XKCD: It's more than a comic

It's just the emoji the comic ended with.

I noticed there's some difference in emoji rendering:

• In Firefox and IE11 on Windows 7 (as well as IE11 on Windows Server 2012 R2), the emojis are monochrome and the same color of as the font.
• In Android Browser, the hands are flesh-colored and the faces are yellow like forum smileys, with no apparent regard for font colors.

edited 21st Jul '16 1:18:57 AM by Medinoc

This is absolutely me. I have spent an entire lifetime preparing for the "not walking into stuff while reading" competition.

I'm pretty sure I did more dangerous walking-without-looking when I'd read books in the passing periods in middle school while walking to class through the crush of other students going everywhere else.

I would not be surprised if there's some difference due to books not having movement while most phones, etc do, same reason why they say that watching a movie in a car (or having cars nearby with movie screens) is so dangerous in terms of attention.

That said, I too learned to walk while reading and it's paid off with things on the phone as well. One of the bad habits I avoid as a result is the "texter's neck" where people are developing neck strain from having their head tipped down all of them. Instead, I keep my book or phone up at eye level so that I can read without bending my neck while using peripheral vision to watch my surroundings.

I have my book at waist/chest level, but my neck straight and my eyes down. Holding it farther away leaves a larger periphery region to detect oncoming obstacles. I was a champ at navigating crowded halls with my nose buried in a novel

Snapchat.

Nice meta joke, there.

Politifact.

What is Politifact, anyway?

Politifact is a US-based fact-checking group. On their site, they take statements made on the public record by political figures and rate them in terms of their truth value. They've been accused in the past of false centrism: of rating Democratic statements that were only slightly misleading as false or "Pants on Fire" (their worst rating) in order to balance out their coverage of Republican statements.

And of course Republicans - especially Trump supporters - claim that the site is biased because it doesn't show Democrat and Republican politicians lying equally often. The possibility that politicians on one side lie more is simply not even considered.

Republicans are just not having a good year, are they?

I'm hoping that it forces the party to take a good hard look at itself and what it's let itself become. Certainly, Trump and Sanders have shown the issues of radicals in the parties and how quickly they can fragment things in these days of transparency. Heck, the only reason Trump got through was that the Republicans were hidebound on having a completely Democratic process for nominations while the Democrats have a system where citizen votes are more of a suggestion.

Republicans are having a bad decade or two.

If... wow, ten years ago now? They had responded to the Tea Party by excommunicating them as extremists, they wouldn't have a presidential candidate who actively requests a foreign power commit a cyberattack on the American government.

edited 27th Jul '16 8:50:09 PM by TParadox

I don't think it would have been that easy. Without that extremist vote, they'd be a shell of a party anyway.

Chemo is better than dying of cancer, but not by much.

edited 27th Jul '16 10:29:33 PM by TParadox

Aren't there other presidential candidates than those two? America is not actually a two-party system, right? Which also means the Democrats could be replaced by another party if things go bad enough for them.

From the sounds of it anything other than the central two is very far off being popular enough to actually win though. This puts Clinton and Trump at about 40 each, while Johnson is at 7.2 and Stein at 3.

The fringe parties like to imagine that there is a vast wealth of disaffected voters out there who would consider them if it weren't seen as so pointless to break from the major parties. That, however, badly misses the point that said voters would be just as likely to split left as right, or vice versa, meaning that you might end up with a distribution like 20-30-35-15 (Libertarian, Republican, Democrat, Green). In that situation, either Democrats would win 100% of national elections due to FPTP, or the House of Representatives would choose our Presidents.

Which just shows how far in the hole the US system is. Other countries manage to do elections with multiple parties and nominees just fine.

The two parties have been around for so long that they've managed to entrench themselves permanently into the system with no chance of removal. On the face they're bitter rivals but in reality they're each others greatest supporters, the existence of one guarantees the existence of the other.

If there ever has been an election that's proven that the two party system needs to go, it's this one. Just look at those disapproval numbers and imagine how a proper third, fourth and fifth option would improve the situation. I've seen numbers that say that about half of the votes to be cast in this are protest votes.

Having more options would actually force the parties to change with time and work for their approval. There's all this talk about changing the system but none of that's going to change if the main players in the system won't change. The old adage about insanity and repetition applies.

And yes, none of what I said is new, profound wisdom or anything. The more I follow these elections the harder it is not to blurt out something like that whenever the subject comes up, however.

The number of parties doesn't matter so much as the wealth of choice those parties represent. In Canada we have three "mainstream" ones (Conservative, Liberal, NDP), two semi-legitimate (Bloc Quebecois and Green) and a bunch of fringe candidates. The problem is that figuring out where e.g. the Conservatives and Liberals, or (in some elections) Liberals and NDP differ is sometimes harder than it seems.

First-past-the-post results in fewer, larger parties, while proportional representation results in many, much smaller parties. Israel is a good example of a system that has a ton of smaller parties, and the Prime Minister generally has to cobble together a coalition in order to rule. That has both good and bad parts to it - sometimes they are forced to make deals with parties they'd rather have nothing to do with, for example. On the other hand, no vote is ever "wasted" the way it is in FPTP.

In this US election the main problem is not the policies but the personalities that's having the biggest problem. The individual parties are stuck with candidates that neither of them really like very much and are being forced to sell them and demonize the other one with all their efforts. People aren't stupid, though - they can tell when a party really isn't behind the person they've chosen to represent them. A third choice would work in this election but most likely not any other that comes after it, assuming both the GOP and Democrats come to their senses at least somewhat.

There's an interesting argument being made that one of the major issues in today's system is too much transparency. We need more smokey backroom deals to keep order.

There's a bit of a loop where nobody votes for third parties because they don't expect third parties to have a chance and because nobody votes for third parties they don't have a chance, but the fact is that they just pop up to make spurious bids for the presidency without actually trying to build a party base, so they just end up poaching votes from viable candidates, and when they get enough attention, they poach enough votes from a presumptive candidate that the one fewer people are happy with wins.

And this year, we can't afford to poach votes from Clinton.