That’s what they thought. But, keep in mind, if there’s a tie in the House or Senate, guess who casts the deciding vote? The VP.

Not the president. The veep.

The whole thing is set up to make passing new laws difficult. Intentionally.

We’ve made it easier and easier over the years. And in the process, we’ve broken our nation. We turned a nation built on bottom up power, where the majority of power is held by the individual into a top down power where our government has the majority of the power.

It was changed, because they were worried that it would increase assassinations as the VPs people wanted the presidency. But they didn’t consider the follow-on issues. Basically another knee jerk reaction

The guys who set it up originally were actually pretty smart. And we spent the next 250 years screwing it up…

The original setup was basically a ranked choice system already. The top two vote getters were the president and vice president.

That was changed, ostensibly to “stop assassination” but like all good ideas, it had bad follow on effects.

The fptp system was broken not long after it was created. It wasn’t always broken like it is now.

That happened under the guise of making it “safer”

Used to be, the president didn’t have a running mate, the runner up was the VP.

By removing that, we’ve made our system into the 2 party monstrosity it is today.

And half the horsepower and half the fuel mileage. 🤣

The only reason I know either of those two stats is that my dad’s first car was the aforementioned Mustang, and my family had an 85 LTD CV bought new in 85.

It was a good car as far as it goes, and comfy as all get out, but it was definitely thirsty as fuck.

My 2006 Honda Accord coupe weighs almost a thousand pounds more than a 1965 Ford Mustang.

In fact, a 1985 Ford LTD Crown Victoria only weighs about 400 pounds more than my Honda.

People WILDLY underestimate how heavy modern cars are, and how much better they are for safety of the occupants.

The original idea of the first past the post setup was that the second past the post was the vice president.

We’ve undone that.

The House are the people’s representatives, the Senate was supposed to be the States’ representatives, and since each state is supposed to be equal, all states have two senators. It was supposed to be a check on the mob rule of the House.

We’ve also undone that.

It’s no wonder we are in the state we are in now. We’ve undone ourselves completely.

The only brand new, 10gbe managed switches that I can find for less than 60 bucks are off-brand chinese junk. No thank you.

As far as electricity cost goes? After doing that math, it might cost me a dollar fifty a year to use. That machine sitting on the bottom is a much bigger chunk than the switch itself, as it has 6 7200rpm SAS drives in it. Plus it’s a Xeon E3 CPU.

Those drives, each, use as much electricity as that switch does, even before considering the CPU itself.

It is a MANAGED switch, my guy. A simple 8 port switch would not work here.

I have multiple VLANs running.

Also, one of those connections is a 10gbe DAC to the big machine which is my NAS and main server.

Not too many 8 port managed switches out there with an sfp+ 10gbe port for 50 bucks, which is what I paid for that Brocade switch in my picture.

But hey, if you feel like buying one for me, I’ll happily take it, and start using it instead.

The used 48 port was cheaper than the used 24 port.

You call it waste, I call it reuse.

Such professional. Much clean.

Not pictured: my raspberry running adguard. It’s tucked behind a TV, because it also runs Kodi.

Also not pictured, my Sophos SG-135 rev 2 running OPNsense. It’s in the box where my Starlink equipment is, on the other side of this room.

Sounds to me like your DNS on the router itself is crashing.

There’s a couple of things you could do. Set up something like pihole or adguard home, and set the forwarding to something other than your internal DNS server.

Personally, I use AGH, and the default quad9 for forwarding all but my own domains. Those get handled by my OPNsense router’s Unbound DNS and/or DNSMasq, depending on which domain (local or one of owned domains)

Everything other than those gets forwarded to quad9’s public DoH service.

Am I, or someone I love, the 46 year old, or the 25 year old?

The only time I would care is if the answer to the first question is “yes” or if one of the parties isn’t acting consensually… Otherwise, its not any of my business, as they’re both consenting adults.

If more people worried about themselves, and less about what others are doing, the world would be better off.

Mind ya business, people.

Or, we could go the other way, and stop those subsidies, too, and quit spending our kids’ future on today’s problems.

Heyyyyoooo

In China, your populations are mainly confined to a few large, major cities. With farms and farming communities nearby those same cities.

I live in an unincorporated area about 30 miles outside of the nearest city, which has a population of about 250k people: Mobile, AL

It’s about 150 miles in the other direction to a fairly large city, named New Orleans, LA.

Thing is, there’s not any real “country side” between those cities. It’s all houses and neighborhoods. All of it. It’s not quite heavy enough population density to be a city, but still higher than farmland.

That said there is a passenger train service that runs from New Orleans to Mobile, with two trains, one leaves New Orleans and the other Leaves Mobile at pretty much the same time. 2 engines, 4 cars on the Mobile-based train, and 2 engines 3 cars on the New Orleans based train.

Thing is, they each have multiple stops along the way, too.

It’s a 4 hour ride in the train from end to end, and another 4 hour ride back. Each train ends up where they started at the end of the day.

So to use that train, I must drive 30miles into town, find parking, leave my car there for 8 to 10 hours, and spend maybe an hour or two in New Orleans,

Or, I could just drive for 2 hours, and spend however long I want to, in New Orleans, and not have a set schedule.

There’s absolutely not enough demand for more than the two trains in either direction for that to make any sort of sense, either.

I mean that’s how governments always solve problems.

That type of thinking is no different than the christians who believe that unless everyone else believes as they do then they ALL go to hell.

That ype of “enforced community” bullshit is exactly that. Bullshit.

People spend way too much of their time worrying about everyone else. Yes, helping when you can is a good thing.

You, however, are the one professing all the doom here. If not everyone believes the right things then we are all doomed.

Except who decides what those right things are, and what will happen when you teach society to think in that way, and then some demagogue takes control, and decides to subtly start changing what those right thoughts are?

Why, you get what we’re going through right now, don’t you…

So no, group think is never a good idea even if the thoughts are the “right” ones.

Then let them. What does it matter to you? People are allowed to be complete morons if they wish.