It makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it

I understand why he felt he needed to do this press conference, but at the same time I can’t believe he did it because he would have literally had to be perfect for it to not just generate new headlines and memes about his decline (which it clearly has).

It seems like the headlines will never stop and they are being perpetuated by people on both sides, and he’s completely flailing because the fact is, he’s no longer capable of giving a stellar live performance that can put this all to rest.

Right after the debate, I felt that if Democrats had brushed his performance off, it would have dropped into the background and been totally erased if Biden did reasonably in other appearances and the next debate.

However, each time there is a new headline about a Democrat’s observation that he is not in good shape, I become more certain that he must end his campaign. Not necessarily because I’m more convinced about his mental decline, but because you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

So I’ve stopped weighing whether switching out Biden at a late stage was the optimal strategy in a vacuum. He’s been damaged enough by Democrats in liberal spaces that it’s absolutely the optimal strategy now. I’m not judging these Democrats for what they’ve done, I’m just saying it’s a hell of a gamble. So in my view, we might as well accept it that he’s gotta go and hope to hell their gamble pays off. Because there’s no way the guy can stay after all of this.

People who already would vote Democrat need to be alarmed into making sure they vote their asses off

When there is literally one alternative and it is the Trump administration? I do not think it is cultish even to say that I will literally vote for a grilled cheese sandwich for president if that grilled cheese sandwich has the current team continuing to run the executive branch instead of Trump and his horrible people.

It’s not a cultish obsession with the candidate you want to win, it’s a desperate desire to avert disaster.

If a person is convinced that changing the candidate at this point in the race lowers the chances of winning, they may be wrong about that premise, but if they then say they will vote for Biden even if he’s in a coma, it doesn’t mean they are obsessed with him.

While I agree that it would certainly be ideal if a speed limiter could account for the context that the car is in, you’ve missed a lot in drawing your conclusion that it would be useless without being able to do that.

Hitting a pedestrian is not the only type of accident. If you rear end a car going 25 mph at 70mph it is not a guaranteed death sentence for all. Especially if the driver brakes, which some do not, but some will. And this is ignoring cases where there isn’t a tremendous mismatch in speed. Like, even if it reduced residential deaths by 0% but it reduced overall deaths looking at all situations, it would be a net gain with literally nothing lost. We are looking at the aggregate here. So, it isn’t relevant if you think of one specific situation where you believe 70mph isn’t better than 90mph or whatever number.

Reaction time and braking distance are affected by speed. In some cases, the person going 70 might be able to slow down enough to have the collision be non-fatal. Reaction time goes down and braking distance goes up as speed increases. If a speed limiter gives just enough time to occasionally make an accident non-fatal, then in the aggregate you have fewer fatal accidents.

In fact, taking braking distance into account, I don’t think you can even say that over the millions of miles driven, that a speed maxed at 70mph isn’t going to, occasionally, lead to a situation in a residential area where someone was able to just get out of the way in time because the car covered 30% less distance between the time the pedestrian reacted and the time the car reached that spot (or an even larger difference if the driver noticed and braked at some point as well). But again, it doesn’t matter if it’s few to none in this specific scenario, because a speed limiter of 70 will certainly reduce fatalities overall.

You can certainly kill someone going the maximum legal speed in a place where the speed limit is much lower. But the likelihood of injury and death still does increase with the increase in speed. So if, say, 5% of accidents involving someone going 70 are fatal, but 10% if the person is going 90 (these are made-up numbers), then if cars are not even able to go above 70, you end up saving lives.

Wow, that is exactly the opposite expectation and take from me. If young people don’t show up to vote, I expect they’ll blame the DNC instead of themselves, even though the purpose of voting is getting the best outcome for your future and not about liking people or being sold on a brand.

Doesn’t it make the most sense to blame our election system that makes people feel like they don’t have enough choice or the ability to express their actual preference in an election?

The Democratic Party is a product of this flawed system. You can make things a bit better, but at the end of the day, you have to have a party that is a coalition of disparate groups that choose a single person who has to win it all. So, a candidate that super excites and energizes one faction of the coalition is likely to be very unappealing to other factions. And most of the time you’re going to end up with someone who nobody is actually excited for. It would be great if Democrats had a preferential/ranked voting system for determining that one candidate, which allowed for many candidates, and for those candidates to stay in the race without the risk of cannibalizing others (e.g. having both Warren and Bernie wouldn’t detract from either one). However, even this isn’t determined centrally by the party, as each state gets to do voting the way they want to. So, it’s not an easy problem to solve.

It seems to me that the question of free will is only truly meaningful (aside from being an interesting thought experiment) if we could then perfectly or near-perfectly predict what a person will do. But the system in which we exist is so complex that we will never be able to model that or come close.

So we might as well consider humans to have free will, just as we consider a roll of the dice to be random.

When people talk about that Biden is going to lose and blame it on him, I really wonder if they understand what our system is and what the stakes are. We only lose if people decide not to vote for Biden. There are things that a good candidate can do to excite their voters and motivate people, but at the end of the day, anyone can see the options that lay before them and choose regardless of what the campaign does.

You can wish that the campaign/candidate were better so that it made the job of motivating people easier. But if you are worried about the consequences of Trump winning this election, then you should be trying to motivate people to vote Biden. The article is to remind people that while Biden fared poorly at the debate, Trump was actually worse and is always worse. It seems to me that this is an honest point that underscores the need to vote Biden in this election, despite any of his shortcomings.

We are driving down a road and a semi is coming straight at us at 100 mph. We can either veer off the road and damage or even total our car on whatever is there, or we can say “I shouldn’t have to veer off the road, there should be a shoulder”, or even “I didn’t even want to take this route in the first place but my wife insisted” as the truck hits us head on. There’s no good option, but there’s a clear survival option.

Instead of store hours like this:

• Monday 6:00-18:00
• Tuesday 6:00-18:00
• Wednesday 8:00-18:00
• Thursday 6:00-18:00
• Friday 6:00-18:00

We can have store hours like this:

• Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
• Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
• Wednesday 0:00-10:00
• Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
• Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.

Sorry, I was just attempting to make a joke, nothing more than that!

So you’re saying it’s his turn

I’ve spent the past decade thinking “surely they won’t get worse than this” and they always do

So, let’s just strengthen that outrage muscle then, huh?

I bet you’re going to tell me you read it somewhere

It sounds like you’re asking why assholes act like assholes. It’s a question as old as time

Fair enough! Not that I think it means Obama-McCain fits into the dumb-smart dichotomy.

Are you talking about the debate with Mitt Romney?

I understand how it’s procedurally possible to do. But why would everyone accept having the delegates at the convention just vote for some random person that the people didn’t get to vote on themselves? People around here talk about how the 2016 primary was so undemocratic because they had stuff like superdelegates, but at the end of the day the process was actually pretty democratic, unlike choosing someone totally unrelated after the primaries.

To me, Harris is the only one you could just put in place and say this is still the ticket you voted for. Anyone else, I don’t know how you pull it off.