Regarding the Electoral College, the only thing I have an issue with it is that most states chose winner take all and the Senate is counted for votes. If the electoral college votes were given out as a percentage to each state’s popular vote, it would make the system work a lot cleaner.

A lot of people do as a way to judge a person’s rank in society. The attractiveness of a person’s spouse is a common metric for how successful someone is. So, if a highly attractive woman is slumming it with a man who appears to be well below her status, it is confusing for a lot of people.

And it is also bundled with an ad-free music service.

Linux is subsidized by a consortium of major tech companies supporting a common code base as it is cheaper than relying on one vendor.

Signal is run by a non-profit group which is funded by various grants.

Mastodon is a combination of above, the code being subsidized by a consortium of developers and individual servers funded by various means.

To just say “it is free” ignores the economics of why they are free.

But who gets to play Gunter?

It will get given out every time FIFA needs to mollify a corrupt official that will impact their work.

“Opposition Leader” is only a role in parliamentary systems where the leader of the second party has that role.

Typically, legislative “minority leader” positions fill a lot of those roles that an opposition leader would, but it isn’t official.

Wearing a suit isn’t the only way to show power.

Tech used to dress up to the same standards as other professions in the 60’s, with their rules for conformity. Some engineers realized that they were too good to need to conform, so they dressed down, daring their bosses to fire them. Given how valuable the good engineers were, they got to keep their jobs even though they didn’t fully conform to the dress code.

It became a statement of power. Meetings would often be decided on the person worst dressed because they were the valuable tech decision maker.

Fast forward to when Facebook is trying to get its IPO and Mark Zuckerberg is going into meetings with financiers dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The financiers were all wearing suits, but Zuckerberg didn’t need to because they needed him more than he needed them. Zuckerberg didn’t need to dress up for bankers, bankers needed to dress up for him.

The only time Mark Zuckerberg wore a suit as part of his work was when he was testifying in front of Congress. Why? Because Congress had power over him and that power made Mark dress up.

In context, Trump won 2024 with only 77 million voters. If you can get 100+ million to show up, that’s enough to demand control over Congress and the Presidency.

So, a good example of wealthy fashion is Frasier Crane. He’s appeared in three TV shows across the decades. In Cheers and the original Frasier, he is typically wearing a suit. In the reboot, he isn’t. Same character, but the wardrobe changed over time.

I only wear a suit when going to see a client or certain professional events, which hasn’t changed since COVID. Only the CEO commonly wears suits to the office, but that is because they are commonly visiting clients and professional events.

People are still dressing down in the office, though. I started wearing a tie and dress shoes as required in the dress code. We’re at the point now where collared shirts aren’t mandatory.

Maybe Iraq should test it. After all, I don’t think Iraq is hosting any American military bases. It would also be a good test for its port and rail system it is setting up with Turkey to bypass the Suez Canal.

The issue with Linux is going to be if there will be a single distro that dominates or if it will be more distributed. Right now, it looks like Google and Valve are the closest to making dominant distros, but I can see at least one EU government one being created as well. If there are few distros, then I can see development getting locked to those distros rather than across all Linux.

The same thing happened with Android, Google ended up controlling Android so the open source side got hollowed out and the closed source side controlled by Google became necessary to running Android.

And, along with this, you have to be able to show that the writer(s) had access to this information while writing the script. To give you an hour long media analysis video to watch, here’s some Lindsay Ellis:

https://youtu.be/44chgavSaKA

The summary of it was that animators saw The Thief and the Cobbler and might have used some of what they saw as inspiration for some of the character design in Aladdin, but the writer of Aladdin didn’t have access to the movie so Disney could credibly say they didn’t steal the script.

How rich do you need to be to deal with the legal fallout of getting caught drunkenly street racing?

A lot of them work for various non-profits as a way to support various causes. A majority of charities are run by the families of the wealthy.

A lot of high prestige but low pay organizations will have a lot of wealthy people working there. This includes museums, publishing houses, and other high art media.

You also have those who don’t have jobs exactly, but hobbies. They get into collecting enough of a thing to fill their own gallery. They have causes they contribute to on a part time basis. They may have a local estate where they get to pretend to be farmer.

It isn’t all going into business with Daddy.

It also doesn’t help when private train companies didn’t want to run passenger service.

Is this related to Epstein or something else entirely?

The only “influencer” that I can think of who has done anything involved in Hollywood was John Green, and he isn’t the typical influencer. Even then, his path there was to use his fame to sell his product, books, and then that product became something that Hollywood could turn into a movie.

Outside of that, I think the Five Nights at Freddy’s movies had influencers in the cast, but I don’t see them using this to build an acting career yet.

Usually, it isn’t that an influencer becomes a movie star, but a movie star becomes an influencer since the star can use their same to build a following online. That’s likely why studios use the follower count as a metric in getting actors for certain roles; it is a way to determine fame and the ability of the actor to pull in crowds to see a movie.

The American rail network was built mainly as private enterprise regulated by public agencies. This worked when rail had an effective monopoly on long distance travel, but fell apart when other modes could compete. When a major railroad (Penn Central) went bankrupt, the federal government relieved all private companies from having to maintain passenger service and the long distance trips went into Amtrak in the 1970’s.

Until Biden, there was little public demand for building out rail transit. The Interstate system built out a decent highway network and air deregulation meant that flights got very cheap.