• 2 Posts
  • 268 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why does postal voting favour the American Democratic Party?
    33·
    17 days ago

    Cities tend to be more democratic than their surrounding area, but also tend to be more densely populated. So you can have a situation like this with hours long lines in busy areas, which heavily disrupt people’s ability to have their vote registered.

    So! The answer to that problem is mail-in voting! Vote in advance, with no lines, on your schedule! But the problem with city voting isn’t always an accident, and so mail-in voting has obviously got to go too.

    But anyway, I think that’s your answer. It swings Democrat because other things have already happened to make voting in Democrat areas worse in other ways, and this seemed like a good alternative.

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoNews@lemmy.world•Nonprofit libraries ordered by State Department to stop processing passport applications
    67·
    17 days ago

    What’s frustrating is that these are the costs of corruption. This, or that time they sabotaged the postal system in order to try and stifle mail-in voting. Taking a system that’s working, and making it not work any longer, doesn’t make things better for anyone. It’s just overhead! It’s paying to knock down a functioning building, leaving nothing in its place, and then paying every month to maintain a fence around the rubble.

    No one benefits from this, except some people that shouldn’t be in power get to stay in power, so they can keep doing stuff like this to stay in power, and no other person sees any growth, improvement, or value. That would cut into margins.

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoFediverse@lemmy.world•FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?English
    51·
    19 days ago

    Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games.

    I think this is the important part that’s missing from a lot of these discussions, including from users themselves looking for a new place to go. Some people use discord as an IRC chatroom replacement. Some use it was a small group text, essentially, between friends or co-workers. Some people use it as a Patreon perk to get access to a community around an artist and interact with that artist and their other fans.

    And I’m in some “servers” of all of those. So anywhere that’s using it as IRC can be replaced with XMPP or Matrix no problem. Or IRC, but with gifs. Cool. But my other group that hangs out in there async every day and the occasionally jumps onto an ad-hoc voice chat when people are available to game, or sometimes shares my screen so someone else can watch what I’m doing? None of those things do that. But mumble kinda does, but not in a persistent or integrated way. Mumble is a great way to talk, but an awful place to hang out. Jitsi does screen share, but is not casual and also isn’t a good hangout.

    And we could limp by with an XMPP room for chat and then a link to a Jitsi or Mumble or something when it’s time to do something. But there’s something tight about having the “just call” button right there, tied to the chat you’re already in, and in being able to see “huh Alice and Bob are playing GAME right now. I should pop in!”

    But if you’ve never been in a discord server like that, you make a recommendation of IRC or something, and a gaming friend group user checks it out and is like “this is even close to doing any of the things I need it to…”