There'll be some amazing hip hop and punk rock to come in the next few years.

This might not be a bad time to take up meditation. I've been thinking that it's time to give it a serious try myself for various reasons. Creating a place where you can have some calm distance from the cacophony of the world might be worth it.

So some friends of mine and I watched coverage of your election last night until right after the victory speech. We did this in our usual manner, which is to say that we went back and forth between reputable outlets and occasionally checked on Infowars to see what colour the sky was in the alternate dimension. I…

It is bizarre. They could have basically just dropped one triangle, no? If they had simply raised the price slightly, they wouldn't have had to change any of their moulds and could have saved money on that. Maybe they're planning on making seasonal Toblerone Classic a thing.

Headed down to the US for a few days in December, if all goes as planned. Looking forward to spending more time at the border crossing than I will on the road!

Canada's not, like, easy, but it's doable if you have sufficient money and a job already lined up. Once you have the job, a work visa will take care of you while you make it more permanent.

What a blasphemous rumour! I certainly don't hear anybody laughing.

I just found out that it apparently almost happened under Nixon. It passed almost everything, but it was a few votes shy in the Senate.

At least "Shadrach" doesn't have any references to Jerry Falwell or anything OH GODDAMN IT

I think the separation of powers also works against it. It's simple enough to have multiple parties in Canada (where I live), for example, because the Prime Minister is simply the leader of the party with the most seats. There's an incentive to vote for parties that don't have much chance of forming the next…

Those were the cases that came to mind, yes. I think it's fair for someone to call that system rigged; aside from the current associations with the word, it sounds about right to describe a situation where only two parties can be ascendant at a time because that's how the rules are written. It confuses me as an…

It took me a bit to figure out where the miscommunication had happened here, as I didn't initially see where I had made the argument to which you responded. Rereading what I wrote has made this clearer.

Shades of God Bless America here, perhaps. I'm interested.

What the hell kind of rhyme scheme is that?

Bold, but I like the concept. The main question is how this would interact with foreign markets. Under what circumstances would they pay tax when interacting with the NYSE, for instance? Would this incentivize the use of other markets instead? If there were a way to do it, it'd be a massive resource.

It hasn't been that way for every election, though. There have been credible three-way contentions for President (I think Taylor was one, yes? Ran against two other candidates with no platform and won?) and there was also the long era where the Democrats and Republicans both had distinct conservative and progressive…

If you cut sales tax with the intention of making it up through increased economic activity, it might be wise to forego cutting corporate taxes as well. The corporate tax would be where you could make some of that lost tax money back when the economy picked up.

He was on the ballot, but voters couldn't see him.

This will sound far-fetched and cynical (because it is), but it could get worse if there were no consequences except a reward. Trump himself is a walking power vacuum (I think they called them "doughfaces" in the 19th century?). If he got in, the problem wouldn't be him so much as it would be the effect of having a…

I sometimes wonder if modern diagnoses couldn't even have applied at various points in history. When the Borgias were at their height, for instance, can you unambiguously define them as irrational actors? The world in which they lived could be said to have essentially passively defined their behaviour as proper for…