thawed_caveman

I have a passing familiarity with the politics of a couple countries, and they all fit this pattern: their constitutions say nothing of a two-party system, they don't even say anything about parties at all. People just choose to create political parties, and then those parties coalesce into two major parties.

The reason that this happens is because people, from voters to every level of politician, look at the rules of the game and make tactical decisions; their tactical decisions cause a two-party system to emerge.

The USA is a really extreme case of this; in Europe there are more parties, and they even very occasionally come to power. Current french president Macron broke a decades-long streak of two-party governance in his country.

Further viewing material:

What is tactical voting

Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting

The Alternative Vote Explained

My takeaway from this is that there are things that can be done to improve the voting system, as suggested in these videos; but i don't even like representative democracy at all, i think there's better solutions in direct democracy (referendums and such). Representative democracy was designed to put elites in charge, voting was initially reserved for land-owning nobility. Extending voting rights to more people doesn't change what the system is designed to do.

I don't know what would happen to your body, but i know these would be the worst meals you'll ever have

Yeah, sexuality doesn't really fit in neat boxes and this is especially true for the asexual spectrum. I get the vibe that you want to find something to identify with though, so yeah i'd say you're in the ballpark of asexual

Yeah, i have a huge archive of music in .mp3 format and it keeps growing. There is no appreciable loss in quality between uncompressed and 320kb/s, with the potential to go reasonably lower depending on the source quality.

I'm like this with my movies too, with some exceptions all 2000 of them are around 1-2Gb in size, which is considered small in the torrenting community. For those ones i can actually notice the low image quality, but it kinda doesn't bother me.

I have good headphones and a good TV, i just stopped believing in high fidelity. People adore the imperfections of vinyl and VHS media, and i kind of feel the same way towards digital artifacts, movies feel weird when the image is too sharp. For music, again, i don't even notice.

In this context, if a format can cut my library size in half and i can't tell the audio difference, AND it's patent-free, i see this as an absolute win.

Not that most people would care anyway, in the age of streaming people don't have libraries anymore

I don't know why i remembered i had this somewhere in my dusty folder full of thousands of old memes, but:

I've sat in voice chats with Vtubers as they made mad scientist level stuff with their avatars, with visual programming and blendshapes and api hookups and a bunch of shit that i don't understand. And they were doing it for 10 viewers.

And at that point the question becomes, why bring these viewers to Twitch? If you can build an audience on YouTube, that's your income right there, you don't need to stream for Twitch where you'll make a lot less money. Either you do it for the love or you don't do it.

Aside from those who have like 5k viewers (<0.1% of streamers), Twitch creators make less money than they would on another platform with another kind of content. This is good for me as an audience member because it means most streamers (that i watch anyway) are doing it out of passion, but it's bad for the platform because it means they're not profitable. Daddy Bezos can pull the plug on the Twitch money pit any day

This isn't terribly far away from being me, except i randomly went to an art school for a couple years. Didn't exactly pick up many marketable skills there lmfao

The nicest way that i can put it is that this has been true for most of human history until industrialization, let's say that the 50's is when industrial food starts to make poor people fat.

The less nice way to put it is that this hasn't been true for 70 years. You are completely clueless to health food and poverty in the 20th century, let alone the 21st. Nowadays, eating nothing but the cheapest food will in fact make you fat, this is one of the main concerns of nutritional science today.

You know Call of Duty started out as killing nazis on the Quake engine. I don't remember really liking them but it's there

Life hack: let someone steal your car. They get easy loot, you get 1. conveniently rid of your beater and 2. insurance money.

Disclaimer: i'm not the first to think of this and they made it illegal long before your beater was even built

Gaming aside, powerful GPUs are useful for a lot of work like 3D graphics, video editing, neural networks, and a lot of stuff i don't know about