Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.

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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • I’ve got a spray bottle filled with windshield wiper fluid I sometimes use to “pre-treat” an icy windshield before I get to scraping it, it’s often able to loosen the ice’s grip on the glass so the scraper can just lift it off. Simpler and more controllable than relying on the built-in windshield sprayers.

    A one-handed garden pick is a nice tool to have handy if you find your car’s wheels stuck in some hard-packed snow or ice. Don’t spin your wheels fruitlessly, the friction is just making the ice slicker and harder. Use the garden pick to dig the wheels out instead, creating a rough surface to get some initial traction on. There are also traction plates or mats that you can stick in there to help get moving, though you need to be able to move the car far enough to get them caught under the wheels for them to work.

    Make sure your car battery is in good condition. Cold weather will reduce its power output, so if your car’s going to fail to start it’ll be in the dead of winter when that happens. For peace of mind I bought one of those battery booster packs that you can use to jump-start a car with and I really like it, it’s got a built-in air pump, USB charger, and light source as well and I’ve used it for all of those things now and then. Wasn’t very expensive.

    Stash a warm hat and a pair of warm mittens in the car somewhere. If you end up stranded on a roadside you won’t have known ahead of time that you were going to be stranded so you might not have brought adequate clothing with you. A flashlight, too. In northern latitudes there’s a lot of darkness during winter time.



  • IMO the best feature of democracy is not that it results in better selection of who gets to lead, because it doesn’t really - the vast majority of the electorate is not educated in the sorts of things they’d need to be educated in to make truly good decisions about this. The best feature is that every few years we “throw the bums out” and put a new batch of people in charge.

    I used to be kind of ambivalent about term limits, I figured it was kind of suboptimal to have to get rid of a leader who’s doing well at some point. But with the size of the population of most democracies there’s really no constraint on the pool of perfectly adequate candidates to draw on. I’m starting to think that “one and done” might be an even better approach, at least for the highest levels. Make it so that there’s no motivation whatsoever to cling to power. Do the same with congressmen and senators, perhaps. Let them prove their capabilities with a political career in local politics, where it’s less important if someone ends up with some kind of corrupt fiefdom because the higher levels of government can keep them in check.









  • You should watch the video I linked, it’s only 6 minutes long. The problem is that if you did manage to get more success for a third-party candidate that would be a bad thing. It would mean that the resulting government will be less likely to reflect your positions and ideals than it would if there had been no third-party candidate you supported.

    In a first-past-the-post voting system trying to figure out how to make third-party candidates viable is a self-defeating goal. Unless you’re focusing on trying to make third-party candidates who appeal to your opponent’s voting group more viable, that is. Which is why you keep seeing sneaky donations from right-wing PACs to the Green party and such. The Republicans would love to see the Green party become a more prominent and viable option for left-leaning voters. And likewise, a lot of Democrats are cheering for RFK Jr. to be on the ballot because he draws more support from the right than from the left.