Kethal

I'm guessing it's a right-angle quarter-turn ball valve. It's crimped on one side and looks like a compression fitting on the other. Maybe it's a gate valve, which in my experience are far more prone to leaks, but the notches in the handle make me think ball valve.

Which part leaks?

Didicot?

Turning on Windows 11 requires between 3 and 4 Gb of memory, but it does scarcely more than Windows 7 did, which took less than 1 Gb, and looked much nicer. Why don't they try fixing that instead?

I think voters should petition their local officials to change their local election systems to use some sort of proportional voting. Then we'll get better local officials and we can keep pushing this system to higher levels.

I don't like NPV. I wrote about that in response to someone else, but in short, it's the same mentality as allocating all electors to someone who wins only a portion of the vote, which is inherently flawed. It's better than what we have now, but it's a hard sell because people never want their vote to go to a candidate they didn't support, so there will always be states that rightly don't support it.

Part of the problem seems to be that no one seems to know what the electrical college is. The difference in voting power you describe above is not the electoral college. That's that fact that states have disproportionate voting power. The college reflects that, but it's not due to the college. You could have that without the college. Also, that disproportionate power is something to disagree with, but it has not resulted in a president winning an election despite losing the popular vote. You could keep disproportionate power and the college, and if states allocated proportionally, none of the times the US has elected a president who lost the popular vote would have occured. Conversely, if you removed disproportionate power but kept allocating all votes to the pop vote winner in the state, not a single election outcome would have been different. The problem is that states don't allocate proportionally. That's it.

I already said that two states allocate proportionally....

NPV is minor improvement and a terrible approach. States don't have an incentive to allocate their electors to a candidate that wasn't popular in the state. That makes it hard to adopt, and certainly some states will never adopt it. It has gained ground, and maybe it will take effect in the states where it's passed, but I guarantee that as soon as a some states are allocating electors to a candidate that wasn't popular there, they'll repeal it. Conversely, everyone is incentived for their vote to go toward the candidate they actually voted for. Getting states to do that doesn't require buy in from a dozen states like NPV does. It's a state level incentive that achieves everything NPV hopes to achieve, that's far easier to implement, and has the added bonus of not further supporting the shitty two party system.

I don't think there's ever a case where the electoral college itself has ever been the problem. The problem is the same one that plagues local elections but in a different form: there isn't proportional voting.

At the national level, states allocate all of their electors to the candidate that wins the popular vote in that state. If a candidate wins 51% of the state's votes they get 100% of the electors. That has historically been the reason presidents win despite losing the popular vote, not because of the college itself. Even without the college, if states allocated their voting power that way, you'd have the exact same problem.

At the local level the problem is more confined in that an individual can only put all of their influence behind a single candidate. This forces one to choose the least bad option.

The solution at all levels is proportional voting. States should allocate their electors according to the proportion of votes candidate receive. This needs some thought to do because it's impossible to allocate exactly proportionally, but it's a simple problem to address. At least two states do this. For every election I'm aware of where the president won despite losing the popular vote, this would have prevented that.

At all levels, something like ranked choice voting (there are other possibilities) allows voters to support multiple candidates, letting them give the most support for the candidate they genuinely prefer, but giving a hedge to support a candidate they do t love but that's better than their worst candidate. This could be applied on top of a state's system for allocating electors.

This is probably a top 3 priority for creating a workable government instead of this shit show we have now. It's gaining significant reactions with several states using some sort of proportional system, but there's heavy opposition from the current policitians. They know if it gets through, they'll lose their elections, and won't be able to jerk around their constituents. If you're sick of one shit party vs another shit party, do everything you can to support proportional voting at all levels, and to get your state to allocate electors proportionally (not like the NPV pact does).

I've never seen it, and it appears there's a problem. Although Cage is mentioned, he's not actually in the movie: https://www.cageclub.me/welcome-to-hollywood-1998-cagespotting-redux-mikes-review/.

Were you thinking of swapping Nick Cage and John Travolta in Welcome to Hollywood?

Nick Cage and John Travolta in Face Off

Yeah, I use that all the time. I think I use it in a different way though. I have projects with C, C++ and other languages. The C and C++ get compiled and linked together, and so there are some considerations for those files that don't apply to anything else. So I mean C files and C++ files, but not as if they were the same language.

If he tries to sell large amount at once, presumably the price would plummet. I can't imagine there are anywhere near 3.5 billion dollars of buyers out there for this.

I guess that's the joke, and I think we're all confused because it's wrong.