ricecake

https://www.newsweek.com/voter-turnout-count-claims-map-election-1981645

Tldr: a lot of people assumed record turnout because we had higher registration numbers. Those predictions were in some cases wrong.

Additionally, at the time the election was call, not all the votes were counted. California was only about halfway done counting, but could be safely called for Harris. So the vote totals when the election was called is likely quite different from the actual totals.

Meanwhile, Dems simply don't seem to care. They don't repeal gerrymanders. They don't amend the VOA. They don't expand mail in voting. They don't implement DC statehood.

I mean, in Michigan they did, at least as far as Michigan has the power to do so. It amounted to fuck all.

So while it's all well and good to continuously look for a way to blame the outcome on one abstract institution or another, at some point you have to just say "fuck the voters who voted for a fascist, and fuck the ones who didn't vote against him".

Because of how the demographics are. The electoral college favors Republicans, and the popular vote favors Democrats.

A Democratic victory is expected to involve urban votes in typically contentious states, and urban votes take longer to count due to higher volume and more voters per polling location.

If the Republican candidate is getting enough votes from the quick to count low population density areas to win, it unfortunately means that the slow to count areas don't really matter in terms of what the outcome is.

Democracy is how you pick your leaders. It's not the only tool you use to defend your rights and civil liberties.

I actually dropped mine off at the township clerks office just so I could get one of the new stickers.

Sadly, they were out of the werewolf.

Honest to God I think these stickers might be a significant driver for the increased turnout.

Totally. And the staff is also pretty reasonable about how it's ultimately just a fun way to get food you might not have thought of.
I usually tell them I hate sour cream and they'll let me know if I should get something else, which is technically against the "rules", but it's also just pizza that I'm paying for and not a national secret or anything.

They do ask you to let them know if you have any allergies, and they do tell you what everything is when they give it to you. You're not at risk for eating something you can't. You'd have to not tell them when they ask, and then ignore them when they told you the ingredients.

I get people wanting to defend the "traditional" preparation of a food, because otherwise you get into weird philosophical "burrito of Theseus" issues, but... You can just slap "non-traditional" on it and then carry on and enjoy the food. If you feel really strongly or it's really out there, call it a fucked up ____ inspired whatever.

One of the best pizzas I ever had was at a pizza place near me that has a "trust us" pizza, where you don't know what it is, but it's new and definitely worth the cost (they're not giving you a plain cheese pizza). It was like a strawberry and anduille pizza with a seasoned sweet white sauce. It was weirdly good.

Some are random and have no disadvantage, so they stick around. Others have an advantage that may or may not still be relevant.

High melanin levels help with bright equatorial sun. Low melanin levels help with vitamin D synthesis in areas where there's less sun.

Curly African hair is better at protecting the scalp from the sun and heat. There's less hair follicles overall, allowing for better airflow and the tight curls keep the hair away from the scalp allowing it to cool better. This also meant less sweating, which made it easier to remain hydrated and clean.
Straighter hair tends to be more dense, and to do a better job keeping you warm.

A lot of the other traits are random, or in genes connected to the general melanin genes, since evolution is unlikely to specifically target just the melanin levels of skin, and not the overall melanin level.

Some traits are also a result of sexual selection. Peacocks have large, vibrant plumage because it helps them attract a mate. Some human characteristics are the same. We essentially selectively bred ourselves based on the whim of aesthetics.

Finally, much of what we consider racial differences between people are social constructs.
That's not to say that the differences aren't real, but that the racial division is a relatively arbitrary line.
For example, I'm nearly a foot taller than my wife. My ancestors wandered up from Africa, landed in Scandinavia and then drifted to Scotland and southern England before coming to the Americas and getting mixed up in the Canadian fur trade in the 1600s. My wife's ancestors stopped in Germany before coming to the Americas in the late 1800s.
Our children are not considered mixed race because our skin is the same color, even though the actual lineage is pretty distinct.

We decided that skin color is a race marker, but not things like "height", "toe and finger length", or things like that.
Except for where we did, like when European colonizers relatively arbitrarily decided that different traits were racial markers amongst the colonized, like nose shape and chin thickness.

All that to say, much of what we consider obvious racial differences that stand out are only such because we decided to pay attention to them. Other perfectly visible variations are just normal individual variations.

You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn't let them vote for president, so they can't legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
One of the proposals that's come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there's never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.

For the most part it's not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
It's an engine for producing text that's most like the text it's seen before, or for telling you what text it's seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
This is kinda nifty and I've actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

I've seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn't doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as "wrong".

I mean, it's not because they're Puerto Rican, it's because they live in Puerto Rico. Someone from Iowa who moved to Puerto Rico would also not get a vote.
This is because our system allocates votes to land, not people.
US citizens don't get to vote for president. They get to vote for who their place of residence votes for.

Up until the 60s, people in DC also didn't get a vote, because by default only states get a vote, and it's explicitly not a state.