SirEDCaLot

It boils down to this: If you support the direct will of the people in choosing a candidate, you probably like RCV. If you want the party to have significant influence in choosing a candidate, you probably don't like RCV.

It is possible the Democrats are realizing that their establishment selected candidates are not competitive against modern Republicans.
It's also possible they are considering somebody more radical but want plausible deniability about how that person came to be elected.
Or it's possible they are just out of ideas. Or maybe all three...

Amazon is a total mess.

If you want a quality item but don't know what brand you want, it's near unusable. All the results are random Chinese vendors with what look like random names, half of them are rebadging the same noname Temu-quality crap.

It's gotten to the point where I Google for product recommendations or look at YouTube (keeping in mind that 90% of them are sponsored 'unbiased reviews' of the product in question) rather than searching Amazon.

Of course then you get the brand name stuff sold by random grey market resellers for $5 below Amazon's price so they claim the buy box and you get a product where the mfr won't honor the warranty.

Your understanding is correct. It's actually a very simple calculation: volts x amps = watts. Watts is the amount of total work done. So to use a water pipe analogy, imagine you have a pressure washer. Volts is the pressure in PSI. Amps in the flow rate in gallons per minute. Watts is how quickly it cleans your sidewalk. Thus, the 500 PSI pressure washer that can put out 2 gallons per minute does about the same amount of cleaning as the 1,000 PSI pressure washer that puts out one gallon per minute. However, as long as the hose can withstand the pressure, pushing out 2 gallons per minute requires a larger diameter hose.

It's the same way with wiring. The capacity of a wire is measured in amps. So if a device needs say 1200 watts, feeding it was 240v instead of 120v means you can use thinner wires everywhere. Including in the transformer that powers it.

However, this type of gain only really makes a big difference when you get into very high power consumption devices. An electric kettle that takes 1500 w, in the US you are almost maxing out a single 15 amp outlet. In the UK the same kettle is using less than half of the outlets capacity. (Of course they just make a kettle that has twice as much output, because the Brits don't want to wait for their tea). Amusingly, that 3 kilowatt tea kettle is one of the only places where you get a real perceptible advantage from a 240v system.

This is exactly it. Back before Black Friday was a household name that appeared in advertisements, there were some real good deals to be had, especially if you were willing to go before noon. That's where you got rushes of people banging down doors at 6:00 a.m. for the very best deals, but there were plenty throughout the day.

Then Cyber Monday became a thing. Then it became Black Friday week.
And in the process it lost all meaning. It's no longer anything special, it's the same deals you get on many other major holidays.

So I just don't bother anymore. Like I'll grab something if there's a good deal but I don't put much special attention into it anymore because there's no point.

... How is that the case? You're multiple loads end up with a cubic foot of plugs and receptacles. Like imagine I want to plug in a computer, two monitors, a printer, a desk lamp, a cell phone charger, and a laptop plug. None of these devices use more than 100 watts. In UK you need seven of those ridiculous giant plugs for all this. Even with a power strip it would be physically huge.

In the US the power strip that would run all that stuff is barely a foot long.

I have used power strips all my life and never once has one caught fire.

American here. I may be in the minority, but I think this plug design is absolutely stupid. I get that it has safety features, that you can put a fuse in the plug, that the outlets have switches, etc etc etc. But it is absolutely fucking huge. Ridiculously huge. And anywhere that you have multiple devices you want to plug in, it is totally impractical because it is so fucking huge.

The fact is, very very few devices need 240v 13A. Yes I get that it is useful to have this ridiculous amount of power so you can boil your tea kettle in 35 seconds, but other than that very few household appliances need anywhere near that amount of power.

So the result is a cell phone charger, which at the very outside is pulling 20 or 30 watts, is plugged into this giant ridiculous monstrosity capable of supplying 3000+ watts. And in reality the only appliances that use anywhere near that much are cooking appliances and space heaters.

Meanwhile the US NEMA 5-15 is good for 1800 watts, plenty to run almost every household appliance, with the longer ground pin and an appropriate outlet it supports tamper resistance shutters, the thin flat pins resist the insertion of foreign objects into the outlet, and you can fit many outlets in a small space.
And it doesn't destroy your foot when you step on it, as a nice bonus.

Hey I really appreciate that, seems like these days most people double down on the cynicism rather than walking it back. Sending tons of good vibes your way.

I agree it would be difficult to complete a democratic process in an authoritarian state. I think the process would have to be those areas revert to Ukrainian control, and the election will happen in 4 to 6 months or something.

It might also be totally impractical, for the simple reason that those areas have been contested for so long they are probably largely war zone rubble and much of the civilian population has fled. So you would have to restrict voting to anyone who lived in the area before the fighting started, because if you allowed anybody who lived in the area at vote time to vote you no Russia would just pay a whole bunch of people to move there and vote to switch to Russian rule.

Basically my thought is Russia should not get to expand its territory by force, but at the same time if people in those areas genuinely prefer to be part of Russia that should be taken into account too.

Never said they were my friend. They might have been once, in the 'Don't be evil' era, but that era is long past.

They are however somewhat more interested in open standards than Apple. Android for example uses OGG a bunch under the hood.

The article suggests this was a more secret room, not the sort of thing any random person could join.

Nobody knows what to do with it because it's proprietary and requires a license. If it was not encumbered, windows would ship with a decoder built-in for free and nobody would have a problem. If Apple devices didn't use it by default, no one would have a problem because they just wouldn't use it for anything ever.

If Apple got sick of paying the fee, they could switch to AVIF or JPEG XL or anything else. It wouldn't be hard, just bake native support into the next OS of everything, and have the next iPhone take pictures in that format by default. The rest of the world will catch up right quick.

Actually come to think of it I'm kind of surprised Google doesn't do that. Make the native Android camera shoot in AVIF by default...

My take is that he's only working for himself. Across both terms, he has a track record of rewarding personal loyalty and looking out for his own interests above most else.

Yeah but look at the AV1 hardware support matrix. A lot of current mobile silicon supports decode, not nearly as much supports encode. To have AV1 truly replace MP4/MP5 a hardware encode is necessary so you can do video calls in AV1.

The one who could really make this happen is Apple. If they decided to move away from MPEG-LA and embraced open codecs (AV1 / VP9 / Opus / FLAC / AVIF / JPEGXL / JPEG2000), supporting them in software, hardware, and their services (imessage/ichat/facetime, music store, video store) that would single handedly push the industry.

They did that with HEIC- before iPhones switched to HEIC by default nobody bothered with the encumbered format. Now it's become de facto standard. That SHOULD have been something open like AVIF, JPEG XL, etc.