• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 4th, 2024

help-circle
  • No, it won’t change the minds of his base.

    But there are people he wouldn’t consider his base, that also tend to vote conservative, who were actually offended by some of those jokes. And then realized that hey, Trump and company are white nationalists, and that means that no minority will be safe.

    It’s a tiny minority of Trump supporters, but as close as this election could be, that’s more than enough.

    Now, Trump is planning on stealing the election anyway. Via disrupting or delaying certification of votes past December 11th, Which then means that there will be incomplete slates of electors, which means the election goes to the House, and each State gets one vote instead of the house itself voting.

    They’re going to try to use Section three of the 20th amendment.

    If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President-elect shall have died, the Vice President-elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President-elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President-elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice President-elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

    Fun times to live in…



  • The definition is that Tesla is shit.

    They’re selling a spotty lane assist as Self Driving when it is not.

    Other companies are selling actual self-driving cars, (even if those companies are fucking up as well) but Tesla is nowhere near that level of autonomy. All because Musk cheaped out on the sensor package.

    Teslas will never be self-driving, because they literally cannot detect the road and obstacles with just their little camera setup.

    They should not be allowed to call it self-driving, or autopilot, or anything else that implies that you can take your hands off the steering wheel.




  • I know, it’s maddening. But thanks to how elections work, you have exactly two options. And they are not the same.

    If you think that Biden’s policy is bad, just look at what Trump has planned.

    He’s likely to order the US military to help in the genocide. And since Arabs have not had the best public image in the US in the last 20 some years…

    There’s a chance the military would do it.

    With that as the other option, the current diplomatic talks are far better.

    Now, here’s why promoting some also-ran jack off is a bad idea. Your also-ran cannot win. It’s literally impossible. They can only siphon off votes from the left, and that means that Trump wins and everyone learns again that when a madman tells you what he’ll do, you should believe him.






  • Except Ranked Choice doesn’t actually fix anything, and in fact can make things worse.

    RCV is the only voting system designed that fails the monotonicity criterion.

    What that means is that ranking a candidate higher on your ballot can cause them to lose.

    Which is insane, and a deal breaker, and not the only massive flaw with the system.

    A lot of it stems from the fact that RCV is, at its core, a series of First Past the Post elections on a single ballot.

    You cannot fix the problems with First Past the Post by just iterating First Past the Post.

    No, the only way to actually fix things is to ditch Ordinal voting in favor of Cardinal voting.

    www.equal.vote is a good source for more in depth analysis of actual fixes.




  • Eh, it’s honestly safer than you’d think. The size of the reactor plays a huge role in safety.

    A reactor sized for a container ship would be literally incapable of melting down, because there just isn’t enough fuel to get to those temperatures. You could then limit the ship’s speed, and over build the reactor a bit, so that the reactor is never truly stressed during normal operation.

    Then for refueling, you just remove the entire reactor and replace it with a new, fully fueled one every 10 years or so.

    That’s where you want your controls.

    Other than that, yeah it would be safer than oil. A crash just means your reactor casing gets wet.

    The main worry is someone cutting into the reactor to take out the spicy rocks… and there are easier ways to get spicy rocks.



  • Simple question, where are the Whigs today? Gone? Because that’s what it takes to have a different party. The Whigs imploded, and the Democratic Republicans then swept the elections for a couple of years until the Republican Party coalesced.


    Gore did not in fact win. Not because he didn’t have more votes, but because it was close enough that Republicans could steal the election. I Ralph Nader had not been on the ballot, Gore would have easily pulled the win. But several thousand unimpeachable votes.

    This is called the Spoiler Effect. It’s the mechanism by with Durverger’s Law works. A vote for a third party is a vote against your own interests. Ralph Nader voters were horrified to learn that they helped Bush win the election.

    But all this debate here is effectively in a vacuum. We’re not actually talking about the current election. A vote for a socialist third party in this year’s election is a wasted vote. Full Stop. You’ll not impress anyone, and the socialist candidate will not care about you. And that’s because the “socialist” candidate is likely a Republican plant. Because the two major parties know about the Spoiler Effect, and Republicans specifically have been funding the “left leaning” third parties to split the vote so that they can win.

    If you as an individual want to harm yourself, I’ll not really care. I can’t stop you. But if you start advocating for others to join you, I’ll call you out as a Republican plant, working to fuck over the rest of us.


  • Just because you’re too lazy to actually look them up, doesn’t mean that they aren’t full of equations.

    This is one Proof of Arrow’s Theorem;

    Let G be a coalition with size ≥ 2. Partition the coalition into nonempty subsets G 1 , G 2.

    Fix distinct x , y , z. Design the following voting pattern (notice that it is the cyclic voting pattern which causes the Condorcet paradox):

    voters in G 1 : x ≻ i y ≻ i z voters in G 2 : z ≻ i x ≻ i y voters outside G : y ≻ i z ≻ i x

    (Items other than x , y , z are not relevant.)

    Since G is decisive, we have x ≻ y. So at least one is true: x ≻ z or z ≻ y.

    If x ≻ z, then G 1 is weakly decisive over ( x , z ) . If z ≻ y, then G 2 is weakly decisive over ( z , y ). Now apply the field expansion lemma.

    See how helpful that is? No, Well, if you had a phd in math or political science it would be.

    This is the wiki link if you want the full Proofs. And that’s just Arrow’s Theorem.

    Durverger’s Law is both simpler, and more targeted. It simply states that if you have a system of government where there is single winner elections and plurality voting, you will inevitable have a two party system, and that further, any attempt to create a viable Third Party is not only doomed to failure, but is actively harmful to the interests of those Third Party voters.

    In other words, the Spoiler Effect, Like what happened with Ralph Nader in 2000. He’s the reason why Bush won.