Steven Hassan was a former member of the Moonies cult who obtained a PhD in psychology after being deprogrammed and has written books on the psychology of cult recruiting. Interestingly, he points out that the same tactics are often used by organizations that aren’t cults. I highly recommend reading one of his books!

That TLS handshake went hard

some mf named like cum-sock

Excuse me? My family BUILT this country!

I tried to keep the example simple since this is ELI5. If you take the number of electors a state has a divide it by the states population, you’ll get its electors per capita.

28 electors for 19 million people equals 1.47 electors per million people for New York.

30 electors for 22 million people equals 1.36 electors per million people for Florida

Idaho gets 4 electors for 2 million people equals 2 electors per million.

Since it’s the number of electors sent to Washington that decide who gets to be president, sending more electors per capita means a state has more influence on the outcome.

50% of Americans live in just 9 states. The other 50% live in the remaining 41 states. If the 9 states all voted one way, and the 41 other states voted the other, the popular vote would be 50/50, but the electoral college results would be a landslide victory for whoever won in 41 states.

The main reason someone becomes president while losing the popular vote is because they won the electors from a bunch of the smaller states. Smaller states are less populated and more rural. Rural people tend to vote conservative since they benefit less from progressive policies and prefer tradition. Conservatives therefore have an edge due to the electoral college. There were 4 presidents that won without the popular vote. All of them were Republican. Given there have only been 59 elections in American history, that’s a 6.8% chance the loser of the popular vote wins.

In America, the people don’t elect the president. The states send electors to Washington and all the electors form the “electoral college”. It is this electoral college that elects the president. To make it a bit democratic, each state holds a vote to see who the residents of the state want as president. The electors that state sends to Washington will be told who they should elect based on who the residents of the state voted for.

A simple example. Imagine the US only has two states: New York and Florida.

New York has 19 million residents and gets to send 28 electors to the electoral college. Florida has 22 million residents gets to send 30 electors to the electoral college.

All 19 million residents of New York vote for Kang. New York sends 28 electors and tell them they should elect Kang. In Florida, the vote is split. 12 million vote for Kodos and 10 million vote for Kang. Since more people voted for Kodos, Florida sends 30 electors and tells them to elect Kodos.

The popular vote is 29 million votes for Kang and 12 million votes for Kodos. The electoral college votes are 30 votes for Kodos and 28 votes for Kang. Kodos wins even though 70% of Americans voted for Kang.

The existence of “echo chambers” is debated by scientists. It really doesn’t matter who you hang around with, you’re going to disagree with people.

The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media.

Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber?

Echo chamber? What echo chamber? Reviewing the evidence

The action would have been done as vice-president, not president. Vice-presidents are held accountable. This is why Trump got in trouble for defamation of E. Jean Carroll.

He defamed her as president and called it an official act. The case was put on indefinite hold. Then he said the same things while he wasn’t president. A new case was brought against him and he was found liable. Then, Carroll’s lawyer asked the original case to be resumed arguing that Trump’s statements couldn’t be an official act of the president since he performed the same action while he wasn’t president. The courts agreed and resumed the case and he was found liable again.

The requirement for a steady paycheque is what keeps everyone working in terrible conditions. I’m lucky enough that I’ve always had a lot in savings and it has come in handy a few times. Twice I’ve walked off a job and never went back after failing to negotiate proper working conditions with the boss. Both times I burned through about $10,000 in savings while searching for a new job. Almost nobody has that much saved up. If they did, terrible bosses would lose employees on the regular.

“Fake it till you make it” doesn’t mean pretend to be happy until you are happy. I committed to a relationship I wasn’t happy in, a career I wasn’t happy in, and hobbies I wasn’t happy doing, all because I wanted the approval of others. A divorce, career change, and hobby swap made me much happier.

Soon they’re going to change the name to “M” and sell them individually

Shapez is basically factory building reduced to its bare essentials. It’s a huge grid with sources of simple grey shapes and RGB colouring. The sources are infinite. You have to cut, paste, rotate, stack, and colour the base shapes to make complex ones and deliver large amounts to a central hub. The only “cost” for building is when you copy and paste a blueprint. Your main focus is finding the steps needed to produce the desired shape and the ratios of machines needed at each step to avoid bottlenecks.

There’s a 3D sequel that’s in Early Access but I haven’t tried it yet.

I give you cash, then you give me cash, what are we doing here?

This is why I don’t give people gifts and tell others not to give me gifts. Holidays arent about gifts. If I do get a gift, I give it back to them the next year. Bonus points for giving it back in the exact same gift bag. After a decade of this, people have finally stopped giving me gifts!

Peanut butter out of the jar.

First cousin once removed

How are they still in business? Every single farmer, bar none, has to know about their business practices

Wendover Productions has a decent video on John Deere’s market dominance. tl;dw It’s by cutthroat capitalism of course.

John Deere has bought out all their competitors and continues to do so. Every single breakthrough in farming equipment technology in the last decade is owned by John Deere. As a farmer, you either choose to sign a one-sided contract with John Deere or you use outdated inefficient equipment that John Deere hasn’t purchased the patent rights to. Or, of course, you sell your farm all together. Large corporate farms don’t care much about the John Deere contract since they have the power to negotiate a better deal. A lot of small farmers have been making the choice to sell out.

Soon, all farming will be done by one megacorp, buying their seed from Monsanto, using John Deere equipment, and cashing in a ridiculously fat subsidy cheque from the government.

There was a jogging app known as Strava that posted an image on their Twitter that was a heatmap of all the jogging activities of all of their users. Their idea was just to show how popular their app was by showing the entire world lit up. Twitter users were able to locate secret US military bases on that data alone. Turns out nobody jogs in circles in the middle of the desert except GIs.

Recently a group of Harvard students did a demo where they used Meta’s camera glasses and a chain of commercial programs and products to find out people’s names, address, workplaces, and family based only on their facial data.

These are just two examples off the top of my head. Essentially, the more data someone can accumulate, the more info can be analyzed from it. With things like AI tools, that analysis is incredibly fast even with huge datasets.

I remember an interview with a former NASA engineer that said NASA would never be able to do anything near what SpaceX (or any other private company) can do. The reason given is that SpaceX spent billions after billions on what were essentially very expensive fireworks until they finally achieved a breakthrough. A breakthrough that wasn’t a guarantee. Even Musk himself had said he would have eventually closed SpaceX if they hadn’t achieved something and it would have been a multi billion dollar failure. He, and everyone else really, got very lucky.

Imagine NASA asking taxpayers for another billion dollars after blowing up the last billion with no guarantee this next billion would produce anything but another explosion. How many times would the public foot that bill? Not even once. Not while people don’t have healthcare and homelessness and hunger exist. The government can’t justify it and that’s just how it is. The only way we get space travel, with our current system, is to hope someone with a lot of money is willing to bet it on a breakthrough. It sucks but the problem isn’t Musk, it’s the system that makes us reliant on billionaires for nice things.

It becomes false advertising when you prove them wrong in court. Few people want to do that so most ads are bullshit. Even if they do get proven wrong, the settlement money is typically peanuts to the impact their ads have on sales. Red Bull paid $13 million for their tagline of “red bull gives you wings” while making several billion a year.

I was a funeral director and got this question a lot.

1. That’s not how vikings had funerals. The only Norse who had that type of send off is Baldr, son of Odin, in Norse mythology. Real Norse were cremated or buried. Important people had huge burial mounds since they’d be buried with a lot of their possessions. In reality, if you burned a boat with a body on it, the result would be a charred decaying corpse floating back to land in a day or two. A ship doesn’t have enough wood to completly burn a body and bacteria in decaying dead bodies produce gas which causes dead bodies to float.

2. It is possible to “bury at sea” depending on the area. The Canadian government charges a significant amount for a permit to do so and it comes with a lot of conditions like a weighted and sealed casket and being dropped far enough from the shoreline. I’ve heard they make the process as difficult and costly as possible as a way to discourage the practice. However, there are no restrictions on scattering cremated remains at sea!

It’s honestly impressive how we went from “only nerds know tech” in gen x to “everyone knows tech” in millennials to “only nerds know tech” in gen z.