Even if it's strictly sex, sex with a real human being is leagues different than sex with 40 lbs of heated silicone

That's why I keep a oil reserve in a pit out back. Got my pool guy to line it with concrete. Stable and pure petroleum

Having the second wealthiest nation back in the EU has obvious advantages

More things in life should have a Muppet button

Most lawyers advise against invoking that. Gives all sides more time to prepare. Like the defense spent a good bit of time trying to get certain evidence removed from the record as it's own proceeding. The hope was of course if the judge found that the evidence must be excluded then the prosecution may drop charges even before the trial.

So yeah Luigi could have had a trial, but I can almost guarantee his lawyer is slowing things down to build his defense and try other types of hearings that strengthen their position once a trial begins

My german apartment is managing, but these thick walls are getting warmer day by day. I'm afraid it's going to become an oven before long

My state prints out a physical slip that shows the vote that's deposited into a box. It's tied to your electronic vote. Ideal system imo.

We get the speed and convenience of electronic voting and there's a secure analog form to audit

On your point about printing off a human readable copy that can be verified manually, you have now invented the worlds most expensive pencil. You'll always want to verify the manual copy, so why bother with the computer one?

This way the state can count the votes quickly and if there are any audits they have a physical analog to compare. Honestly if the state just randomly audits 1 county per election to check for issues they will catch anything weird going on and save a tremendous amount of time and money.

If the audit discovers something weird they can then count up all the paper ballots and fix the software.

Additionally in 2024 the UK had 28,809,340 votes cast. The US had 158,427,986 votes cast.

Why does the state need to count votes quickly? Votes should be counted accurately, not quickly.

You can have both

This mentality exhausts me. If people can stop treating geopolitics like a fucking sports match that would be great. We don't have to root for anyone in a given conflict. We can acknowledge both sides are bad and not matter the outcome it will be bad for common people.

If we ever are able to do this we might actually have some progress. But until then we continue to worship inherently evil states

A concerningly large percentage of US voters seem to only be able to think about last week, this week, and next week.

That's the extent of their ability to think and plan

Funny how your type will double down on how there's no moral choice between democrats and Republicans

Yet somehow you can find the "moral" choice between a theocratic dictatorship (also capitalist btw) and an imperial nation.

Thank God you're here to tell us the correct way to whip our troublesome women 🙏

Historical projections of population place the global population at roughly 162 million people. Let's say only .1% of the population was capable of this sort of thing. Although I think it's low and while these early Greek philosophers were certainly smart the key to their success was wealth and the ability to focus on their "craft". But I'll really lowball human intelligence

Anyway, at .1% of people that means roughly 162,000 thousand people would be capable. The number of those with resources to actually dedicate the time even smaller.

Today the world population is over 8 billion, but we'll use 8 billion. So at .1% that gives us 8 million people alive today that would be capable.

I really underestimated human intelligence, but the point is the same. We have so so many people alive today that there is certainly quite a few people capable of doing these sorts of things

Higher voter turnout changes those percentages. You seem to be thinking that votes scale proportionally with turnout? That's not always the case.

Anyway the more candidates you have the more split the vote will be. Plus the media/Trump campaign didn't pump millions of dollars into a smear campaign against Harris in NY. Why? Because they didn't expect to turn NY red so they focused resources elsewhere.

An insane sum of money was spent trying to put Mamdani down

I use the pythagorean theorem a lot more than I expected tbh

That's lesson 1

Yes use a significant portion of your meager income to get you that dog hat from a private seller 2 states over.

I'm generally against our overconsumption culture and have been critically evaluating what I need.

That being said the corporations have us by the balls. They priced out the competition and lobbied to keep our wages low. So we have to evaluate between having less of whatever you buy from the "little guy" or buying from the corporations. For the majority it's a matter of surviving. If you buy from a small seller their supply chain or the product they produce is in some way coming from a mega corporation. We are truly fucked

And no you don't need a dog hat, but I acknowledge sometimes you just want to buy a dumb little thing to make this shit time feel a little bit better.

I guess my point is it doesn't make much of a difference if it's Amazon, best buy, target, or Walmart. They all lobby for us to get fucked and that fucking keeps us dependent on them.

a) it's an example to illustrate a point. You only have to be a very moderate lemmy user to know what I'm talking about.

b) The first sentence was correct. The rest you made up, but that's okay you are right for the most part. Unfortunately some people don't just mean supporting Iran in terms of the conflict with the US/Israel. If you look at the comment that I replied to you can see the user says that Iran should be supported because they oppose global hegemony. That extends far beyond the recent conflict.

In their mind the USA is the "enemy team" so whoever is up against them they will then be the "good team". That's exactly what the person I replied to is saying. It's frankly sad and morally bankrupt.