80’s’n’t

Coming into a thread that has nothing to do with politics and using it to soapbox your political superiority is still kinda cringe, ngl.

Caught me before I was able to edit! I thought about it for a second and decided that estimate was too high.

10 people is what I would usually say is a normal amount, maybe variable depending on how hungry people arrive and if there are any other dishes to snack on at whatever hypothetical party this is.

I can only eat 3-4 slices at most before I get full, but my appetite isn’t the biggest.

Usually what ends up happening is that I still order a party pizza for a group of 5 or so people and then end up with leftovers for a few days. Just can’t beat the surface-to-crust ratio.

A party pizza is basically what it sounds like, a pizza meant to feed a party of 10 or more people.

They usually look like this, a large rectangle cut into squares. Each square is about the width of your palm between your wrist and your fingers.

I mean it’s just the cake equivalent of a party pizza. It’s not made any differently than any other sponge cake, it just uses a larger square sheet to bake in than smaller round cake pans.

Sacred Indian living grounds with a few burial grounds here and there.

Massachusetts passed an unprecedented measure allowing ride share drivers to unionize.

Salmonella. It’s carried in chicken dung, sometimes eggs get a bit of feces on them, so the US washes them to attempt to reduce exposure.

Problem is that without the protective coating, the eggs are more permeable and susceptible to bacterial infection, hence the refrigeration.

So it’s a question of whether it’s better to reduce bacteria exposure or susceptibility. I am sure there’s research out there with numbers indicating one works better than the other, but it’s been such a long-standing thing at this point that I don’t think Americans would trust unrefrigerated eggs.

Some apps/frontends have keyword filters, could just filter out the word “Trump” as a way of trimming down the feed.

Inhales

What 4th wall?

Upvotes and downvotes are not private. You may have to jump through a few hoops to see the information, but user IDs are attached to every upvote and downvote sent across the platform.

A combination of first-past-the-post and winner-take-all systems for nearly all elections, coupled with the Electoral College for the presidency.

First-past-the-post is a system wherein only the plurality candidate wins. Here is an example:

• For a given seat, be it a president, senator, representative, or local office, assume Party A wins 40%, Party B wins 30%, Party C wins 20% and Party D wins 10%.

• Despite a majority of voters preferring someone other than Party A, Party A wins and everyone else loses. This is first-past-the-post voting, and with no other considerations given to the other votes, makes it a winner-take-all system.

• The majority aren’t happy with this, but the other parties continue running their candidates and continue losing because Party A wins the greatest portion of votes each time.

• Because the other parties can’t even win any power, there’s no “coalition” or “alliance” that can be made to shut out Party A.

• Party B decides to take advantage of everyone’s dissatisfaction. They adjust some of their policies to be more favorable to Parties C and D to attract some of their voters. This is the closest thing to a “coalition” that the first-past-the-post system can achieve.

• During the next election, Party A wins 40%, party B wins 42%, Party C wins 12%, and Party D wins 6%. Party B assumes office, starts fulfilling their agenda, a lot of their voters aren’t completely happy, but at least Party A isn’t in power.

This illustrates how only 2 prevailing parties come to be, because it is not possible to win an election in the US unless you obtain the most votes.

For the presidential election, the electoral college is a winner-take-all system determined by the limited pool of national electors.

• Like all other offices, the presidential election is still first-past-the-post. Only the candidate who wins the most votes wins the election, everyone else wins nothing.

• For the presidential election, the only votes that matter are the electoral votes. Each US state is assigned a certain portion of electors which is based on population but is often very disproportionate in practice (due to a capped elector total nationally, and minimum elector thresholds for less-populous states).

• Each elector is 1 vote for the president, and the electors are supposed to vote based on how the citizens of that state voted. This is the distinction between the electoral vote and the popular vote.

• With limited exception, this is also a winner-take-all system, meaning all the electors for a given state must also vote in line with one another. If a state has 10 votes and the election is 51% Party A and 49% Party B, all 10 electors must vote for Party A even though it’s almost a clean split down the middle for the popular vote.

• This results in cases where even if a majority of voters nationally prefer Party B, Party A’s candidate could still win because they won more electors.

• Accepting the system is unfair but being unable/unwilling to change it, the two prevailing parties try to game the system any way they can to swing things in their favor. They identify a handful of states where leads are very narrow and focus all their attention there. These are swing states.

Why do people hate third parties/why do they never win?

• For the reasons illustrated above, a third-party can never win any significant amount of power under the current system.

• When a race is even remotely close, small factors like people who choose to vote third-party instead of supporting one of the other two parties can turn the tide in a swing state, and thereby turn the tide nationally.

• There is a trend of third parties getting financial/promotional support from political groups that are actually opposed to their policies, but are using the third party to attract votes away from their main competition for a given seat. This is called the spoiler effect.

This outlines how, under the current political structure of the US, there can never be a successful third party in government outside of local grassroots elections, and why there is so much hostility towards third parties. Third parties aren’t there to win, they are propped up by larger political interests who use them to take votes from their competition.

This is why you may often see “A vote for a third-party (e.g. Jill Stein) is a vote for Trump” during this election, because the Green Party is being primarily supported by right-wing interest groups this election despite being one of the more “leftist” options on paper.

There’s a certain something to giving people cash versus a gift card.

For one, cash today is almost an inconvenience, a lot of places don’t accept cash.

The other element to it is that gift cards need to be used for specific things, while cash is often seen as something to just toss in a bank account and use for necessities or forget about. If the goal of the gift-giver is for the recipient to treat themselves to something, a gift card helps set some limits. Or if the goal is to get something related to someone’s hobby but you don’t know enough about what to get them, the gift card is an option.

I don’t hate getting cash as a gift, but I am going to be honest that it is not going to get spent on anything nice. It’s going to rent and groceries and whatever is left gets tossed into savings.

I’m not much of a gift card giver, but there have been a few times where I gave Steam gift cards as a gift for friends who are into games but I don’t know exactly what they want.

Same story we saw in 2016, Trump has no policy other than destroying American institutions and the status quo, so people get this sort of collapse fetish and pick him for that reason alone.

I once had this pizza topped with tortellini, glorious.

But I also like the burrito pizza the place down the street from me makes, they use like a black bean base for the sauce and it’s so good.

Greek style pizza is otherwise the norm here and I generally prefer it to the charred mess that is “authentic” New York style pizza.

I will admit as a kid when I wanted tea I used to just fill a mug with water and stick it in the microwave for a minute.

That’s the thing, the answer for a lot of people in the US is no.

After coffee, the most common need for boiled water in US households is probably for pasta, and a kettle’s not really the tool for either of those.

People that do eat a lot of instant ramen or drink a lot of tea in the US are more likely to have electric kettles (as some people I know do) but most don’t eat ramen often enough and tea just isn’t as big here.

A lot of things are faster than me.

In my defense, my left leg hasn’t been as good since I took a tumble off my bike into a gutter outside of Fuzhou a few years back.

I’d also say sign fatigue (plus general fatigue) is a thing. When you go to an airport security line there’s like these giant signboards stood up like the 200 Commandments, each with a mix of pictures and walls of text of for things you’re not allowed to bring on a plane. Or some things you can check and not carry on or you can carry on and not check. And you’re also expected to know all of that while you are in transit, stressed, and maybe also sleep deprived.

Too many signs to properly pay attention to them all.