sevan

California is probably one of the least gerrymandered states. In 2008 there was an initiative to form a non-partisan redistricting commission to draw districts. All federal and state districts have been set using this process for more than 10 years.

California also has an open primary system where all candidates run against each other in a combined primary vote regardless of party affiliation (except president and some local offices). The top 2 from the primary advance to the general election. So, the general election could feature 2 democrats or 2 republicans.

Additionally, following the pandemic, California moved to automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter. They also have automatic voter registration at the DMV.

Altogether, it would be unfair to compare California to Texas or any other red state, all of whom actively gerrymander and work to suppress voter participation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistricting_Commission https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/primary-elections-california https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-27/california-universal-voting-by-mail-becomes-permanent

My prior employer actually ran diversity reviews on layoff lists to make sure the layoffs were diverse enough to defend against discrimination lawsuits.

At my old company we would ban customers that were repeatedly abusive to customer service agents. Agents had the right to hang up on customers that were being abusive and if the same customer kept getting reported, eventually they would receive a letter from the legal department telling them to stop. If it continued, they would get banned.

I remember one guy was so bad that a director got the phone system to automatically route any calls from him to his mobile line and put him in his phone book. He would very politely greet him by name as soon as he picked up the call to make it clear that he wasn't ever going to get through to anyone else.

At a prior employer, we noticed that there were many customers getting essentially free service ($100-200 per month) by calling customer service hundreds of times per month and asking for credits for all sorts of things. They were generally very nice and just picked up $5-10 credits until their service was free. Beyond the free service, they were costing the company the expense of the service calls.

We started routing all of them to a small group of agents and flagged the accounts so the agents would deny them pretty much every time. It was kind of funny because we didn't tell them anything changed, but you could see that some of them noticed because they started asking which call center they were talking to. They would immediately hang up and call back over and over and just keep going back to the same place. Eventually most of them gave up.

Note: nobody here would/should feel sorry for this particular company, but I still thought it was funny to see these scammers get mad that we caught on to the scam.

I joked recently that I should put a ruinously large bet on Trump to win the election. That way, if he wins, I'll get a huge payout, which will soften the blow a bit. If Harris wins, I'd be broke, but at least I'd be happy that Trump lost.

Worst book I've quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!

Worst I've finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I'll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.

Maybe JD Vance turned the camera upside down.

So, is nvidia the cisco of this cycle?

Its an OK game. I got it on sale and don't regret the time spent playing it, but the controls are awkward and there wasn't much nuance to the story. There appear to be lots of potential story-line elements based on your decisions, but it was too slow and cumbersome to be worth a replay for me.

By comparison, I quit Heavy Rain pretty early, I seem to recall walking around yelling for my child for an extended period of time and that was the last I ever played it. IMO, Detroit is a much better game than that.

It looks like Steam has it on sale for $12 at the moment, which is less than I paid for it. I played it one time through for 12 hours, so $1 per hour of entertainment isn't terrible. Not a glowing endorsement, I guess.

Thanks, I'm guessing the benefit of subscribing is to create that persistent relationship. The free version from MS that I'm using times out after a while. I definitely get the problem of it making up experience for me when it encounters something in a job description that isn't referenced anywhere in my info. Honestly, I'd probably get more interviews if I just let it make up stuff, but I'm guessing that might become a problem for me later. :)

I interviewed for a job recently and asked why the position was vacant. They said the previous person died. I didn't have the courage to ask if the death was work-related though.

Can you share a bit about how you used it? I've used Copilot a bit to try the same thing, but it makes so many errors that I spend too much time editing and fixing them. Also, after running quite a few cover letters, I found that the text was repetitive and unnatural in a way that made it really obvious that it was an LLM writing the letter and not a person.