Just like any weight loss and gain, this is the sort of things that happens over years. You lose the weight, then five years later realize your weight has started creeping back up. Once you're heavy the battle never really ends.

Andy Serkis has versions of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion all on Audible.

If I go for a 10k, I burn ~1100 calories (I'm a big dude). I can eat that deficit no problem, hell, I was able to maintain my weight during my marathon training last summer.

It's always a balance, there's always nuance, and there's no one single solution.

I don't think "addictive" is the right term, but we have an evolutionary imperative towards eating to excess when there is food in excess, which wasn't maladaptive until recently.

I don't know if the fact that it fully slipped into the absurd or the fact that it probably still worked on people is sadder.

I do love the idea of voter registration oscillating back and fourth at 20 minutes intervals forever. Would make voting in the primaries way more exciting as the voter base kept flipping.

To me as a Canadian, the absurd part is that ordinary people are expected to have "registered" with a party (as opposed to registering with the independent organization that runs elections, like we do; they automate getting most of the voter roll from Revenue Canada, but this requires your explicit consent on the tax form).

I've never once registered with a party in the US. I always check "independent" on my voter registration. But I'm in a state with open primaries, so I can still vote in one or the other primary, even though I'm not registered with the party.

This is just for primaries, you register to vote with the state as well.

In Canada, those votes happen independently as decided (deemed necessary) internally by the party, and public participation is much less common.

What's the purpose of a primary election? It's to select a party's candidate for a general election. It's not very obvious that this should even be a democratic process, but if it is, why shouldn't party members be the ones selecting their own candidates?

It's funded by tax dollars, and regulated by local and state laws.

If they want their own private primaries, then it should happen internally and at the parties' own expense.

How do you envision this working without the "opposing party" poisoning the vote to get a weaker opponent?

I envision that it does not matter, because this is a tactic that would 1) be available to all, and 2) it gives up your vote for someone of your own party, thereby weakening your own position. It's self regulating.

You would still forfeit the ability to vote in your primary though. I do think there are people that do this, but most people want to vote in their primary regardless of whether it's a landslide.

Is actual party membership required?

Or, in effect, are you just required to claim either that you're more of a cat person, or that you're more of a dog person?

Yeah it's the latter. The US does not have party membership the way that, say, the UK does. In many states, it's open primary. In Colorado, for instance, I get mailed Democratic and Republican primary ballots and can vote by mailing in either one. I think you get neither counted if you mail in both, but I have no idea; I've never tried it.

The last time anyone tried to poison a presidential election by promoting a weaker candidate on the other side in the US, it was the Democrats boosting Trump in 2016. It did not work out.

For an alternate example, in Illinois you choose one at primary election time and only get that one. This year the options are Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, and Non-Partisan (which means only the referendums, not the elections).

This would kind of be the same as us (I'm Canadian too) registering with the NDP so we can vote for the next leader. But the level of lying on display here is just insane.

> I don't know if the fact that it fully slipped into the absurd or the fact that it probably still worked on people is sadder.

The thing is that that one plays on propaganda that people have already been conditioned to accept.

Very probably this person's father believes that the Democrats (a) control the state-operated voter registration system, and (b) manipulate it to their advantage. He believes that because he's been sent that message through a vast number of channels for many years. He would think it was absolutely in character for his registered party to be changed, and would probably think that would somehow affect how his vote was actually counted.

It's no more absurd than the idea that busloads of illegal aliens are showing up to vote "somewhere". Or whatever other idiotic lies they've been telling forever.

This isn't even close to the most ridiculous emotional manipulation techniques American conservative fundraising uses to target old people who might not be in full possession of their faculties. It's some of the scummiest stuff possible.

Philosophically fun, sure, but the article also points out that another vector was "Your language settings have been changed to Spanish", so I don't know if it's as profound as you're making it out to be. Anything that makes us panic can be a vector.

That sounds like a Silicon Valley bit.

That show didn’t hit Black Mirror levels of existentially uncomfortable, but man, I recognized too many of those scenes.

Don't like that. I'm of the "if you're going to do something important, do it on your PC" generation. I do not want a future where I lose my phone and I can no longer access my bank.

They won't find a solution to your problem, when one is obvious: buy a phone.

They'll find a solution to their problem, which is you: apologize for losing you as a customer, and express a hope that you'll consider them again after you've bought a phone.

There can be laws like the right to have a bank account, that might say your bank can't require you to have anything they don't provide you with for free. In some places.

What is that supposed to accomplish? The service providers that require a phone will require one whether you have one or not.

We need to act now, while there are still service providers that don't require a phone. If my bank said they wouldn't do business with me unless I used a phone and an app, I would immediately take my business and all my accounts to a different bank. Banks have no moat. You can pretty easily move accounts to a different one or to a credit union who won't abuse you.

You and the four other people who might do this are just delaying the inevitable.

Only if people roll over and take it. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

99.9999% of people are “rolling over and taking it” because they don’t have an aversion to installing their bank’s app on their phone.

Most people would find this viewpoint to be strange.

IMO Most people simply lack the context and knowledge to understand the viewpoint.

Or they’re arguing with like four FUD contrarians on a website.

No no no shut up, don’t speak up. No one thinks like you.

It builds a case. You're not going to win with one clever move. We need to show that these policies systematically deprive honest customers.

Unless you are a multimillionaire, they will tell you to go do business elsewhere, you're not worth their trouble.

I wonder what the rate of "getting killed by some rando along the way" actually is. Sure, lots of anecdotes, and I don't really know how you'd measure it, but I'm curious how it plays out by the real numbers.

For men I suspect the “killed by a rando” number is pretty low, but robbery/theft is very high. Of course if you have nothing to steal, that does insulate you a little.

For women I suspect the “killed by a rando” number is low, but the sexual assault number is higher.

s/killed/harassed/ and the numbers are pretty damn high at least in my circle

The rate of being killed is pretty damn high in your circle? What is s/killed? Or is it just a harassment issue? If it's so high, why keep doing it? I'm struggling to understand the risk/reward, and what the risk actually is compared to what it's perceived to be.

s/foo/bar/ is search & replace foo with bar. So yes, they're saying the rate of harassment is high. Even if we posit that >99% of men aren't harassers, a solo female traveler is going to encounter a lot more than 100 men, so is quite likely to be harassed.

> s/foo/bar/ is search & replace foo with bar.

Ah, thank you.

I get it, it's an irrational desire, but with the timespans we're talking the evolutionary distance is greater than that between us and whatever fuzzy things was scurrying under the feet of the T-Rex.