If you’re looking for an alternative to the USA’s big landscapes and natural parks then Canada is your best bet. If you’re looking for more cultural stuff and things to do in cities then Canada only has a few nice cities and they’re spread across the country from coast to coast.

No? The SNES was in fierce competition with the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. They didn’t call it the console wars for nothing.

That’s probably why I haven’t bought a Nintendo console since the original Wii. I keep looking for a reason to do so but coming up short.

I still love the NES and SNES, as well as some N64 and GC games. I definitely would like to try some of Nintendo’s newer games, just not at the prices they’re asking for! I am absolutely spoiled for choice on games to play.

Because I don’t think it’s worth it to pay $650 Canadian for a console based only on a few Mario/Zelda/Metroid games?

Because your previous comment conflated exclusives with first party exclusives.

I can remember when the SNES had countless 3rd party exclusives. Now we can’t expect any?

The value prop of the Switch 2 is not compelling to me.

Because everything else can be played on a Steam deck!

How many exclusives is the Switch 2 going to have besides the usual Nintendo first party stuff?

I never had any issues writing LaTeX with vim. I used UltiSnips and wrote a bunch of my own snippets for it. I also wrote a lot of my own macros in LaTeX.

I’ve tried. It breaks my brain too much. I’ve even used emacs without evil but the unholy combination just does not work for me.

I have the same problem with all vi/vim emulation modes in other editors. There’s always some incongruity that messes me up.

I prefer to call it the dark side!

I don’t really recommend people learn vi/vim even though I’ve been using it for years and love it. It’s a very personal thing and the time you invest into learning it might not be worth it if you don’t use its features enough.

I think it’s dependent on your personality and neurodivergence/neurotypical characteristics (I don’t know a word that encompasses all of this). If you’re the type of person who gets really annoyed/distracted by any sort of “friction” in the editing process then I think you may be a good candidate to learn vi. Otherwise probably not!

Edit: by the way I’m also a LaTeX user!

Yeah. A lot of people who use vim don’t know how to use the full power of vi. They’ll often install plugins to do things they could have easily done with built in features!

The one area where regular vi sucks though is undo. If you want multiple undo then you’ll have to at least go with something like nvi.

It’s Synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is used to refer to the whole.

A few of the things were explicitly designed (such as the rules for elections, the composition of parliament) but a great deal of it evolved (English common law system, electoral districting/Gerrymandering, and many decades of legislative processes by many different people).

That last one I want to highlight because it seems like it is something explicitly designed. It is not. It’s like a soup pot many chefs walk past and add their own ingredients to. The fact that the soup is not very good can’t be blamed on one particular chef. Thus there is no real designer of our body of laws.

I also want to further point out that laws are not systems, they’re just words on paper. The system is the combined effect of all the people in society acting to produce an outcome. This outcome may be strongly informed by society’s laws (and also by social norms such as respect for the rule of law) but it’s not determined by them the way a computer’s actions are determined by its programming.

One need look no further than the Trump administration which has severely undermined the rule of law in the US. Without the rule of law the system turns into chaos. But that is also an outcome of the system itself, since social norms are the product of social forces (which are themselves highly chaotic).

Oh I don’t doubt that another violent revolution is coming. But each violent revolution proves the failure of the one that came before. Violence begets more violence.

Building a stable system that works for everyone is much more difficult. It takes many years of careful work. Flipping the table never gets you there. Table-flippers love to take all the credit, however.

As for your premise on “non-violent versus violent revolutions”, I reject it entirely. I’m an advocate for careful reforms, not revolutions.

The main takeaway I would hope people get from the idea (one that I heard from a forgotten source and then began using in the light of my own understanding I have to confess) is that we are living under a system that has been disproportionately and consistently shaped over much of its history by moneyed interests in various ways for the specific aim of winning the class war for the wealthy. That’s what the system is doing, that is its purpose.

Another objection to “the purpose of a system is what it does” is that it implies that systems have purposes in the first place. Many systems don’t have a purpose because they were never designed. Ecosystems are the biggest example of this.

Talking more specifically about our political and economic systems, I think the ecosystem view is helpful. Believing that an elite have conspired over centuries to create a system which entrenches their interests is dangerous, conspiratorial thinking which most importantly does not lead in any positive direction.

Violent revolutions rarely work, yet Americans have a peculiar affinity toward them, perhaps due to their history. It’s a particular sort of societal sickness which I believe leads to perfectionist, radical thinking and shuns graassroots, reform-oriented work.

The original topic of discussion (for this thread) was voting systems and two party systems. Grassroots political work can and has been proven to work at solving problems like this. There are many cases around the world where such voting systems have been changed thanks to the efforts of grassroots politics.

People have been doing hot water bath canning at home for well over a century. It works great for acidic foods like tomatoes or pickled vegetables. It’s completely safe if you follow the USDA Guide to Home Canning.

To avoid the uneven heating just turn down the microwave power! No one does this and everyone complains about uneven heating! I get great reheating results from my microwave just by turning down the power and running it for longer.

This is how microwaves used to work decades ago when they were lower power by design. Over time the microwave power arms race resulted in them getting much too powerful for even reheating.

I’ve seen it from some of the local sushi places here in Southern Ontario. I always thought it had something to do with trying to keep the flavours separate.