So do you think it ' s dumb when baseball teams lose despite having more hits ? Or what about football when they have more passingrushing yards ? <| sep |> Oh god please don ' t . We don ' t need another Zarna youcaring fiasco on our handsedit wait a sec , does that say ' HOT LATINA ? !?!? i ' m donating $ 100 <| sep |> I do serial port IO and I need to cast everything to bytes before I can send or write wrappers around a standard librarypyserial . That ' s because you ' re dealing with bytes , not unicode strings . Your serial port can ' t deal with Unicode strings . It deals with a specific bytebased protocol . It ' s the same in C or any other language . You can ' t send a wchar to a serial port , it needs to be decoded first . Easy to solve of course but wasn ' t an issue before . Because Python 2 used bytebased strings that could be upconverted to unicode , not Unicode based strings .