Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.

There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas (“my dad always voted for this candidate, so I’ll vote for his son”), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I’ve seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.

Deciding on the school for my master’s. Had two choices: the no. 1 school in the US at that time, or an up-and-coming pgogram. The top school would have set me back about 200k in debt, but I was virtually guaranteed a job with a starting salary of 150k+, and a career path to the C-suite. The other school would give me a free ride, but it was anyone’s guess where’d I end up. I picked the free ride, and ended with a dead-end job for 40k. That was 20 years ago. Since then, that job gave me the push to leave the US, settle elsewhere, find a wife, start a family, and have an exciting new job with career progression. The choice, when I was deciding, couldn’t have been more clearly defined, and for years I kept thinking what if I picked the top school. Not anymore…

I always respond that in that case, “jpeg” should be pronounced “jfeg”.

"No pain, no gain. "

As someone who’s been running for over 30 years and working ou for 20, if there is pain, there is injury. When there is injury, you take a break and regress. People may say that muscle pain or stiff muscles are a sign of a good workout, not an injury. However, even with those your risk of injury is much higher, and you’ll eventually hurt yourself. “No pain” should be one of the outcomes of smart exercise, not an admonishment for not working hard enough.

If you insist on pronouncing “gif” as “gif” instead of “jif”, you should pronounce “jpeg” as “jfeg”.

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Tapiooooca!

Sorry; you are right. I never saw that reader with any other authors, so it’s not something that’s really stuck in my memory.

The Hyperion books by Dan Simmons. Hyperion has full cast, the rest doesn’t, but still very high quality narration.

Honourable mentions:

• Alastair Reynolds and John Lee collaborations. Lee has the perfect voice and tone for Reynolds’ precise (and somewhat aloof) language.
• Neil Gaiman books. Gaiman does his own narration, and I can’t imagine his books without his voice.

Dishonourable mention:

• John Scalzi, read by Will Wright. Wright reads as if every line in Scalzi’s works was hillarious. Scalzi is a very funny writer, but his books have somber set pieces, and Wright ruins the immersion there.

Form yor own opinion. This is the original thread. A follow-up thread claimed that it was removed by Reddit admins because the picture of the van showed the company name and phone number. That thread included the fan with blacked-out identifiers and was allowed to stay up until users didn’t start identifying the company in the comments.

There is currently a tiny bit of uproar over at r/irelandshittydrivers. A user took a photo of a work van that blocked two disabled spots. He sent the photo via Whatsapp to the company, which responded in a batshit crazy manner (for some reason, escalated it to praising Osama for 9/11). Naturally, the user posted the photo and the conversation to Reddit. Within a few hours, the company contacted Reddit and had the post removed. If a company with perhaps three customers per week can do it, what do you think large companies can do? Censoring user posts would be only the tip of the iceberg.

Posted on r/KotakuInAction by any chance? I usually run into this kind of complaints because of that sub.

My personal take is that subs that ban people just for posting on other subs are actively perpetuating their little opinion bubbles. They are essentially creating little virtual prisons for their members, and most of them are actually happy about that, which in turn tells all I need to know about those members’ intellectual laziness. To twist around Groucho Marx’ quote, I would refuse to join a sub that rejected me for posting elsewhere.

I wouldn’t change anything, but I would be far less stressed that everything would work out just fine.

Geocities. That’s how I lerned HTML. Used their WYSIWYG editor and then tinkered with the code. Built several pages close to my interest, and even scored some free stuff from marketing early online retailers like CDNow.

Also spent a lot of time browsing other Geocities pages and contacting people with shared interest.

I don’t mind discussing politics or religion, even though I don’t repeat myself in the same discussion and don’t engage with trolls. However, I absolutely never discuss my family, my personal matters and my racist views.

I used to use Ubuntu up to 12.04. By the time the support ended, the new versions had the Unity desktop, I didn’t like it, so for a while I switched to Crunchbang (may it rest in peace), and now I’m using Mint Cinnamon. Some of my developers are using Ubuntu with Unity. Everyone is free to pick what suits them; I’m not one to judge them.

I helped to destroy gaming by having kids. According to my game launcher, the last time I played a PC game I paid for was 3 years ago, and the game was published in 2011. So, having helped to destroy gaming already, I don’t give a flying fuck what people think of me for playing Crossmath on my phone while taking a dump, during the only opportunity when I’m not being disturbed.

I paint and draw, purely as a hobby. You wouldn’t believe the amount of crap some people have. Brushes they use only once in a lifetime, for one specific element. Special colours they also get to use only once. Pencils they don’t even open. Get a basic set, familiarise yourself with it, stretch it to the full extent of its capabilities (that’s mastery), and then upgrade to a higher quality version of what you have. No single-use novelty tools and materials.

There may be dozens of us who still remember Captain Future. I used to get in trouble in school for doodling his space ship in my workbooks.

Americans also expected me to leave a voice message instead of sending an SMS when I didn’t reach them. That was quite a culture shock for me.

Geocities. A platform where anyone, regardless of technical skill or any design sense could go wild about their passion.