was RickRussellTX @ reddit

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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Well I did link to it in my response.

    The NPVIC has a number of problems. The biggest one is impermanence: Many states, faced with assigning their electoral votes to the least popular candidate in their own state, will rush back to the their halls of legislature to gut the compact.

    I mean, can you really see the progressive legislators in MA or CA assigning their electoral votes to a conservative winner who got whipped in their own state something like 60-40? The only states willing to enforce the NPVIC are the states whose internal popular vote mirrors the national popular vote.






  • Is this even news? Surely the list of politicians who’ve opposed this or that spending measure, then gone on to demand disbursements from the same pool of money, is very long and bipartisan. I’d go so far as to say it’s his job and responsibility to get as much for his constituents as he can, no matter what his official or personal position on the bill.

    For Democrats, the usual culprit is military spending – they’ll speak against it on the floor, then demand contracts and base expansion in their own state.

    And when politicians do refuse disbursements on principle, as some Republican-led state legislatures did around welfare expansion and COVID-related spending, we ridicule them.








  • So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.

    It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.

    The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.

    • Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.

    • And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.

    I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.

    • Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.

    Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).

    The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.