I tried to keep the example simple since this is ELI5. If you take the number of electors a state has a divide it by the states population, you’ll get its electors per capita.

28 electors for 19 million people equals 1.47 electors per million people for New York.

30 electors for 22 million people equals 1.36 electors per million people for Florida

Idaho gets 4 electors for 2 million people equals 2 electors per million.

Since it’s the number of electors sent to Washington that decide who gets to be president, sending more electors per capita means a state has more influence on the outcome.

50% of Americans live in just 9 states. The other 50% live in the remaining 41 states. If the 9 states all voted one way, and the 41 other states voted the other, the popular vote would be 50/50, but the electoral college results would be a landslide victory for whoever won in 41 states.

The main reason someone becomes president while losing the popular vote is because they won the electors from a bunch of the smaller states. Smaller states are less populated and more rural. Rural people tend to vote conservative since they benefit less from progressive policies and prefer tradition. Conservatives therefore have an edge due to the electoral college. There were 4 presidents that won without the popular vote. All of them were Republican. Given there have only been 59 elections in American history, that’s a 6.8% chance the loser of the popular vote wins.

In America, the people don’t elect the president. The states send electors to Washington and all the electors form the “electoral college”. It is this electoral college that elects the president. To make it a bit democratic, each state holds a vote to see who the residents of the state want as president. The electors that state sends to Washington will be told who they should elect based on who the residents of the state voted for.

A simple example. Imagine the US only has two states: New York and Florida.

New York has 19 million residents and gets to send 28 electors to the electoral college. Florida has 22 million residents gets to send 30 electors to the electoral college.

All 19 million residents of New York vote for Kang. New York sends 28 electors and tell them they should elect Kang. In Florida, the vote is split. 12 million vote for Kodos and 10 million vote for Kang. Since more people voted for Kodos, Florida sends 30 electors and tells them to elect Kodos.

The popular vote is 29 million votes for Kang and 12 million votes for Kodos. The electoral college votes are 30 votes for Kodos and 28 votes for Kang. Kodos wins even though 70% of Americans voted for Kang.

I had to create an account on a government website. The website didn’t list a character limit so I used a password manager to generate a 32 character password. My account was created but I couldn’t log in. I used the “forgot my password” option and I received an email of my password in plain text. I also noticed why I couldn’t log in. The password was truncated to just 20 characters. Brilliant website! Tax dollars at work!

The government using brute force to influence other regions isn’t popular in democracies. There were huge protests over the Vietnam war and currently lots of protests over Isreal-Palestine, a conflict that the US is only somewhat involved in. Political parties have nothing to gain if they’re voted out of office a few years after launching an expansionist war.

Everything is 0s and 1s to a computer. What a pattern of 0s and 1s encodes is decided by people–often arbitrarily. Over the years there have been attempts to standardize encodings but, for legacy reasons, older encodings are still valid.

The 0s and 1s that encode ’ in UTF-8 (a standardized encoding) are the same 0s and 1s that encode ’ in CP-1252 (a legacy encoding).

The � symbol is shown when the 0s and 1s don’t encode anything of meaning.

It was really easy. The Paycheck Protection Program wasn’t administered by the government directly. Instead, it authorized banks and financial institutions to issue PPP loans using government money. These institutions were told they wouldn’t be found at fault if they gave money to a fraudulent applicant. So they were authorized to give out money that wasn’t theirs and couldn’t be found at fault even if they gave it to a fraudster. There was zero reason to check if the application was real or filled with fake information. It’s estimated that, of the 21 million PPP loans issued, 10% were fraudulent.

My work has barrels full of IPA. Unfortunately, isopropyl alcohol doesn’t taste great.

Schrödinger’s cat was also meant as a rejection of quantum mechanics. Something cannot be both a wave and a partical until observed the same way a cat cannot be both alive and dead until observed. However, it does seem like quantum superposition is a reality, making the thought experiment even more bizarre.

I checked my settings and it was already off

The long reply on how to change file ownership when it could just be chown -R andrew /pictures

A lot of responses here so I’ll suggest a different approach. You can watch your python code execute line by line using a debugger. That might help with understanding how it all works.

def my_sum(list):
    result = 0
    for number in list:
        result += number
    return result

my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
list_sum = my_sum(my_list)
print(list_sum)  # Prints 15

If you run the above code line by line in a debugger, you’ll see that when it gets to list_sum = my_sum(my_list) the program will jump into the function my_sum(list) where “list” is a variable holding the value of “my_list”. The program continues line by line inside of the function until it hits the return result statement. The program then returns to the line it was at before jumping into the function. “my_sum(my_list)” now has an actual value. It’s the value that the return statement provided. The line would now read list_sum = 15 to python.

A debugger shows you which lines get executed in which order and how the variables update and change with each line.

Just a note: python has a built-in sum() function you could use instead of writing your own my_sum() function, but a debugger won’t show you how built-in functions work! They’re built into the language itself. You’d need to look up Python’s documentation to see how they actually function under the hood.

I made one called “crash_bandicoot.exe” that opened the windows calculator in an infinite loop.

Just writing words doesn’t make it legally binding. Anyone who reads this comment owes me $1,000,000 USD.

See your problem is you’re editing the code until it passes the tests. It’s way easier if you edit the tests until it passes the code.

There’s a string stating that the code should not be passed or the employee will be fired. I’d assume this was a test to see if an employee meant to be doing code review was actually doing them. Spoiler, they were not, as OP said they found this in production code.

Things said by Github copilot.

It’s not satire! Torovoltos used telnet to hack into my iPhone and instal an mp3 virus known as Songs of Innocence

For an additional TIL: Canada also shares a land border with Denmark Hans Island

That’s why UK insults are the best. Referring to a backbencher as a backbencher isn’t an insult. Referring to the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom as a backbencher, because she lost her office and now sits on the back benches, is an insult. It’s an incredibly snide remark that seems perfectly normal unless you know why it’s not.

The Tory backbencher

UK insults are the best