Sure, I know Texas could be more competitive, and there may be others. That’s why I point out the vote spread, if it’s bigger than 10% in the past few elections, it’s not going to flip this year.

Surely this doesn’t require two posts. Here’s the other one.

You can place additional links in the body of the post if you want to share multiple parts to this.

Oh absolutely. But you only get so many options for each position, so it’s best to maximize the utility of each of those votes.

In my case, pretty much every office will go to the GOP by a 20%+ margin. We used to have a competitive House district, but they gerrymandered that away and now every House seat is uncompetitive. In fact, many seats have no competition at all (my State House rep seat hasn’t been contested since I moved here, and the State Senate seat has been contested once). So I leave those uncontested seats empty or write-in (if write-in is an option), and I vote for the best candidate for the job for the other seats. What ends up happening is that my ballot looks something like this:

• 50% - biggest third party
• 25% - Democrat - occasionally a decent candidate runs

The rest are uncontested (e.g. State House) or non-partisan seats (e.g. school board).

And yes, it’s a long game, hence why I refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils when that lesser evil has zero chance to win.

You do you, but a little professionalism goes a long way. Maybe that manager moves to another org that you want to apply at, and they reject you because of how you acted the last time. Or maybe they just tell someone at the new org how you left.

Doing this has zero benefits to you, sending an email takes almost zero effort and might have some benefit for you. The rational thing is to send the email.

I’m in the US and haven’t bought compressed air recently, but I definitely didn’t need to present ID the last time I did.

This article says 38 states have age restrictions, but after a brief search, I couldn’t find any evidence for this in my state (Utah). It’s illegal to use it to get high and to sell it to someone with the understanding that they’ll use it to get high. But now I’m curious, I’ll have to ask the next time I’m at a store that sells it.

Exactly, yet I get so much pushback on that.

Yes, if your state has any chance of flipping, choose the lesser of two evils. And don’t just look at the last election, look at the last 5 or so. If any of them were anywhere near close, vote for the lesser of two evils. Or if your state is trending toward being competitive, vote for the lesser of two evils. If you’re not willing to check, vote for the lesser of two evils.

But if your state consistently votes a certain way with a huge margin, then vote your conscience. For me, that’s the most popular third party.

Exactly. A properly run nuclear plant can be extremely safe.

Exactly. I’m bullish on AI, I’m not bullish on what the mass market media calls “AI.”

Yeah, almost any metric is more useful than this one, and I’m an American who “benefits” from this stat.

Ah, fair point. I guess I generally don’t like sitting spread eagle.

While I strongly disagree with the dogwhistles here, it’s true. If your state voted for Trump or Clinton/Biden with >10% margin in the last two elections, there’s almost zero chance the Trump/Harris election will go any differently.

I personally dislike both major party candidates (but dislike Trump more) and since my state (Utah) voted for Trump with ~20% margin in both prior elections (even in 2016 w/ McMullin taking >20% of the vote), I feel comfortable voting my conscience. I even voted for Biden last election on the off-chance that people here hated Trump enough to matter, but no, >20% spread.

So I’m back to voting third party. Even if every third party vote went to Harris, my state would still elect Trump with something like 15-25% spread. The only way that changes is if Kamala converts to my state’s predominant religion and Trump literally outs himself as worshipping Satan, and even then we’d probably still go with Trump for some stupid reason.

So I vote for the next most popular third party, and in this case, that’s Chase Oliver from the Libertarian Party. I’m also registered Libertarian, mostly because I think they have the best chance to actually get a message out about voting reform, but also because I’m probably closest to their views (though I disagree with the LP on a ton of issues, especially recently, and especially the local UT LP). He’ll probably get 2-3% of the vote, perhaps less this year because he’s gay. If that instead were the Green Party, I’d vote for them (even though I have even less in common), because my goal here is to send a message that the 2-party system sucks.

If your state is that polarized, there’s really no point in voting for the minority party candidate, go third party and make a statement.

But realistically, it really doesn’t matter in more than 3/4 of the country, due to how the Electoral College works. If your preferred candidate lost by more than all third party votes combined, there’s zero way your vote could’ve changed anything.

And that’s the situation I live in. My state (Utah) almost always gives 65%+ of the vote to the R candidate. In 2016, Trump won w/ only 45% of the vote, but that’s because the other 20% or so went to Evan McMullin (Hilary got ~27% of the vote). I even tried voting Biden in 2020 because I figured people hated Trump enough (he got dead last in the primary here in 2016, below candidates that had already withdrawn), and I guess I helped because Trump only got 58% of the vote to Biden’s 38%. Excluding McMullin (basically a conservative), third parties got 5.5% in 2016 and 4.2% in 2020. I’d be very surprised if Trump gets less than 60% of the vote this election.

It really doesn’t matter who I vote for, so I make my vote count by voting third party. If they get enough votes, people will take them more seriously and politicians might take some of their policy positions.

Eh, I took one home from a business trip (direct flight and arrived a couple hours earlier), and it was packed. I enjoyed the flight well enough, and I’d totally do it again for the price. I just mailed my bulky crap through USPS before getting onto the flight, so I only needed my backpack.

Why the middle seat? You can stretch your legs in the aisle (my preference) or look out the window. I see zero benefits to the middle.

Then again, I’m tall.

It’s better than my costume choice: suicide bomber. Maybe I’ll try your idea next time. :)

Exactly, this is the way. I use it w/o the ribbon, but I like that the ribbon is an option for those who like it.

Eh, I’ve just moved on to something I like more. When I do have to use MS Office, I just get frustrated and try that much harder to not use it again.

I think we’re just going to disagree. This is my last comment.

Fair, have a great day. I do recommend reading more about it when you get a chance, maybe you’ll change your mind.

Same. I just use an ad-blocker and still watch YouTube. If their prices were lower and their app better, I’d pay. I pay for Nebula afterall, so I’m not unwilling, I just don’t see the value.

If YouTube ever actually blocks me out, I’ll just stop watching, simple as.

Then you’re all clear.

I personally want my Jellyfin to be on the WAN, and I have certain devices on my internal network VPN’d to my VPS, which exposes the services I want to access remotely. But if you don’t need that, using the local addr in your DNS config totally works. Getting TLS certs will be complicated, but you don’t need that anyway if everything is local or over a VPN.