But the founding fathers were so terrified of poor people they created the Electoral College to ensure the “right” people [...] got in charge.
E-e-e-hhh... kinda. It also had to do with the fact that states like Virginia had comparatively few voters (they had lots of slaves, but fewer white men), so they were worried that they'd be voted down by the northern states. So the worry was that those states wouldn't want to join the Union. The Electoral College, which gave slave states a boost in presidential elections, was a sop to get them to join.
A modern equivalent would be a state like California or Texas, with lots of non-citizen immigrants: they're not citizens, so they can't vote, but they do count for purposes of assigning House seats, and thus Electors.
This was what made me push my mom to go out and get a smartphone to replace her old flip phone. (That, and the fact that she had no idea how to send or receive text messages, or check voice mail.)
22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
People act as though Jesus was a paragon of virtue, but even according to the Bible, he could be a right bastard sometimes.
I splurged for my birthdays a few years ago and got a Waterman Expert, and then a Carène. Combine that with a Clairefontaine notebook, and it's completely frictionless, like writing on room-temperature ice.
In fairness, it's pretty smart, IMHO: one of the big difficulties in getting a social site started is getting a critical mass of people together to sustain conversation. Facebook already has plenty of Instagram users, so giving them all access to Threads seems like a pretty good way to bootstrap Threads.
The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.
This may be the wrong place to post this, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while. "Algorithm" isn't a dirty word. And in fact, IMHO Mastodon could benefit from a few alternatives to its most-recent-first algorithm.
For instance, I might want to see posts by emergency services in my area first, followed by posts by friends, and posts by a bot that posts a cat picture every minute further down. Or someone might be going off on a rant, and I'd like to turn their firehose of posts down to a trickle for a few hours. Or maybe I'd like Mastodon to just stop showing me anything after a few hours of activity, to encourage me to take a break.
The reason Twitter's, Facebook's, algorithms are evil is that they encourage you to do things you wouldn't want to do, and because they show you content you don't want. Not because they're algorithms.
In a perfect world, every user on every instance would be able to choose how posts are presented. But that may be too computationally expensive, especially for large instances, especially when you start trying to figure out things like the mood of a post. But maybe each instance could decide which algorithm it wants to use, and user can migrate from one instance to another, depending whether they like how things are presented.
I remember a friend telling me, "I'm going vegetarian: I'm switching to only corn-fed beef."