I totally empathize with the hopeless feeling. People are feeling it all over the world.

It breaks my heart to see Americans bailing. Denouncing thier citizenship.

There are like 2 billion people who WISH they could be an American ONLY FOR VOTING DAY just to wait through thr wind and rain and ICE beatings and shootings and whatever, just to help restore some degree of sanity to the world.

But we can’t. And Americans are joking (or actually) running away to Canada. Americans get all pouty and then don’t even show up to vote. Like, even if sometimes you feel like there is nothing you can do, think of the billions on the planet affected by this man who have even fewer options than you do.

Show up, vote, get your friends to vote, don’t let them skip voting. Tell lazy stupid people who are abstaining from voting that they’re being lazy and stupid.

This guy is fucking up the planet by like every measure, but most people on the planet can do absolutely literally zero about it. You can do at least a little!! Just make sure you DO it! We are all literally counting on you. The jabs are just to keep you awake. Keep you from getting complacent.

Register and participate to push the needle to actually get a half-decent candidate and then make sure that your lazy friends actually go vote, because a ton of them said they did but didn’t. Understand how voting and registration rules may be changing in your area so you can help make sure you and your friends even can vote.

I know it’s glib, but really… get involved in your local community. You can’t really help anyone on the internet, but you can make a practical difference in your community.

And it doesn’t actually matter if you’re in a deep blue or deep red jurisdiction either. Polling does affect results, people love hopping on a bandwagon. If you can contribute to a “deep red state goes from 95/5 to 90/10” it’s an infectious shift which could move other needles elsewhere past 50.

Don’t succumb to hopelessness, or the idea that there is no impact to be made, or that for some reason you can’t make an impact.

You’re muddling a few distinct concepts like “fault”, “blameworthiness” and “responsibility”.

It’s the collective fault of the country: the guy won the popular vote.

I don’t blame you, personally.

But ultimately you share the responsibility of resolving the situation.

In my experience, people who get prickly about the basic facts (the guy won the popular vote, there is no failed system here… you literally can not blame the electoral college… merely a failure of the electorate) really are clamoring for a way to say “there is nothing I can do” and “Somehow someone has to do something but it’s not me and doing nothing is actually totally morally fine”

What is there to gain from calling people out? I want you to be honest enough about the facts of the matter that you are agitated enough to not go quietly into that goodnight. That you don’t tie off and mainline “Nothing I can do” just to sleep at night.

When a measure is used as a metric, it ceases to be a valuable measure.

It’s literally a software engineers job to consider and understand functions. If you tell me I’ll be judged by the output of a function, I will crack it open to understand what inputs maximize outputs.

I’ll burn though however many tokens you want me to. Give me hardware and a blank cheque I’ll bring a data center to its knees. I’m guessing your hope was that tokens burn would translate into productivity, but that hope was misplaced and that failure is on you.

Well, he won the popular vote… so it’s what most people explicitly voted for, or failed to show up to vote against.

Either way: bad look. There was a leg to stand on with that argument in 2016, but not now.

Own it, don’t dismiss it, and then fix it.