Well it’s similar to what Churchill said about democracy… it’s a bad system but it’s better than all the others.

If you can put ideology aside and think in terms of economics, in many industries capitalism offers an efficient way of determining the an optimal price and quantity to produce considering the costs and value something brings. And it’s something that allows for industries to function without an excessive amount of centralized planning which will often get things wrong.

But it’s like a machine in a many ways. And like any machine it requires maintenance. Things like trust-busting, progessive taxation, regulations, and occasional stimulus are necessary to keep it running smoothly.

But once you bring ideology into it, it all becomes a shitshow. Some will argue capitalism is a perfect machine and any kind of maintenance on the machine will ruin it’s perfection. Others take any kind of maintenance on the machine as a sign the machine will inevitably fail and needs to be replaced entirely. But then we go back to the beginning where other systems have been tried and they’re worse. Charlatans, grifters, ideologues abound pushing people in every direct except for simply taking reasonable measures to keep the machine running smoothly. There’s an almost religious devotion towards arguing the either the machine is perfect or the machine is doomed to failure and not only should be replaced they should accelerate the failure so it can be replaced sooner.

Zealots from all sides demonize the mechanics that are simply keeping things running. A lot of emotional nonsense about this thing. But to an economist, it’s just a machine with both strengths and weaknesses. The functioning of the machine is well understood, and the other machines that have been tried didn’t really work.

It sucks when playing by the rules too.

Last game of monopoly we played strictly by the rules with four players. So I’m coming around the board and can know the the most likely outcome is that I’m going to land on a property with a hotel and go bankrupt. According to the rules I’d have to hand over all of my properties to that person that person just won the game even though there would still be three players. There’s nearly zero probability that someone with a big pile of cash that owns half the properties with hotels on a bunch of them already will ever lose.

So before rolling the dice, I sold all of my houses. Band made a couple of deals with the youngest family member in the game. First deal, I bought the electric company for all the money I had. Second deal, I sold all of my property (including the electric company) for $1 to that same player. Rolled the dice and as expected, landed on a property with a hotel. Handed over the $1 I had and I was out. This is all fine to do within the rules.

It actually made for an interesting game after that because the players left were evenly matched. But not everyone saw it that way so we never played again.

Really the properties should go back to the bank if someone goes bankrupt, otherwise a game with more than two people is effectively over as soon as the the first person goes bankrupt. Still nothing you can do about someone just setting up someone else to win by making a bad deal (whether intentionally or not).

It’s just kinda a shit game no matter what you do.

You’re not offering any alternatives.

Well the cops might be taking pics of a dead body the next day. So then they could say “yeah we probably should’ve responded to that one last night, but we just couldn’t risk that it might’ve been one of the 0.01% of these calls where it turns out it’s an internet swatting thing.”

Buy 'em out, boys!

Dude’s gotta feed the monkey. You could donate some money to him on patreon then he wouldn’t need to have an amazon affiliate link.

What do estimate the percentage of these calls are some internet loser swatting someone rather than it being a legitimate report of domestic violence? You may be underestimating the number of actual domestic violence situations where the police need to intervene be a few orders of magnitude.

Someone calls an emergency number and says “My husband has a knife and he’s threatening to kill me!”

Should the operator say “nothing we can do until you provide provide me with some evidence, ma’am” ?

Seen it before… watched it again anyway. Praise Vectron!

Yeah I used to be like that, just not something I’d think of. Now I just automatically swap it out when I finish a tube of toothpaste.

Some of the ad revenue goes to pay the people that made the content tho.

But I have over 10,000 bookmarks!

Problem I have is I got my lastname@gmail.com as my email address. Many times when people with my same last name they’ll type firstname<space>lastname@gmail.com for their email address. And guess who gets signed up?

At first I unsubscribed, replied back to emails that were meant for someone else, etc. But the number of things to unsubscribe from unmanageable and it gets to be too much of a chore.

What they didn’t say was Jamie and Adam were shitting themselves in the workshop on a regularly basis.

Yeah, Yoda became a parody of his character in ESB.

In ESB he comes across as someone that’s speaking in a second language. Sometimes he mixes up the grammar, especially when emotional and trying to speak quickly, but when he’s more relaxed and speaking slowly (or saying something simple) he usually gets it right.

In other portrayals it feels more like he’s got brain damage.

A ranked choice type system would mean a third party wouldn’t be just something that screws up elections. In fact it would probably really benefit Democrats as people who might not go to vote otherwise might go vote green as their top pick and then vote Democrat as their second pick. If the Green candidate won, that’s someone they could make some compromises with to get legislation passed. If the green candidate loses, then many of their votes would go to the Dem candidate making it more likely they would win.

Twice in this century a GOP candidate has won the EC without winning the popular vote. So it’s obvious why the Democrats would want to get rid of that.

But as it stands voting third party (or not voting) is just letting everyone else decide how things should be. The way it works now is you vote for the candidate most likely to care about your concerns (and who could feasibly win) and write to them and tell them what you want. Yeah it’s a pain in the ass to write to a representative, but it’s more likely to have an effect than anything you write on the internet. Be polite, tell them the things you want that can be reasonably be implemented. Also you’re probably going to have to vote in many elections to get what you want. But if it’s something you really care about you’re willing to vote in as many elections and write to your rep as many times as needed to get it done.

It takes time, but it’s more effective than doing nothing.

If you actually want a potential President Kamala Harris to have some good legislation to sign, you might want to consider voting for congressional candidates that will write the kind of legislation you want. And if you want to end the Electorial College bullshit, you might consider voting for state reps. And while you’re there, you may as well vote for Harris if for no other reason than you might someday say to your grandkids that you voted for the first woman President. That’s a better story to tell than explaining about how you were too angsty about “the system” to bother going out to vote.

The politcal system means that voting for a third party means you’re not actually opposing fascism. It has the exact same effect as not voting at all. While it’s not supporting fascism, it’s also not opposing fascism. So it’s just being fascism neutral.

It would be nice if you had a system where a third party vote wasn’t the same as not voting but that kind of system will never happen if you continue to waste your vote.

Most fascist movements die out before they can hold onto power long enough to transform society.

We tend to focus on the fascist movements that have obtained power on held onto it long enough to transform a country into a fascist state. Mussolini, Franco, Hitler etc.

But the danger is there so it’s important to be vigilant.

That being said… yeah, on lemmy.ml, anyone that fails the leftist purity test is a liberal and all liberals are fascists. Everyone is a fascist that isn’t an authoritarian with a red and yellow flag.

Kinda. Finishing my coffee is synchronized with the clock. I take a shit soon after that.