That won't help, though. Considering the following: you have a candidate you agree with entirely, but they're new. They'd arrive in Congress with no committee assignments. They would spend their first term accomplishing next to nothing as they'd have to "earn their spot" at the table. Or, you have the incumbent. You don't agree with them on everything. However, they're on several prime committee seats, and they have the political clout to get things done.

Which are you going to rank higher? The candidate you agree with but who doesn't have the ability to do anything? Or the candidate you partially agree with and has the ability to accomplish things? Be honest.

That's the problem with our seniority-based system. Incumbents have more power because they're incumbents. Period. Throwing out an incumbent means accepting that the replacement will be less effective simply because they're new. Even if you like their policies better, their views and policies don't mean much if they can't do anything with them.

Part of what makes safe seats "safe" are a lack of term limits. You get a scenario where the worse candidate is better, because they have the cabinet positions and know how to get things done, leading to an entrenched political class. Term limits are necessary to forcibly "clean house" every once and a while and ensure that you don't wind up having to vote for the worse choice because the better choice won't be able to get anything done.

And on that note, also worth pointing out that Kamala Harris was born in 1964, and is currently 60. Had she won, she would have been the most-recently born president, but by far not the youngest.

And she's about the youngest Democrats have left in their party, since their gerontocratic leadership has steadily helped keep young people out of positioned of power, guaranteeing that they had no one to step in when their octogenarian leader started to very visibly have his brain leak out. (The few exceptions, like AOC, prove the rule. Plus, the party hates her and her "squad" and would very much like to kick then out.)

Republicans, on the other hand, have quite a few young people in their ranks. Vice President Vance is only 40, a veritable spring chicken by the standards of the Democrats.

And which were better, the four years with President Trump or the four years with Braindead Biden?

Because I know which were better for me - and everyone I know, for that matter - and it's not even close. Biden can at least claim senility, but anyone paying attention has noticed that things were far, far worse under Biden's sleep than they ever were under President Trump.

Gamers expect constant updates because we live in a world where games can be patched, which leads to two very annoying things: games being released as buggy messes, and games being released incomplete with the promise that the rest of the content will be patched in later.

There's another thing that's forcing games to be in constant development, and that's modern platforms being moving targets. For mobile games especially, if the game isn't constantly being updated, it will probably be unplayable a few years after the last patch. Especially on iOS: any iOS game released before a few years ago is likely unplayable today. And that ignores iOS dropping 32-bit support, which killed a ton of the original iOS games.

But the main thing harming the gaming industry is games being released in buggy, incomplete states. So of course gamers expect post-release updates, these updates add the missing content and fix the bugs making the game unplayable. It's cheaper for the developer to release them in a mostly playable, mostly complete state, gain some money off the game, and then let the players be beta testers to find whatever they didn't find before release. It's just kind of become standard practice. So, too, unfortunately, has become the practice of abandoning a game to be left forever an incomplete buggy mess if an audience doesn't suddenly appear.

Agree on the first part, and disagree on the second. Most review "bombing" happens because games are released with breaking bugs and incomplete content. Bad reviews in that case aren't review "bombing" - they're legitimate bad reviews.

It's also confusing because if you read the article (what? I know), it says Sony's down 5% over the year under a chart showing Sony starting at $17.01 a year ago and ending at $18.46. Huh?

But the overall point behind the article appears to be focusing on Sony's entertainment properties, and it's clear that Sony Pictures and Sony Interactive Entertainment are having major issues. Sony isn't just its entertainment divisions, and it's entirely that those other divisions are what's keeping the company afloat, even as entertainment drops.

All that being said, everything in the entertainment industry is encountering issues, for a couple of obvious reasons. The first is inflation: as prices rise, people drop luxuries, like going to the movies or game consoles, first. The second is the end of the pandemic: during the pandemic, entertainment sales spiked as people had nothing else to do. Now they do.

Which means that, even while Sony definitely had a bad year when it comes to entertainment releases, everyone else has had a bad year too. Microsoft is having issues with Xbox and Nintendo has pushed back the release of its new console. Quite a few game studios have folded entirely. It's not just a Sony issue.

No, it isn't. Don't lie.

You look it up by doing a REST request to plc.directory/[DID].

Which is a centralized service and the master repository for the DID, under the control of Bluesky.

And how exactly does your DID point to it, in a distributed way? How do you map a given DID back to the "personal data server?"

Because it's not distributed in the current implementation. In fact, pretty much every distributed thing is all "we'll figure this out later." Currently, the answer is your DID maps to a server that Bluesky itself runs, and only via this server can you look up the instance a user is on.

And, since the current DID implementation is essentially just a database key, there's no way to replace it with a "real" distributed implementation. It's irrevocably tied to that centralized service.

In the end, like so many "distributed" things, it's "distributed" right up until it isn't. Most of it is, in reality, centralized, and effectively under the control of a single, central company.

And notice that this was the ONLY demographic Democrats improved with. Every single other demographic, including women, they lost voters in. Gee, wonder why that might be. So many of us have never gotten a single helping hand from the Democrats because we can't win "identity bingo." And the Democrats handed out literally billions of dollars to buy votes. Don't think I'm ever voting for a Democrat ever again until ever cent is clawed back.

Democrats are a party that care more about dictating what pronouns you can use than improving the economy or helping businesses thrive. It's that simple.

The point in The Last Jedi that killed any ability for me to suspend disbelief was when they literally dropped bombs on a space ship.

I get that the combat in Star Wars is supposed to be based on World War II naval carrier combat. So that's why there are "bombers" that bomb the capital ships, why Luke was a fighter pilot, and why the ships have flak cannons instead of missiles.

But this went beyond that. Rather than having bombers be some sci-fi analog of bombers, which is how every other bit of Star Wars media handled things like "B-Wings", they literally - and I do mean literally - dropped bombs. From a bomb bay. In space.

And then the very next plot point has to do with details like the range of a turbolaser and shield strength and how fast the ships can accelerate and hyperspace tracking and they're going through all this technobabble after, again, literally dropping - keyword there is dropping - bombs from one space ship onto another.

All within the first 30 minutes or so of the movie. I stopped caring about pretty much anything at that point, because it was clear that there would be nothing coherent about the plot.

It's not that hard to understand. In an election that isn't particularly close, eventually the vote gap between first and second becomes insurmountable, even if every remaining vote is for the second place candidate. At that point, you can call it without counting the remaining votes.

Of course, there are points before that where in order for an election result to flip, the remaining votes would have to skew so far for the second place candidate to be outside the realm of statistical possibility. It's that point that news organizations use to call elections.

And they will be. It's just, it takes a lot longer for that entire process to complete than you'd expect, and the outcome of the election is a foregone conclusion well before the final count. The final vote count can take until the end of November. Do you really want to wait four weeks to announce a winner, when there's already enough data to guarantee who won?

So I take it that's a no, you don't want to face reality and admit that, in fact, Trump has made great inroads with just about every demographic? That the youth vote isn't going to break towards Harris in record numbers?

You mean Biden? Because the irony is that one demographic has been shifting away from Republicans: people aged 65+. But that shift has been more than made up by every other demographic shifting in favor of Republicans.

Oh, that's easy: they don't. But it doesn't matter, because his opponent effectively insisted that the issues didn't exist at all.

When you have to choose between someone who acknowledges your problems and promises to fix them, and someone who tells you that your problems aren't real: who exactly are you going to pick?

You're not going to like the answer, but I'll give it to you anyway: It does and did.

Because all things being equal, voters voted for change. The fact that it was as close as it was is proof of that.

Trump didn't get a free pass. A lot of the people voting for him don't like him. They just think he'll be a better leader of the country than the Democrats. It's that simple.

If Harris had positioned herself as a candidate for change, who knows what may have happened. She didn't. She ran her campaign as Biden 2.0: Younger and More Female. Voters don't like Biden. They don't like Trump. But they especially don't like the status quo. So they voted for change, and this election, that meant voting for President Trump.

Now that the election has been called for President Trump, will you consider maybe looking at the facts? There was every reason to believe the pollsters were still missing Trump voters and no reason to believe that they were missing Harris voters. Likewise, pretty much every demographic saw a shift towards Trump - including younger voters.

Biden was an amazingly unpopular president, the economy is in the toilet and speeding towards disaster, inflation may have slowed but people still can't afford groceries, and Harris promised to continue all that. It should be no surprise she lost.