There’s no new jobs for horses after the combustion engine was invented to do physical labor

Bingo. And this time we’re the horses.

I doubt that stores will only have one employee

It’s already here, my dude. Not every store, but some are doing this now. It’s just a question of how fast it will spread.

IT guy here, I am not that worried about AI

That’s pretty much because you’re an IT guy. You’re in an industry that AI won’t replace any time soon.

If you were a cashier, or a stock clerk, or a busboy, you should be terrified by AI. The speed at which those jobs are already vanishing is astounding. The other day I was at a restaurant, and I never interacted with a human. The ordering was done by touch panel at my table, the food was delivered to the table by a robot and I paid at an automated terminal. I don’t know how many staff were on duty but it had to be a fraction of what it would have been a decade ago. I bought clothes last week and there was one employee in the store, overseeing the self-checkout lanes (but really just sitting idly by in case anyone had issues). I read an article yesterday about how robots are now being distributed to convenience stores that can clean, stock, and reorder items, so these shops will pretty soon have only one employee in them.

The gimmicky shit that your browser AI and chatbots can do is nothing compared to how this is already revolutionizing the world.

THAC0 is just subtraction instead of addition. I’ll never understand the hate it got.
I have no problem with ascending armor classes and attack bonus. The math is the same. It’s easy and intuitive. But if you’re having issues subtracting whole numbers less than 20, you’ve got a problem bigger than the wrong game system.

Unless theyre scrapping 2077s engine and starting over completely in a different engine for Cyberpunk 2.

They previously (last year or so) said this was their plan.

Shockingly, it takes more to revolutionize a country of 320 million people than casting a single protest vote for Jill Stein every 4 years.

The folks whining the most about Biden also seem to be the least civic-minded.

Well, no. The Electoral College has its own list of problems, but keeping 3rd parties out of power is not one of them.

There’s two main reasons we don’t have any serious third party candidates:

1. We have a first-past-the-post system, which mathematically results in a two-party system, and

2. no serious politician runs as a third party candidate, because any serious politician understands how our election system works.

It’s almost like… there’s a reason these 3rd party candidates aren’t making it onto the big party tickets.

“I don’t like Trump, but Biden just doesn’t excite me…”

Those were the really fun days of the internet.

When surfing the web was actually an adventure and you’d actually discover things.

Not that I could ever go back to dial up speeds, but damn those days were fun.

So we have been saying this since I was a kid, a third party is a wasted vote. Next time around will be our chance! Well. When? We just going to always push off voting third party until democrats stop hiding and go full republican?

This is why I included “ignorant” among the list of terms in my previous comment. I’m not using it as an insult; yours is a popular opinion, but it displays a fundamental lack of understanding about how the US election system works.

A third party is a wasted vote, because that’s literally how the system works. It’s not something people say to discourage you from voting or to keep the Big Two in power. It’s just a fact of the rules of the game. Voting third party in hopes that it will change the game is as useful as picking up the soccer ball with your hands in hopes that maybe this time the ref will allow it. The rules just don’t allow for that.

To be clear, I’m not saying this because I like the system. I’m not defending the system. I’m just highlighting the truth of it. The rules we have are crap, designed by people hundreds of years ago who didn’t know any better. It was the best they had at the time, and here we are 250 years later desperately in need of a rules update… But that still doesn’t change the rules!

In our FPTP system, one of the Big Two parties will win. Period. If you want that to change (I know I do), the time to do that is in between election cycles. You will never ever change the political system by miraculously voting in a 3rd party. Even if you could somehow get 100% of the country to unanimously vote for a 3rd party president, all you would have is a lame duck president. You would not change the makeup of the legislature, which is the part of our government responsible for making the rules. So if you want to change those rules, you do so through the legislature, not by electing an outsider president. You need to spend the period in between election cycles petitioning, writing, calling, and contacting your legislative representatives every way possible to convince them to support election reform measures. Then and only then will there be meaningful discussion about changing the rules into something better; something where you can actually vote your heart or for the person who best represents your views rather than just a person from party A or B. In other words, if you want to play a version of soccer where you can use your hands, the time to do that is before you play, not mid-game. The same goes for elections.

If you don’t believe me, just look into how US elections work. There are so many great explanations about the math and the game theory that makes them function the way they do. Third parties are a wasted vote, not because of any cynicism or pessimism or nihilism; they are because the math literally works out that way. Worse, any vote for a third party candidate actually aids the candidate you dislike. That is to day, if you’d rather Biden beat Trump, your vote for candidate C mathematically actually aids Trump. So yes, third party candidates really do spoil the election, and third party votes are actually shooting yourself in the foot.

So let’s change the system, and let’s do it the only way laws get changed in this country: by petitioning our representatives. Not by pinning our hopes on a zero-chance candidate and actually supporting the worse candidate by wasting our vote.

All this comes off as is petulant, ignorant, and unimaginative.

It’s unimaginative because nobody who spends even half a minute thinking about the consequences of the election could come away believing there would be no little to difference between the two outcomes.

It’s ignorant because it displays a lack of understanding about how the FPTP US election system works.

It’s petulant because it’s akin to demanding the system work for you, rather than you working within the system. You’re refusing to participate in a choice that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people just because a system that hundreds of millions of people work to produce doesn’t function the way you want it to.

he can’t pardon himself

Anytime I hear someone say Trump can’t do something, I want to wave my hands in the air and point to everything.

Trump will pardon himself because he has no shame, and the people in charge of pointing out that he can’t pardon himself will do fuckall, just like every single person with any repsonsibility has done fuckall the stop Trump from doing anything for the past 8 years.

There have been thousands of chances to prevent Trump from doing A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc. And every. single. person. has done nothing at all to stop him. He truly is above the law.

That’s a terrible argument against it.

If there’s a bad vibe to eliminating a candidate for following laws that were explicitly written down 150 years ago to stop such a candidate, then what kind of vibe does it give off if we flat out ignore that same law?

If we allow ourselves to be swayed by the idea that taking away a very specific privilege from a person gives off a bad vibe, then we’d be undermining our entire justice system and the very concept of law itself.

The law is unambiguous, and we must follow it. If we don’t, then the rule of law truly has no meaning.

I think the right-leaning justices know pretty well that their positions are safe. They’re already benefiting immensely from corruption. When democracy dies and they have no obligation to the law, they’ll do whatever it takes to enrich themselves further.

It’s literally following the law.

This certainly tracks with me. I was familiar with the pro-Trump crowd on Facebook and Reddit for many years, but I never understood why liberals just failed to get the vote out until I came to lemmy/kbin. The sheer amount of people on the fediverse who are loudly choose to vote against their own interests due to a lack of understanding about how US politics work is a tragedy. It seems the right’s war on civic education has reached its tipping point, and they no longer need to rely on policy or numbers; they just need to rely on the ignorance of those who might have voted against them. We seem doomed for a second Trump presidency because nobody wants to take responsibility for the future.

This says more about the character of the voter than it does about the Democratic Party’s poor choice in candidates.

If you choose to not fight fascism because the alternative isn’t perfection, you’ve made a very foolish choice.

So then we really don’t have a democracy

We have a kind of democracy

since we’re being forced to only vote for Trump or Biden, instead of other candidates we might align with better?

You’re not forced to vote for one of them. But they are the only two for whom a vote matters.

You are free to not vote. You are free to vote for a third party. You are free to vote for a joke candidate. But if you care at all about the outcome of the election, there is absolutely a correct person to vote for. Until we elect a congress that will pass comprehensive voting reform laws, it doesn’t matter who you align with; it only matters which of the “big two” you prefer to win.

The game we play has specific rules. If you care about the future, you should play by them. The hard work of changing the system into something better takes place in between elections, not during election years.

There are plenty of people you can vote for, but there are only two people who might win. Vote intelligently. Vote like the future depends on it.