Regarding the Electoral College, the only thing I have an issue with it is that most states chose winner take all and the Senate is counted for votes. If the electoral college votes were given out as a percentage to each state’s popular vote, it would make the system work a lot cleaner.

For me, it depends if I’m getting a refund or not. If I’m getting a refund, usually by mid February after all my paperwork gets in. If I owe money, I’m waiting until April.

It will get given out every time FIFA needs to mollify a corrupt official that will impact their work.

“Opposition Leader” is only a role in parliamentary systems where the leader of the second party has that role.

Typically, legislative “minority leader” positions fill a lot of those roles that an opposition leader would, but it isn’t official.

Since you like At the Drive-in, have you listened to the Mars Volta?

Also, Nine Inch Nails is still on tour.

They have their greatest hits, it is best to stick to those.

About a year ago to go see “An Enemy of the People”. Great acting.

Get in the fucking robot versus don’t get in the car.

The Menzingers still play well in concert. “America, You’re Freaking Me Out” hits a lot harder now.

In context, Trump won 2024 with only 77 million voters. If you can get 100+ million to show up, that’s enough to demand control over Congress and the Presidency.

Looking back on my childhood, I see that my Mom had anxiety issues and there were a lot of cases where she was white knuckling to get things done while having a panic attack. She had developed some maladaptive behaviors to deal with this, in part because mental health wasn’t a thing back when she grew up.

It sounds like your mom had her own maladaptive traits.

The issue with Linux is going to be if there will be a single distro that dominates or if it will be more distributed. Right now, it looks like Google and Valve are the closest to making dominant distros, but I can see at least one EU government one being created as well. If there are few distros, then I can see development getting locked to those distros rather than across all Linux.

The same thing happened with Android, Google ended up controlling Android so the open source side got hollowed out and the closed source side controlled by Google became necessary to running Android.

No, my beard hair is strong enough to resist that kind of abrasion.

Is this related to Epstein or something else entirely?

The only “influencer” that I can think of who has done anything involved in Hollywood was John Green, and he isn’t the typical influencer. Even then, his path there was to use his fame to sell his product, books, and then that product became something that Hollywood could turn into a movie.

Outside of that, I think the Five Nights at Freddy’s movies had influencers in the cast, but I don’t see them using this to build an acting career yet.

Usually, it isn’t that an influencer becomes a movie star, but a movie star becomes an influencer since the star can use their same to build a following online. That’s likely why studios use the follower count as a metric in getting actors for certain roles; it is a way to determine fame and the ability of the actor to pull in crowds to see a movie.

Whatever gets us all in that autistic kid’s snowglobes.

God yes.

China takes a lot of action to control its currency well above typical markets. This includes significant regulations on capital transfers outside of China.

So don’t put AI in front of anything mission critical or without going through a review of a human.

Only one oil country switched to Euros and an invasion switched it back to dollars.

A lot of the international banking structure was built on American systems of banking, so the dollar got baked into a lot.

Until Trump, the dollar was generally seen as more stable given its longevity and being the currency of the largest superpower.

Also, compared to the Euro and Yuan, the American dollar has an internal hedge when it comes to energy prices given that the USA can supply most of its energy needs by itself. It is hard to handle an oil shock when the currency’s value drops because the internal market can’t afford oil.