lennivelkant

One's an accident. Two's a coincidence. Three's an SCP.

(And probably one of my faves.)

God damn I love that community.

Short version: If we're talking national level (that is, electoral votes), then Congress elects the president (House for President, Senate for VP).

If we're talking state level however, for most states the 34% will win and take all of the state's electoral votes.

This is the cornerstone of the two-party system, which emerges naturally as a consequence of plurality voting systems. If you have two left-wing parties, one of which gets 10% and the other 42%, they both loose to the 48% of the single right-wing party. Hence, it's strategic for the left wing to unite, which would theoretically earn them 52% of votes (practically, voter disillusionment makes it more complicated).

This is called the Spoiler Effect: A left-wing party would end up splitting votes off the Democrats, leading to a plurality victory for the Republicans. And in winner-takes-all systems, that plurality is enough to get the respective state's electoral votes.

everyone who talks about linux seems to be a programmer /coder, and uses jargon that i don't even understand

I've been pointing that out for a while, but unfortunately there is a vocal subset of the community that thinks referring people to just read technical manuals is fine (if you can't, just learn to read it, duh).

Some things are concepts you'll learn easily, don't worry, and for the rest, you'll always find someone willing to break it down if you manage to look past the snobs. If you want, shoot me a DM if you just want to understand a specific term without someone making you feel like an idiot.

The problem is there are a billion versions of linux, idk what one to choose

There are plenty of suggestions here. Ubuntu is what got me started and I still think it's a good start*. Mint is from the same family, "Pop! OS" too (the name sounds silly to me, but it's legit and popular for a reason). Just look at pictures and see what seems prettiest to you, then go with that. The usage won't be too different.
The grandpa of that family is Debian, but I'm not sure it's quite as user-friendly out of the box. I'm mentioning it in case you come across the term.

The other big families are Fedora and Arch. I personally use a Fedora-Child, but to keep things narrow, I recommend the three mentioned above as starters.

* If you come across people hating Ubuntu - including myself - it's usually for ideological reasons rather than usability ones. Don't worry about that for now. Getting into the weeds of things is a skill you don't have yet and that's perfectly fine.

if i can play my steam games on linux

Steam, fortunately, is the one platform that works best with Linux. For their handheld, they decided to flip off MS and made their own Linux, along with a wrapper tool to make all the games run on it anyway.

You may hear the terms "compatibility layer", "Proton" and "wine", which is exactly that: A tool to make Windows stuff run on Linux. Again, don't worry about the specifics, just believe me: I'm playing almost all of my steam games just as I used to.

If there is a specific game you care about, https://www.protondb.com/ has a large store of knowledge. Some things run out of the box, some may require a few extra settings that are usually easy to add, and if there ever is a thing you don't understand, my offer stands.

The whole idea of moving to linux is overwhelming.

It's a scary plunge, a leap of faith, but I assure you: There are people ready to catch you at the bottom. The reception wasn't as warm when I jumped off of Win7, and the snobs are still around, but things have improved a lot over the past few years. Trust me, trust us: You won't be left alone.

I can't recall ever trying it with peanut butter, that sounds interesting

Well, given that it's supposed to be toxic rather than just painful, I'd say we're resistant in that it takes a high dose to kill us.

How fortunate then that the same species resistant to their defense actually goes on to cultivate it

Allegedly they used to, but Musk felt that vision should be enough because humans don't have radar either and they're just fine.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engineers-radars-cameras/

If the insulation doesn't insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don't know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I'm way off.

Well, you'd need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can't force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they'll lose out on precious markups.

That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.

The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you'd let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you've already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I'm sure it's a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.

I'm all for the idea, mind you. This isn't me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what's stopping us (and the answer is probably "rich people that don't like sharing" as usual).

Now get to a medical facility, but make sure not to surface too rapidly or you might get gas bubbles in your joints, blood or spinal chord.

b-b-but muh communism