It boils down to this: If you support the direct will of the people in choosing a candidate, you probably like RCV. If you want the party to have significant influence in choosing a candidate, you probably don’t like RCV.

It is possible the Democrats are realizing that their establishment selected candidates are not competitive against modern Republicans.
It’s also possible they are considering somebody more radical but want plausible deniability about how that person came to be elected.
Or it’s possible they are just out of ideas. Or maybe all three…

There is absolutely a problem.
The problem is not fraud by the applicants.
The problem is that we allow corporations to pay so fucking little that you can be full-time employed and still need food stamps to feed your kid.

The problem is that rent is up, groceries are up, everything is more expensive, the cost of living is through the roof and a full-time minimum wage income in most places won’t even support a single person on a starvation diet.
Making 47 million people fill out another stupid form will not fix this.

Come on now let’s be civil, even AIDS patients understand the Constitution 😝

With respect, if you’ve never in 70 years heard the argument that ‘this specific election is too important, we have to nominate the best chance to beat the other guy’, then you must either not be paying attention or your memory is failing you.
In fact, go back to 2016 and that is exactly what happened. Hillary was seen as the ‘safe’ option to put up against Trump, Bernie was the ‘radical candidate who wouldn’t get broad popular support’.

I am NOT drawing an equivalence between Donald Trump and other presidents. I am talking purely about campaigns and the discourse about them.

I don’t like Trump, but he’s on his second term. He’s done. He’s not running for election again. The question is, what do we do in 2028? Who do we put forward for the nation’s consideration?
Is it going to be another Hillary / Kamala type ‘safe’ candidate? Because they haven’t done so well of late.
Or is it going to be somebody who has a strong message of principle, someone who can energize millions in the same way that Barack Obama did and Donald Trump did more recently?

Sure is :(

I’m not a Trump fan. But I’ve been an adult long enough to remember this being said about just about every election. That yeah we should do better we will eventually do better but not this time, right now it’s most important to get rid of the other party or make them lose the election no matter what. It’s the same thing every few years.

It’s like hitting the snooze button over and over and over again, if you keep hitting it eventually your alarm times out or you just end up late for work.

Exactly. This is why I have so little respect for Democrats these days. They go on TV and call red alert and say Trump is awful and Trump is horrible and we all have to do everything we can to oppose Trump, and then they go ahead and rubber stamp his candidates and his agenda, refusing to use political options that are very much open to them create the opposition they are so loudly claiming is necessary.
If Trump is truly that awful, they could simply refuse to confirm his candidates, make them fight tooth and nail and bargain with them for every single vote.
But they did not. So the only conclusions are either a, they did not actually feel Trump was awful and all the red alert press conferences were just performant political theater, or b, they have not actually stood up for real principle or wielded real power in so long they don’t remember how to do it.

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

Exactly. He has the right idea on this, but given his gun control background I don’t trust him any farther than I can throw him. Gun control is, at this point, nothing more than a way to lose votes. To an anti-gun liberal, gun control is good policy that saves lives. To a pro gun person, gun control is an unconstitutional civil rights violation that makes a candidate unlectable. This turns away an awful lot of pro-gun moderates from rural areas- these are the voters who make a difference in elections.
And as for the anti-gun base, and anti-gun moderates, what are they going to do, vote Republican in protest? Let’s be real.

Gun control is a lose lose proposition

Gun control seems to mean ‘a little more’. This comic is popular among gun owners because it reflects the feeling of constantly ratcheting ‘compromise’.

A perfect example of that is background checks. The original bill was a compromise, All gun sales at gun stores are required to have a background check, but the compromise is that private sales between one person and another are exempted. That was a negotiated compromise between the pro gun and anti-gun side. I think for the most part it was a decent compromise. But now the anti-gun side is trying to roll it back calling it the ‘gun show loophole’ which is horribly named because a gun dealer at a gun show has to do a background check anyway, and most gun shows require background checks for all sales either from a dealer or a private citizen.

The problem with universal background checks is the concept of a transfer. For example, under some proposals, if you want to lend somebody your hunting rifle to go hunting with, that might count as a transfer, which means you have to go to a gun store and pay about $50 and fill out paperwork to legally transfer ownership of the gun to them. And then when they return they have to transfer it back to you.

You should also know that an awful lot of gun owners absolutely hate the NRA. They serve a useful purpose, but their constant deranged rabble rousing fundraising makes gun owners look like paranoid morons.
What I would much prefer to do is outreach and education. An awful lot of gun control laws are based on a total misunderstanding of what guns do and how they work and what makes them powerful or not, I think if more Democrats actually understood guns you would see fewer attempts at bad laws that do nothing to increase safety but just try to turn the screws on gun owners.

If you order it well done you’re going to need some A1 to go with it.

Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?

I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.

But apparently it’s set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.

To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.

And this is why people are pissed at Democrats.

Democrats are apparently annoyed that constituents are writing demanding they act like an opposition party, aka FUCKING EXERCISE THE FUCKING POWER YOU WERE VOTED IN TO WIELD. They act like they are powerless to stop Trump and they have press conferences talking about how it’s red alert scenario and then they GO ON TO VOTE FOR THE VERY THINGS THEY ARE SOUNDING THE ALARM ABOUT.

If this truly is a red alert situation as another Connecticut Congressperson called it, then stop voting for this shit! Throw a wrench into the works, refuse to confirm anybody, make use of the shitty procedural filibuster and grind things to a halt.

Because if you are voting in favor of any of this you don’t get to fucking complain.

It’s frustrating that so many people downvote this sort of thing rather than considering it. It’s like if you say anything at all other than TRUMP NAZI ELON NAZI REPUBLICAN NAZI ALL BAD you are obviously wrong and fuck you.

Trump may be an asshole. He may be a horrible president. But during the campaign he promised to hack and slash away at the federal government, and that’s exactly what he’s doing. It may be a bad idea, it may cause a ton of its own problems, but he is doing exactly what he promised his voters.

Democrats need to learn some hard truths from this. Specifically, that while life may be great up in the ivory tower, the people on the street are hurting. The people on the street are angry that their struggle has been ignored and marginalized for so long. And when people with two incomes are struggling to afford groceries, they will always vote for the guy who says ‘there’s a problem and I want to fix it’ over the person who says ‘everything’s peachy’.

That doesn’t make them racist or sexist or Nazi. It makes them desperate.

Not asking for instruction on the issue, only clarification on your assertion that I don’t understand.

For example, if you argued that video games cause violence, I could say ‘you obviously don’t understand the issue, specifically, the sort of attitude players take toward the game. Nobody plays like ‘yeah I wish I could do this IRL’, rather, it’s just a game and there’s friendly banter between both teams.’ I don’t have to write a page on video game culture or statistics to do that.

Saying ‘you don’t get it’ on a huge broad subject while offering zero detail on what specifically I don’t get or even a counterpoint is lazy debating. If you think I’m wrong, explain why I’m wrong. Otherwise you are just a low effort shitpost that contributes nothing to the discourse. Do better.

Well there’s a lot of information and different positions, most of which doesn’t fit into a single post. Can you explain what specifically you think I’ve missed?

You are mixing up your 'they’s. There are multiple theys each with their own motivations. Frequently their interests align. Not always.

I don’t expect anybody with money and power to play by THE rules, but everybody plays by SOME rules. Understand the rules each player is playing by, and you understand the game a lot better.

I don’t for a second think Trump’s motivation behind deporting people is pure as the driven snow. I’m sure for many people behind that policy, perhaps including Trump himself, there is a lot of thinly veiled racism or not so thinly veiled racism and a bunch of xenophobia too.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible that it will work, and bring about some sort of positive result.

For me, the big problem with illegal immigration is it creates an easily exploitable underclass. A group of people who will work themselves to the fucking bone for peanuts, who can be exploited at will because they can’t call the government to enforce labor regs. That creates a situation for employers that they can hire these people by the thousands, treat them like dirt, pay them barely anything, have them work in horrible conditions, and then basically toss them on the street. That situation is bad for everybody. It’s certainly bad for Americans because if those exploitable people are available as labor why wouldn’t an employer hire them rather than an American who will demand higher wages and better working conditions?

Ending that system of exploitation will suck, it will be a painful process that will destabilize food and labor markets. And knowing Trump, I’m quite sure there will be a lot of civil rights abuses, which I am strongly against. Everybody deserves to be treated with humanity and respect, including undocumented people who are being deported. But I also think that before we dive 100% into saying the whole thing is a bad idea, we should consider potential long-term effects. And if the result over the entire American labor market is there is no longer a cheap exploitable under-class, I think that’s a good thing for everybody.

100% this.
I’m not a fan of the hamfisted way Trump and Musk are going about all this.
But at the same time, I look at this and have to wonder the outcome…
If agricultural corporations can’t hire cheap undocumented Latin American people to work the farms, they will have to pay more to hire Americans to do the same job. Yes that will drive up grocery prices, but on some level, if that means more Americans are able to afford those groceries isn’t that sort of maybe a good thing?

Every time I see a company complain of labor shortage, it is obvious to me that the problem isn’t labor the problem is the company doesn’t want to pay what the labor market demands. You tell me you can’t find anybody to hire, so I ask if you offered $100/hr for this job would your inbox be overflowing with applicants? If the answer is yes, then the problem isn’t that you can’t find anybody, it is the supply and demand of the labor market and your only problem is you don’t want to pay the market rate for labor. That’s not the market’s problem.

Quite true. Especially since we don’t seem to study history anymore. Forget world history, we barely seem to remember our own history past 6 months ago.