on the platform in exchange for supporting the candidate who has the majority of the vote and the party backing.

The key is that people need to understand they are still compromising to get some of what they want AND to engage with their local (and even national) parties to make sure their voices are heard.

That is 95% false and is the nonsense that has mostly been pedaled by the musks of the world to justify privatized space flight.

Like everything with the US military industrial complex, we split everything up to nonsensical degrees. So much of the research and designs NASA uses are based on work and spec by the Army and Air Force. Which, in turn, leads to very specific proposals for companies like Boeing (eep) and the like.

But the actual design and research and even “small scale” testing? That is generally NASA and JPL. JPL in particular being a government research lab (similar model used by the Navy and the DOE) that coordinates with in house talent as well as university groups around the country.

But as spacex and the like basically poached so much of the top talent out of NASA and JPL and universities? It stopped being “Build this rocket to these specs” and more “Hmm. That rocket you are trying to sell us looks REAL familiar but we have been told by congress we can’t design it ourselves so here is your money. Say hi to Fred for us.”

I mean, nationalized spacex is just NASA again. Which I am all for since spacex (and blue origin and the other one) mostly just came out of poaching staff from NASA and JPL in the first place.

Which is a completely different topic.

starlink works… if it isn’t out in the sun for too long. spacex works… for the purposes of what the actual contracts are for.

the issue is musk being highly likely to be compromised and openly calling for the rape and murder of people he doesn’t like. Which gets back to “politics is allowed and you are the intolerant one” level responses.

Yeah… spend some time actually interacting with people with clearances. They are people just like any other so you have some humans and some deranged chuds. And everyone in positions of power are either political appointees (elected or otherwise) or ladder climbers who want to suckle on the teat of those appointees.

So when you point out that someone is actively cheering for russia in a conflict with our allies or is openly calling people slurs? You get told that people are allowed to have political opinions and you are the problem. Because YOU are the reasonable person who will drop it. Whereas they will then bitch and moan that someone in IT has “blue hair” and whine until a local politician runs on that and suddenly everyone has very strict dress codes.

Which, in turn, leads to people leaving in droves which just leaves the shitheads and the appeasers.

Vance is immensely unlikable even amongst the republican base. And the past eight years have made it clear that trump can only really get trump elected. The only downside of him going to hell is that it will give republicans a few more years to figure out their post-trump pivot (which seems to be liz cheney).

I have sprinted without this being an issue so color me very confused.

Do you wear very loose fitting clothes by any chance?

One can just as easily argue that that is the point of primaries in the US and other countries. You get a wide range of left and right leaning candidates and you downselect based on who the majority wants as well as general election theory to handle moderates.

And… the end result is that people get incredibly pissy when their candidate doesn’t win and disenfranchise themselves. Theoretically, a very strict ranked choice model that requires ALL candidates to be ranked could help with that but you still get into the realm of “protest votes”. See: People who refused to vote for Biden because he had shit stances on genocide and who would have given trump, who is openly genocidal, the win.

The reality is that we need to actually educate people on how governments work to undo decades of “haw haw, douche or a turd sandwich” levels of narrative. But we also need the politicians to actually unite against common threats. The fascists already understand that. But the Left continues to infight at every opportunity.

Why would he need the money?

It isn’t like he pays his lawyers. And you don’t need a great lawyer to appeal a sensitive case indefinitely.

And… it isn’t like he paid his terrorists. He left them hanging out to dry after they failed to murder pence and the entirety of congress a couple years back.

Also, I have a strong suspicion that he’ll end up pushing for some blatantly illegal “charity” where True Believers can donate to The Real President Of The United States.

And lastly: Money is not a cure for novichok.

Good on the workers. But my worry is that Boeing is a sinking ship and this will end up as anti-union propaganda when they (not the doors that fall off mid-flight) are what is blamed for Boeing collapsing.

Not gonna lie. The bar is so incredibly low that, at the risk of invoking dril, at least Child Fucker In Chief acknowledges those are some pretty evil beliefs about immigrants.

No. I expect them to have figured that out during the prep for my surgery. Even a surgeon who does that exact procedure every week should be reviewing the steps before they scrub up. Same with the team.

Oh, I think stein is a fucking moron and, at best, a useful idiot for putin.

This? This doesn’t factor into that at all.

Would you trust a brain surgeon who didn’t know and understand the various regions and structures in the brain?

Yes. Because surgeons are the grease monkeys of medicine and I care more that they know exactly what they are doing to a specific part of my brain rather than are reciting generalist brain facts.

Or an electrician who wasn’t exactly clear on what the building codes allowed regarding which gauge of wire could be installed and what material it was made of?

Very different scenario. That electrician is doing a specific job in my house, not wiring up an entire grid.

Which is kind of what it is. Getting a bill passed is very much about knowing what specific parts of Congress you need to interface with. And being a leader is actually having people who canvas the other congress people and figure out who to focus on.

Maybe it is just my engineer brain but I always prefer to work with people who know what it is important and are able to quickly look up the other stuff.

Alleged russian agents aside:

I actually have no problem with a politician not remembering the exact number of House representatives there are. That number actively does not matter because it is never a case of “I need 435 to vote for this”. It isn’t even “I need 218”. It is “After checking with everyone, we need to convince five more people to vote with us”.

But there are definitely ways to answer that convey that. Guessing a number and hoping you got it right is… not.

Also, because I had no idea and other people in this thread are outright wrong:

435 in the house. 100 in the senate. And 3 electors for DC and Puerto Rico (?) who don’t get a say in legislature because Yes Taxation Without Representation.

That… is the exact opposite of what the article is arguing. If one side of the political spectrum (inevitably right-wing) unites, they immediately run over the side that is split up into different fragments that are arguing over just how much of a school lunch should be subsidized by the government.

And we have seen this in the modern day as well. A couple months back basically the entire Left/Center-Left of France had to unite to try and prevent fascists from taking power and… it is unclear if they actually succeeded.

Its fun to parrot the exact same text every single time a topic comes up. But shit like this is a lot more important than meming about Subway and it is well worth understanding what efforts do and don’t address and think through those problems. Otherwise we just leave ourselves more and more vulnerable to hate.

If you need an “off the shelf, low effort” IDE then you pick whether you are using VSCode or Vim/Emacs and then go to youtube and google “best plugins for ${LANGUAGE} in ${EDITOR}”. And you get basically a minute of copy pasting to have it set up to about the same level of optimization.

Aside from that? The reality is that everything takes time to learn. It took you time to learn your preferred emacs config. It took me time to learn default vim and then what my preferred vim config should be and how to take advantage of it. Just like it took time to learn the editor that came with python on windows for years (still might?).

Which gets back to this being a boomer ass article.

Yes. A much less boomer-coded article would be better.

But as someone who has actually used a lot of the various IDEs over the decades and keeps coming back to vim (and is already expecting to go back to vim within a year because of invasive copilot shit…): Those niche editors? They are either genuinely bad ideas (think TempleOS levels of insanity) or they became plugins for every other IDE. I like vim a lot but emacs is the same (actually emacs is an OS with a text interface but…). And many of those plugins ALSO exist for vscode and atom/sublime and so forth.

Because good (uncopyrighted…) ideas propagate. That is development and design.

I REALLY hate articles like this

Saying we “lost” this software just shows that people don’t understand what software design/engineering is.

Basically every screenshot of the “lost” TUIs look like a normal emacs/vim session for anyone who has learned about splits and :term (guess which god I believe in?). And people still use those near constantly. Hell, my workflow is generally a mix between vim and vscode depending upon what machine and operation I am working on. And that is a very normal workflow.

And that is what we want out of software development. The good ideas move forward. The less good ideas become plugins for sickos. Because everyone loves vscode right now but… Microsoft is shitting that up REAL fast with copilot and just wait until every employer on the planet realizes that and ban it.

And the rest just ignores the point of an IDE. Yes, taking your hand off the keyboard to touch the mouse LOWERS YOUR EFFICIENCY*. But it also means you can switch between languages or even environments trivially. Yes, it is often more annoying to dig through twelve menus to find what you want or talk a co-worker through how to do basic git operations that would be three commands. But holy crap I hate the people who “can’t work without my settings” that mean they are incapable of doing any “live” debugging or doing any peer programming where they aren’t driving.

Back in the day we had plenty of people who were angry that not everyone was using vi and a bunch of tcsh scripts to develop because it clearly meant they didn’t understand what they were doing and were too dependent on compilers and debuggers. And it was just as stupid then as it is now.