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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldshrooms
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    13 days ago

    I would assume they meant “of boobs”, but you present an interesting question of terminology. Unfortunately it begs the question, what exactly would we mean by “on boobs” in this context, so that we can question if “off boobs” is it’s opposite?

    Also, boobs. The answer to boobs is usually yes.



  • We already know from real-world AV elections that voters largely prefer to vote honestly, there’s no reason to think they would get more strategic when it gets harder to figure out the optimal strategy.

    In plain AV, voting honestly is the optimal strategy - there’s no incentive to vote any other way. It’s not for SPAV. And yes, strategic voting in SPAV is harder to figure out than strategic voting in FPTP, but it’s far from impossible - basically you don’t vote for a popular candidate you support so your vote for other candidates counts for more, relying on the assumption that enough other people will vote for the popular candidate you support to allow them to win anyways.


  • He’s probably talking about the electoral college, and likely supports abolishing it in favor of a direct election which would mostly just shift the epmhasis away from the largest states that are close to flipping over to emphasizing a handful of the largest cities.

    There’s actually a bill that’s made the rounds to several states that makes it so that once enough states (read a number equaling half plus 1 electoral votes) pass a similar law they will all switch over to assigning their electors based on the national popular vote rather than what they’re state does. Unsurprisingly, California and New York jumped on this, as did some smaller solid blue states that are willing to hitch their wagon to “whatever California wants” going forward, but it’s probably never going to actually take effect because if it could get to that point because if it could then we wouldn’t be worrying about the GOP winning another election for the foreseeable future.

    Or they aren’t a fan of House apportionment. Or both. Though electoral college apportionment and house apportionment are related, so…

    If they’re from the EU, I’d have a question for them: Do you feel like Germany isn’t given remotely enough power by the EU parliament, or that Malta has ridiculously too much to throw around? Because it’s literally the same problem - if you try to represent people with a fixed number of seats apportioned between territories, and you try to minimize the mean difference in voters/representative, and there are a couple of territories that just blow the curve on each end that’s what happens.

    Still think merging the Dakotas and creating Montoming (merging Montana and Wyoming) is a good idea… Maybe go whole hog and if your state gets one House seat and is adjacent to a state with one House seat, you get merged to be one state from here on out. Where multiple options present, join the ones with the largest shared land border. Repeat until no examples remain, recalculate House seats and do it again if necessary. It probably won’t help California much just because of how much CA blows the population curve, but it would likely push the states with the worst population/representative ratio up by one. Should probably pull out the math and see.


  • Not a fan of SPAV, in part for the same reasons I’m not a fan of STAR:

    1. It doesn’t eliminate strategic voting. For example, imagine you support two candidates for a multi-seat election. Under straight AV you vote for both of them because there’s literally no incentive to do otherwise. Under SPAV, you might decide that since one of those candidates is much more popular and thus a foregone conclusion to win that you should avoid voting for them so the value of your vote for the other isn’t reduced. Too many doing this can cause negative effects, like strategic voting in other methods.
    2. You can’t tell me how my vote will actually be counted until every other vote is counted, because how the ballot will be measured in the end depends on every other ballot as depending on how everyone else voted your votes for some candidates may be worth less than your votes for other candidates. Straight AV doesn’t have this problem, your vote is exactly what is says on the ballot and is counted exactly as it is on the ballot. The extra math also makes it more complicated to explain to voters en masse, which is a problem with other systems that have transferable votes.

    I get that the goal is apparently to make every state elect a split legislature/congressmen by making so that if any seats are even vaguely competitive the parties will essentially be forced to take turns.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldHAAAAAAAANNNNKKKK
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    22 days ago

    I first watched it during University years, and I was very much of the camp that was doing the vicariously living through the power fantasy of Walt’s rise to power and the bitch wife and crying jessie ruining it for him.

    I recently, like a year ago as a 31+ year old rewatched it again, and jesus christ what a top to bottom egoistic selfish asshole Walt is, all I did is feel sorry for Skyler and Jessie.

    I think knowing where it’s going makes a big difference. Like, first time in going in blind Walt is a sympathetic for the first bit, and for most of the story is dealing with the unintended consequences of raising funds for his treatment. Knowing where it’s going it’s a lot easier to see him in a lot worse light earlier in the story.





  • You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.

    The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don’t care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who’s pushing for it.

    It’s like due process - you don’t want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don’t understand why then it’s time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.


  • This was not personal interest, though it is an incredibly interesting text. It was fascinating to discover he devoted ~2.5 chapters to the importance of the same kind of simple, yet powerful finger-pointing rhetoric used by right-wing ideologists to this day. I joking say it’s one of the earliest texts on meme theory, and it’s only half a joke.

    I still find it funny that just a few years ago a feminist social work journal called Affilia published an article that was essentially a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf in terms of sex and with some “fashionable buzzwords” included under the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” Especially since the bit is spelled out right in the title (for anyone who doesn’t know, “Mein Kampf” literally translates as “My Struggle”). It was part of the grievance studies affair.


  • I think I have a mutation in a taste bud or something, but Sucralose is really a prominent and nasty taste to me in anything it’s in.

    The only artificial sweetener I get a nasty aftertaste from is saccharine. But I get a really absurdly foul aftertaste from saccharine, I can’t even compare it to anything because it’s easily the worst thing I have ever tasted in my life and I can’t think of anything even sort of similar. Glad basically nothing uses it any more, but it was more of an issue as a type I diabetic kid decades ago. Sucralose doesn’t give me an aftertaste at all though, neither does aspartame or acesulfame potassium.

    My preferred sweetener though is stevia (I used to go to the local new age shop and buy just dried stevia leaves for my tea and such during the time it was legal to sell in any amount for any purpose as an herbal supplement so long as you didn’t mention it had a flavor which turned it into an unsafe food additive because fuck NutraSweet corp). It took such a ridiculous time to get approved because of NutraSweet, when stevia really should have fallen under GRAS status for the same reason things like tomatoes did - New World plant used in food forever by the natives, but wholly new to Europeans when they came to the Americas.






  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldLinux as the true Trojan!
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    2 months ago

    Really it’s actually capitalism that supposes people are too dumb to make their own choices or know how a business is run, and thus shouldn’t have say over company choices.

    Really it’s actually that businesses with that structure tend to perform better in a market economy, because no one forces businesses to be started as “dictatorships run by bosses that effectively have unilateral control over all choices of the company” other than the people starting that business themselves. You can literally start a business organized as a co-op (which by your definitions is fundamentally a socialist or communist entity) - there’s nothing preventing that from being the organizing structure. The complaint instead tends to be that no one is forcing existing successful businesses to change their structure and that a new co-op has to compete in a market where non-co-op businesses also operate.

    If co-ops were a generally more effective model, you’d expect them to be more numerous and more influential. And they do alright for themselves in some spaces. For example in the US many of the biggest co-ops are agricultural.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldWinning
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    3 months ago

    I understand at a nuanced and historically informed level what’s happening at a political and geopolitical level here, and all of my bleakest predictions keep coming true

    Let’s test this: Make some specific predictions for various points over, say, the next 5 years (start near future and work your way out). Put them somewhere where they can remain generally fixed but available (say on a pastebin or lemmy post or something). Then come back to look at them after those times have past and see how accurate you are. This would let you see your actual rate of accuracy as opposed to just the ones that stand out because they ended up true), which would ideally lessen your panic or alternatively if you really are getting it right in a consistent fashion we can start calling you gravitas_deficiency the Bleak Prognosticator.

    For example just glancing at your profile one you seem to be doubling down on a lot recently is that there will be either no US presidential election in 2028 or no peaceful transfer of power in January 2029. That is easily verifiable in four years time. How do you imagine this will happen? Is it enough to satisfy this if the election happens and the GOP wins with a non-Trump candidate? Do you think opposition to the GOP will simply be made illegal? Do you think they will push an amendment to let Trump run again? Do you think Trump will just run again regardless and argue that the Constitution doesn’t apply to him because seemingly no other law does?


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlJerkoff
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    3 months ago

    You’re not wrong. There’s nothing that requires the two parties be Dems and GOP. But you’re not going to overturn one or the other in a single election, and that means losing to the farthest big party from you, likely a few in a row, while that gets resolved. Especially if you try to do it top down instead of building support from local/county offices up.

    Basically, if you could get enough third party support, you could either supplant one of the existing parties or force them to shift to stay competitive. The argument is that trying to do so with the office of president when doing so promotes a fast track to outright fascism is a painfully bad tactic.