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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m not gonna answer that question. I don’t have the perfect answer ready for you.

    Instead I will tell you what happens when you vote third party in FPTP. Okay, you have a .nl TLD so I guess ssyou’re either in a much better electoral situation or just picked it because it’s cool, but I will use the example of the upcoming US presidential election.

    Now, let’s say the race is really even and it’s over. Flipping just one of several key battleground states would’ve placed Harris in the lead, but unfortunately, Trump won. You look at the votes in your state: Trump won by under 600 votes. Nearly 100,000 people voted for a third party candidate that’s actually to the left of Harris. They would’ve preferred Harris, but because they voted third party, they elected Trump.

    If this sounds familiar, that’s what happened in 2000. Al Gore could’ve won. Should’ve won. But 3rd party candidate Ralph Nader was further left of him and received a bunch of votes that needed to go to Gore. In Florida, he had nearly 100k votes, and the difference between Bush and Gore was literally triple digits. And it wasn’t even the only state where Gore lost because of the Spoiler Effect

    It’s an inherent flaw of the FPTP system and yes, it sucks. It means a vote for a third party is a wasted vote.


  • And yet (at least from an outsider perspective) libertarians are closer to democrats than republicans

    I’m an outsider too, but here’s my take on this

    For the most part (certain exceptions exist, like guns), democrats seem to be about individual freedom from government, but they want government to regulate corporations.

    Republicans are more about corporate freedom from government, but they want government to regulate people they don’t like (women, LGBT, immigrants).

    Libertarians ideally want corporate AND personal freedom from government, but a lot of people only want personal freedom from government if it applies to “their kind”. So they’re really republicans.










  • I’m lucky enough that both of the shareholders of my company are software engineers; one has transitioned to sales and project management, the other is still an engineer, he’s also the CTO.

    Was discussing office chairs with our team lead/office supplies person (it’s a really small company, some people have multiple roles) and when I mentioned that my chair gets really creaky when leaning back but otherwise it works so it really just needs some lubrication, she asked why I would even lean so far back in my chair and the CTO told her “There’s two sitting positions for programming. The writing position and the thinking position”

    TL;DR: Takes an engineer to know how engineering works. Turns out that you have to spend a lot of time just thinking





  • In my country, if you can’t do the mandatory military service (and yes, being a pacifist is a valid reason I believe), you can do the same amount of time working for a charity and get paid minimum wage. I know a guy who worked for the food bank, but there are other options obviously.

    It’s not the perfect program - I’d prefer if you could just immediately choose to do the humanitarian service instead of the military one, rather than having to go through the medical check for the military one first. And I think minimum wage is pretty horrible if you don’t also get provided housing… But overall, I like the idea.