The big five is pretty much the only version of this that’s actually sort of kind of almost a real thing. Nobody likes being told they have high neuroticism though, so it’s not ever a fun fad meme thing.

It would be nice, but they gotta eat.

Well, most dentists would recommend most toothpaste. They’re a lot more concerned with making sure people are brushing regularly than they are with worrying about the brand of toothpaste they use.

That kinda means the exceptions are weird and highly dependent on the dentist and toothpaste brand involved. Maybe they think it’s overpriced, maybe they think it’s less effective, maybe they have ethical concerns about the parent corporation (looking at you, Crest), maybe they’re super picky about what they recommend, maybe they’ve never heard of the brand before, maybe they just got lousy swag from the company rep and they’re being petty. It could be all kinds of things, and the ads certainly won’t tell you what they are.

Sony released a more realistic looking big budget Overwatch clone. It was fine, but nobody cared, because nobody wants a $40 live service Overwatch clone where all the characters have similar silhouettes. They spent 8 years making an okay game for nobody. If they’d done something different with the same basic characters and gunplay it could have maybe been good. They didn’t though, so estimates suggested they sold about 25,000 copies worldwide before pulling it from their store and refunding everyone.

Amazon is super evil, but it mostly comes from the way they treat their employees and sellers. The customer service is… okayish, mostly. They certainly have problems there as well, but it’s not the real issue.

I don’t care. They could put Jimmy Carter on the ballot and I’d vote for him, and honestly he’d probably be a better pick than anyone they actually would consider. This is going to be a stupid mess, just to most likely get the person who would have become president if something happened to Biden anyway at the top of the ticket. Just a bunch of panicked stupidity, because apparently they just figured out that the 82 year old is old this month.

Why? Now the Democrats are going to start tearing each other apart and in the end they’ll pick someone even worse and now we’re even more likely to end up with Trump winning. The only people who ever had a problem with Biden being old were the people who had already made up their minds.

Not counting the time a lady popped her clutch pulling out of her driveway and hit me, since I guess that’s not “almost” an accident, probably the time I got caught out by a snowstorm, and on the way home I did a 360 on the freeway before regaining control. Thankfully there was no one else around, so it didn’t hurt anything other than my pride.

If you think China is any better than the US, then you’ve just switched flavors.

I’m not growing it for you. I’m growing it because I like it for me. If you don’t like it, that’s your loss.

Cool. It’s easy to misread tone in a forum like this, so we kinda almost lost the plot there for a minute, but in the end I think we ended up back on the same page. And yeah, I absolutely understand how frustrating it is to have your vote in the big headline grabbing elections be completely meaningless. It sucks. I’m glad you’re getting involved where it matters most though. If we want real change it’s going to have to filter up from the bottom, not be ordained from the top down.

Look, I get it. I’ve spent most of my life living in a very red district in a very blue state. That’s not true now, and I’m happy to be taking advantage of it, but I understand. Just remember to actually vote at your local level. It makes more difference in your day to day life than who is president anyway. I’m just trying to be clear about what’s going on. Historically and this November.

The number of third party votes has gone up and down a little, but over the last 40 years the only third party candidate to get over 5% of the vote in a presidential election was Ross Perot. 2020 actually had very low third party support. The most popular third party candidate left of the Republican party in the last 40 years was Ralph Nader in 2000, and he got about 2.5% of the vote. There will almost certainly be more people voting for third parties in 2024 than there were in 2020, but unless something very weird happens between now and November it will probably just be going back to normal. 3-4% Libertarian and 1-2% Green. That’s not gonna do much of anything.

Okay, so first of all, yes, I do live in one of those 10% of districts.

Secondly, you don’t even have a candidate, let alone a popular one. It’ll be a miracle if an actual leftist candidate can pull 3% of the vote to come in fourth behind the Libertarian candidate.

It is less dangerous to cast a protest vote if you’re in a district that is dramatically unbalanced, but if you think you’ll make a difference by doing it you are going to be sorely disappointed in November.

Minor problem. I’m neither liberal nor angry. I’m trying to get you to understand that purity tests on Lemmy are at best completely useless, and realistically make you a liability to real leftists. What do you think you are accomplishing here? What have you ever done in your life that actually ever made anything better for a single person?

And I’m hoping you grow up and learn how people organize themselves instead of wasting your life feeling morally superior for accomplishing nothing while isolating yourself from all the people you need on your side to change anything.

If you think the US government gives a shit about “millions in bribes” then you have no idea how numbers work.

I’m not delusional enough to think I’m voting for a leftist. That’s never what Biden was. I’m voting to stop fascism. Socialism isn’t going to win at the ballot box. Elections are how we stop things from getting worse while implementing real solutions. If all you’re doing is whining about presidents then you are a bad leftist.

Not doing everything possible to prevent something is not the same as actively doing it. It’s still bad, but if you seriously think it would be a good idea to let fascists take over America because Biden isn’t marching troops into Gaza or whatever it is you want him to do, then hopefully there are enough sane people left to make you irrelevant.

People are creating new operating systems, but the reason they don’t catch on is hardware and software compatibility. It was hard enough to make an actual performant operating system that could work on a wide variety of hardware back in the 90s. Trying to do it for every possible hardware combination available now is just crazy. It can also be an incredibly difficult task to get even open source software working properly on a new OS. Anything else is just completely out of the question.

I call a spade a spade. If you can’t handle two binary compatible versions of BSD being called distros just because it’s a Linux term even though by every possible definition of that term that doesn’t include the word “Linux” they absolutely are distros, that’s your problem.