DomeGuy

Potable Alcohol is tasty for much the same reason fat and carbs are tasty -- it's calorically dense.

It's also habit forming, much like caffeine or nicotine or THC,.in that it causes a temporary but enjoyable alteration of our neurochemistry.

(It can also be addictive like nicotine, in that regular use can lead to illness-like withdrawal symptoms.)

And, it's also a solvent with distinct properties to water, allowing for preparations with distinctly different tastes from other foods. Which makes alcohol also slightly like salt or spices, in that it changes how other foods taste.

I count eighteen states that fit that description and yet you only list seven.

Am I reading the chart wrong, or can you explain what's different about Oklahoma but not Florida?

Why did you say "not your neighbor who voted for Trump" and then provide an example who absolutely [would have] voted for Trump?

As has been said elsewhere about everything Microsoft is pulling:

If your LLM was worth using you wouldn't need to force anyone to use it.

Fun consequence of this: the ten commandments should be translated into WAY less formal English if want to be traditional.

"No murders y'all" weirdly doesn't have the same punch when engraved on a stone tablet, though. (And most Americans can't read ancient Hebrew.)

He had no business being there ANYWAY.

And Congress didn't "verify" anything. It was a rote formalism with about as much real power regarding the election as the coronation of the king of England.

Schumer resigning as minority leader wouldnt change one damn thing.

The only resignation that would matter would be from his Senate seat, and while Hochul has some progressive bonna fides from her endorsement of Mamdani I dont think there's a good choice for an appointed senator who could make much of a difference.

Maybe someone like Zephyr Teachout, but I'm not sure she'd want the job or that Hochul would pick her.

(And if AOC herself wants the job, I'd want her to get the benefit of winning a statewide dem primary first.)

So Australia, being a country formally ruled by a crown but governed parliment-style via legislative majority with a designated royal proxy, had the people of said "emergency fallback spare government" talk to each other before actually doing one of the only things they're still allowed to do?

Was the royal governor thrown in jail? Was the claimed non-involvement of the queen with someone whose literal job was to act in her name used to argue against abolishing the crown of Australia and changing to a formal Republic?

I don't see the scandal here. If my country's infamous president claimed that, say, the senate-confirned secretary of defense reached a conclusion on his own but they were discreetly in communication it might at worst be embarrassing, but hardly scandalous.

Is this a weird Australian thing or a weird British thing?

Okay, so who filled these rolls in the NYC Mayor's Race?

Cuomo, who was endorsed by the outgoing mayor, was the establishment. Mamdani, who ran an insurgent campaign to beat both Adams and Cuomo in the ranked-choice primary, was the opposition.

That the choice was either Cuomo or Mamdani was so obvious that the leadership of the Republican party endorsed Cuomo over his own party's nominee.

That's not what happened in the primary...

The DNC primary was not a winner-take-all election. We could call them "single ballot plurality wins" or "first past the post" if the difference is confusing to you.

And then when your candidate loses you're going to come back here and yell at me for voting wrong. Hell, even when you win, you're yelling that I've voted wrong.

Where the fuck did I say that? Go ahead and waste your vote all you want. Sometimes both plausible winners suck, and "they both are equally bad" is a perfectly fine fucking message.

Just don't expect any rhetorical accolades for voting "either" from the rest of us.

Essentially every winner-take-all election comes down to the establishment and the opposition. Either you like the team in charge and vote for them, want them replaced and vote for the most likely challenger, or find both choices equivalent and do something else with your vote.

NYC's mayor election is a great example. Every adult who looked at polling knew that it would either be Mamdani or Cuomo, and those who still voted for someone else were communicating very effectively that both choices were equivalent to them.

Look, you can do whatever the hell you want to with your vote. Spoil it, waste it on a "third party" vanity campaign, or just skip the election. Just don't pretend that your wasted vote is somehow not a declaration that whomever wins is as good to you as the runner up.

In a winner-take-all election, anything less than a vote for the runner up is an endorsement of the winner.

You're not "refusing to take part" in the election, you're just voting "either is fine by me."