Gotta love the perennial “our kids are spoiled idiots” bit. That one never gets old. I bet at least one of Aritophanes’ plays will have made fun of the damn kids.

That still doesn’t explain how this timeline would come to exist. Reality as it is is still insane, no matter how we got here.

Money in my bank account I can spend on just about anything. If I realise “shit, I’m out of toilet paper”, I can go to the grocery store and pay by EC, with the money in my bank account. The money that I keep in there, just in case there’s something I want or need to spend money on literally anywhere.

Besides, my bank is subject to my local jurisdiction and my own country’s laws and regulations. If my money is with some US company, I can’t be sure whether they’ll suddenly go “sorry, pal, your money has been confiscated on some bullshit pretense you have no way of actually fighting back against”.

Valve could extend a limited credit for the first two hours of play time. If after downloading and playing for two hours there’s still no confirmation from the bank, they’d then block your access to the game.

About race fetishism and commercial exploitation, I believe

You’re just being a reminder that we shouldn’t want those things and give up.

No, I’m being a reminder that you should be strategic in how you go about it. Don’t just dream – work towards it. Gather support, particularly in smaller, local elections, where the consequences for spoiling aren’t quite as bad. Talk to people. Get people on board. Once you have enough backing, try to swing bigger elections around.

I’m not a centrist, nor a neoliberal, nor whatever else you may associate with the Democrats. I don’t even live in the US, and where I do live, I vote left. But that only works because we have a representative democracy, where my vote counts even if it’s not a plurality vote.

So please spare me your moral grandstanding and deflection and consider what I’m actually talking about instead.

Aye, if you can rally enough voters behind a united, third option, that would be the way to break out. I’m cautioning that you need to be sure you can knock out the hammers, otherwise you risk the Spoiler Effect fucking things up. If you take the shot and miss, you might just hit your own foot instead.

Don’t ignore the ugly realities of strategic voting just because they don’t fit your dream. If you’re confident you can break the cycle, by all means, go for it.

That’s not what I was asking. Would Cool Water prefer Warm Pepsi or Hammers to have the plurality?

Because the whole point of my explanation of the Spoiler Effect is this: If the Cool Water party wins over more Warm Pepsi voters than Hammer voters (which it probably would), it may end up splitting the Pepsi vote to the point that the Hammers win.

Unless you can be sure that Cool Water would take the plurality, you’d risk smashing your own face to spite Pepsi.

By all means, do the work to make Cool Water popular and gain support, but don’t ignore the reality of strategic voting. It’s fucked up, it’s ideologically unpalatable, but it’s pragmatic.

And as far as Cool Water is concerned?

No, it’s predicated on the belief that Warm Pepsi is still preferable to Hammers and that attempting to supplant either of them with Cool Water in one fell swoop isn’t realistic. Under those premises, Cool Water may act as a spoiler party to undermine Warm Pepsi.

Nobody wins by voting third party in a plurality system, unless that third party can overtake one of the two first parties.

Like I said, I get being fed up with compromise. I’m fed up too. But plurality voting sucks, so let’s do some math:

Hammer Party has 45% of the votes. Pepsi Party has 50%. 5% go to some other, minor parties.

Now suppose a Cool Water party appears, clearly better than Warm Pepsi. They start drawing voters, some from the Pepsi, some maybe from non-voters, but the Hammer Party adherents don’t relent. They make it to 10%, with the Pepsi Party now standing at, say, 45%. Hammer are down to 43% thanks to higher turnout. Other parties down to 2%.

Next election, more Pepsi compromise voters are encouraged to vote Water. Water is up to 25%! Hammer is at 38% now – we’re making progress! Except that the Pepsi party now has a maximum of 37%, if there are no non-voters. Hammer party now has the most votes. That’s called the spoiler effect.

Obviously, the Pepsi fraction might see that shift coming and try to avoid it. For that, they’d either have to pull some of the Hammer voters, or accede to the Water voters in hopes of retaining them. Do you think they’ll compromise with Water? And do you think the Water voters are willing to trust that compromise?

Unless you somehow manage to rapidly turn a party up to 50% or win a significant amount of voters from both camps, odds are you’re going to make things worse. Hopefully, they’ll get better after that, unless Hammer Party manages to rig the system in their favour or even get rid of it. Is that a risk worth taking?

For a different example, suppose Water and Pepsi teamed up. Let’s take the initial 5% other voters, manage to push Hammer down to 31% and put the Pepsi party at a solid 64%.

For the next election, hammer and other voters remain the same, but the Water party has split off and immediately pulled a solid 25% of voters. Pepsi is still at 39%, still wins. Not ideal, but better than Hammer, right?

The following election sees even more Water voters, maybe higher turnout too. Hammer down to 30%, other voters 2%. Water and Pepsi are a close race, but turn out 33% to 35% in favour of Water.

That’s what I mean with compromise: strategically creating a statistical base on which change can be built without risking shooting your own foot.

Of course, the best option would be an actually fair voting system, like Ranked Choice (which is probably easiest to explain), but with how things are now, it’d take a lot of prep work and publicity work to get enough people on board so it doesn’t go sideways.

For the most realistic path to that end, the hammer would become so unpopular that an actually decent choice would stand a chance of being more than a spoiler to the Pepsi. For that to work, the Pepsi would need at least twice the approval of the hammer, which would require compromise for the sake of common purpose. Then, the decent alternative would need to be united enough to start pulling the balance, which would also require compromise on lesser points.

But that level of unity seems impossible for many of the progressive factions I see. They’re fed up with compromise, and I get it. I just don’t think a lasting improvement will happen without it.

Edit: This whole comment thread proves my point. We can’t even agree whether we hate the Hammers more than we hate Warm Pepsi.

Just CxU being CxU

We’re trying! Some of us, at least. I have plenty of “anti-genocide no matter the flag” people in my general social environment. Hell, even at work do some colleagues openly criticise it with no pushback.

Unfortunately, the “Christian” parties and one quite blatantly (Neo-)Nazi party hold too much public attention and influence. I guess massacring muslims is still popular with Christians…

And its source is Fandom

I do

I think part of it is the deceptive simplification of political alignment into a single axis with two poles you assign whatever significance you want to.

Gov’t control can be used to regulate companies for killing us for slightly larger profit margins, but also to surveil and eliminate dissidents. It’s just not adequate to judge a political stance by.

I believe that’s what a write down generally reflects: The asset is now worth less than its previous book value. Resale value isn’t the most accurate way to look at it, but it generally works for explaining it: If I bought a tool for 100€, I’d book it as 100€ worth of tools. If I wanted to sell it again after using it for a while, I’d get less than those 100€ back for it, so I’d write down that difference as a loss.

With buying / depreciating / selling companies instead of tools, things become more complex, but the basic idea still holds: If the whole of the company’s value goes down, you write down the difference too. So unless these guys bought it for five times its value, they’ll have paid less for it than they originally got.

I wish you a speedy and affordable recovery