A pride flag pin is not political swag but also correlates very strongly to voting blue, and far-right nutjobs could run with that

*all new cars

We can trust him to look out for himself as he sees it, not necessarily rationally. And also not to plan long-term if he needs a cash infusion now. Will be interesting (I guess) to see which pressure wins out

Additionally, the raised and blunt hood height makes a full-body impact with no force dissipation much more likely, particularly for shorter people, where a more traditional hood shape allows a struck pedestrian to roll over the top and avert some of the force of the strike

It sounds like British Irish

This premise gets thrown around a lot but I actually disagree. “Every time people turn out” is always also thrown in there like some arbitrary thing–when I think the past several election cycles have shown that when there are younger, more progress candidates who make it past the primaries turnout shoots up. Courting the 3% uninformed flip-floppers by moving right is a losing strategy when you could be motivating your own party to turn out by moving left and driving turnout up. There’s no money in that though, so dumb centrists get wooed

if her resume is anything like any of the well-made mid-career resumes I’ve seen then she’s probably left off a lot of experiences, and she can simply handwaved it with a line like “I didn’t list X law clerk internship or y legal work at a corporation either because they aren’t as relevant as the jobs I chose to list” and move on

Look, I’m with you most of the way in theory, but a lot of rural areas don’t have plumbing and drinking water from public utilities, they have their own septic and water wells. I know it’s pedantic but a lot of parts of the world are so rural that it probably doesn’t make sense to have fully public transport, like it doesn’t make sense to have centralized water. The scope needs to be great systems within towns and cities and lots of park and ride hubs around the perimeter

Not that I ascribe this to strategy, but I wonder if this will work in their favor. The last minute change of jockey has been dominating the news since it happened, and pushing Trump’s ridiculous things to the side. This ticket will have huge and new name recognition in voters’ minds, and a lot less time to get mud to stick

The people viewing it as a weakness were going to attack her no matter what, whether she was just black, just Indian, or just a woman. Adding the extra labels doesn’t really amplify their thinly veiled bigotry, she’s going to lose negligible support for being biracial than if she was one or the other, and will possibly appeal to a broader cross section of apathetic voters.

As long as it can’t be mistaken for the actual person it moves the stigma from them doing weird things to the artist doing weird things

At least Sarah Palin came with the illusion of bringing a demographic McCain didn’t already have in the bag, Vance is just doubling down on the MAGA crowd while alienating a portion of them. It’s fantastic

Not a lot but every wedge is probably worth it

Does it really? I’ve seen one single poll, conducted by CNN just after the debate, with 1045 people reached by telephone that showed Harris doing 4% better with a 3.5% margin of error. The more recent polls I’ve seen that lead has disappeared again. If there are other polls, especially polls with better power, that prove your point I’d love to see them. I’m by no means a Biden fan, but I also don’t think Harris has a dependable edge.

I don’t know a single person IRL who likes Harris more than Biden, during the 2020 primaries Biden was the milquetoast, too old candidate and Harris was actively hated for her history as a prosecutor. My grandfather is the only person I know who thought Harris was a smart VP choice. Biden at least gets some of the centrists and disaffected Republicans while losing the progressives, as a black woman Harris loses most of those, the progressives don’t like her, my black friends don’t like her because of the aforementioned prosecutor role, I just don’t know who her support base is except for you. Her campaign didn’t even do well enough to make it to the primaries, let alone compete. Bernie or Harris? I can see. Kamala I can’t

I don’t buy it, tbh. I’ve been hearing some variant of “Tesla isn’t growing more and the stock is overvalued” or in the last five years “Musk is an idiot and is going to tank the stock” since I started paying attention to the markets circa 2012. Musk is a fascist piece of shit, but he does have some quality–and it may just be having more money than God and thus having a sort of wealth inertia–that keeps the stock merrily tripping its way upwards. I bought three shares several years ago on a whim, and between the upward growth and the stock splits I’ve sold my initial investment amount 3x already and could sell it three more times today and still have Tesla stock leftover

It’s definitely not a perfect system and you’re absolutely right that it significantly favors people with strong support and safety nets, especially those of a financial nature.

That being said it’s a very easy shorthand for a company to take and is reliable enough to keep using it, just like how financial institutions in the US use SSNs as private identifiers because it’s easier and cheaper than running and supporting their own systems/assessments and mostly works well enough

The other factor not yet mentioned is charging time/range. There are EVs with more range, and EVs with faster charging times, and EVs that are cheaper, but there are no EVs with a comparable long-range driving ability as Teslas for less money. The Hyundai ioniq 6 is comparable now but it’s new, untested, and doesn’t really have a used market

If the Dems no longer have to compete with Republicans during generals, the focus needs to be on primarying bad candidates with better Dems too, we shouldn’t just be pushing generals every four years. We need to be getting out the vote for primaries and midterms as well

Depending on what you’re trying to avoid, even 18 year old cars had OnStar gps that could in theory always track you unfortunately