• 0 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle




  • Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.

    There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas (“my dad always voted for this candidate, so I’ll vote for his son”), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I’ve seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.





  • I call this “The curse of Might and Magic”. This franchise was established by Jon Van Caneghem who founded New World Computing. The company later got into financial trouble and was absorbed by 3DO. Over time (mainly due to the commercial failure of its console, which came after the acquisition of the M&M property), 3DO started slipping into the hole. It dissolved, and in its fire sale, Ubi purchased the rights to Might and Magic. The rest, as they say, is history…







  • Ironing is the only time of the week where I have the time to watch TV or movies. Not that I don’t have free time, but I usually spend it in other ways. During ironing, I’m a captive audience. That said, I don’t iron all that much. I remember the last season of The Boys took me four months to finish…


  • I live in Ireland, and An Post really delivers. Hell, we still have entire neighbourhoods where houses have names instead of numbers (officially, they have also numbers, but they are not displayed). But have anything shipped via UPS, and you’ll be lucky to have it delivered to a random address in your town…


  • On my subscription page, it shows shorts from my subscribed channels. On my main page, it’s girls in bikinis playing on a guitar, violin or drums. I wantch a lot of independent musicians doing instrumental covers, but I don’t recall seeing any of them wearing skimpy clothing.

    I guess it’s sort of like facebook, to increase engagement. I stopped visiting there about a year ago, but I didn’t close my account. I now get one friend recommendation daily, and it’s always sexy looking girls I’ve never heard of. These sites register me as male, so they always combine my interests with sexy females, to entice me to spend more time there.


  • I haven’t used Photoshop; learned basic photo editing in GIMP (as a poor student, I appreciated a powerful, free editor). So, no complaints about the UI from me. If anything, I’d probably bitch about the Photoshop UI if I ever used it.

    One thing that concerns me a little, however, is the third-party integration with Nik Collection. The second version, which I’m still using, was provided for free by Google. They later sold the software, and the new company commercialized it. I found it difficult to track down the v2 installer, so I’m now keeping it on multiple backups, in multiple locations, as one of my most treasured software possessions.



  • I’m inclined to believe it. I worked for a Wall Street firm when the stock market switched from fractional quotations to decimal. Lots of my coworkers printed out a conversion table from fractions to decimals, and even so often had problems figuring out which of two quotations was greater than the other one (in decimals). Those were smart people, but if you work with one system for so long, your brain gets hardwired and difficult to change.