Changing the voting system so that third parties are actually possible.
You need a cardinal voting system, otherwise you’ll fall prey to Durverger’s Law and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.
I favor STAR, it’s the best system designed to date.
That’s some blatant Russian propaganda there. Blame NATO twice for Russian imperialism.
The “Russia had to invade a sovereign nation because they were talking about joining NATO to prevent Russia from invading them” logic has some holes to it.
The fact that Russia has invaded their neighbors 14 times since the end of the cold war tells you why one of their neighbors would want to join NATO.
Also, remember that time that Russia shot down a commercial airliner? The Ukrainians sure as hell do. That was the true beginning of the invasion, which is why Ukraine was in talks to join NATO.
And yes, people have the right to defend themselves. But the Israeli government has locked down the anti-terror propaganda, because Hamas is pretty vile as far as organizations go. It’s why Israel let Hamas grow and become powerful, and why the Israelis paid to keep Hamas in power for the last decade or so.
As long as Israel can point at Hamas, they have just enough of an excuse to claim their ethnic cleansing is actually just an anti-terror campaign.
Hamas is a full on terrorist organization, not that all terrorist organizations are bad. Or rather, there are some causes where a terrorist organization is the appropriate response. John Brown tried it. So did Nelson Mandela. But Hamas is a religious extremist terrorist organization. One that has distasteful views, and was sort of put in place by Israel for those views.
You see what I’m getting at here? Hamas is fucking evil, and Israel has mostly succeeded in making Hamas the face of Palestinian resistance against Israel.
I doubt many of the original leaders of Hamas are still alive, but that doesn’t matter either when Israel can just lie and say that whoever they kill is Hamas. It’s a bit maddening, and I doubt there’s an answer to it all except for the other Palestinian resistance groups to step up their social media game.
There was no economic or rational factors. The only thing that makes a lick of sense is the irrational.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/
Those are a warm-up, but then you have the purges since the invasion began.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-purges-in-putins-shrinking-inner-circle
Putin has sort of been the butt of jokes for years for killing anyone who looks at him funny. He’s a KGB stooge, who made his career out of backstabbing and paranoia. His entire inner circle were afraid to tell him the truth, because he would kill them if they did.
He’s never been “savvy”, he’s just been willing to kill as many people as necessary to secure his own power.
The classic authoritarian dictator who throws people out of windows for saying no. And whose vaulted military had body armor made of cardboard, because the corruption was so ingrained that every single level was accepting bribes and stealing shit.
I’m surprised that they’re still going, but Russia has shown the world that they’re a third rate military, at best.
As to Palestine. It doesn’t matter what the resistance movements call themselves now. Israel will just say they’re Hamas, and no one likes Hamas. There are good reasons not to like Hamas, they’re religious extremists who want to kill all Jews.
And for decades, Israel has funded Hamas behind the scenes, while coming down extra heavy on any other resistance movement. And now it’s all paid off for them because they can just claim that anyone they kill was actually Hamas.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/
This tactic of creating the perfectly detestable opposition has been used in quite a few places. For example, Greenpeace gets a lot of money from oil company heirs. Specifically the Rockefeller family.
I doubt anyone from Hamas, or Greenpeace, ever took orders from the people giving them money. They were given the money with no strings attached, because they were already jackasses. The money just extended their reach.
Everyone knows Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s a dumbass dictator who started to believe his own propaganda. It’s the dictator trap. Putin surrounded himself with backstabbing yes men by literally killing anyone who wasn’t.
As to Palestinian resistance. I don’t think Hamas is a good resistance movement. For a whole host of reasons. Which is why the Israeli government has been propping them up since the 80s.
An unsympathetic resistance movement can do more to damage a cause than not having a movement at all.
From now until the ethnic cleansing is complete, Israel will call any resistance movement Hamas, regardless of their actual name or beliefs. I’m not sure how to fight that… I don’t think anyone really knows beyond screaming the truth everywhere we can.
It didn’t work in the 1920s in Europe. But maybe with the Internet… Likely not though.
The main reason to electroplate things in gold is that corrosion resistance.
The thinner the coating, the better. Mostly because gold isn’t a very good conductor.
Copper is one of the best conductors available. But the corrosion is the problem. It’s nonconductive.
Also a fun fact. Stainless steel is a better conductor than gold. But gold is slightly easier to use in electroplating.
I’ll add in, Ranked Choice is a bad choice. The “edge cases” mentioned in the post can happen in any and every election using the system.
If Ranked Choice were the only option besides what we have, it would be a slight improvement, but there are far better options.
STAR is simple, and does everything that RCV claims to do, but actually fails to do.
Something to keep in mind for the push to reform voting laws after this election.
There was a write up from one of the writers who worked on the series.
This was written after he and most of the team left Valve.
Most of them were barely old enough to be fathers. Sure you had a few old guys, but most of the idea men were in their 20s or early 30s.
The Texas way. This lawsuit is pure SLAPP. Texas does not have an anti-SLAPP law, and Musk went judge shopping for this specific asshole.
It’s already happened once.
The Big Mike banana was super popular until the 1950s, when a fungal infection basically wiped them out. (they’re still grown in a few places, but are super susceptible to infection)
So, the banana growers switched over to the Cavendish banana. It was resistant to the fungus.
But the days of the Cavendish were always numbered because of how they’re grown. A seedless banana can only grow via cuttings. Which is how they’ve been grown since the beginning. Every single banana on the shelf at your local supermarket is genetically identical. They’ve been identical since the 50s, and the fungus has adapted to them. Worse still, the particular fungus that’s now attacking the Cavendish cultivar is extremely resistant to fungicides.
So yeah, without some sort of massive shift in genetic diversity, the Banana will no longer be a thing in Central America. Do note, that the banana is not a native plant in the Americas, and is cultivated widely in Southeast Asia. So yeah, the Banana will not go extinct, but it will vanish from American and European stores.
That “waste product” isn’t just thrown away.
They’re still hydrocarbons. Which are used in other places or burned for fuel… Which isn’t actually all that great for the environment…
Actually, tossing the waste product in a pit might be better, environmentally speaking.
The Factorio dev. I’ve heard he’s a shit person but not dove deeper into it.
Edit; did some looking and yeah, he’s a shitbag. He claimed that Statutory Rape was a SJW term, and that teachers should be able to seduce their students as long as they weren’t violent.
Then he used a dev blog to link to a racist misogynistic jackass, and when called out on it (The guy just wanted a disclaimer on the link) Korvex went on a rant about cancel culture and then tried to defend the misogynistic views, claiming that “maybe there’s a reason why there are so few women coders”
The lander did have a stage separation though, It left the landing gear and motor on the moon, and the accent stage took it back into lunar orbit.
Fun fact, When Newton was first working on his book Opticks in the 1670s to 1704, he had a lab with prisms, magnifying glasses, and telescopes. He never once used the telescope or magnifying glass to look at the spectrum produced by the prisms he was playing with.
But his work was published and available, which let others learn and grow the field.
Newton also sort of coined the word Spectrum, or at least stole it and put it to better use.
Trump is arguing that his twitter was “official communications”, and thus can’t be used in court. This means that the 34 felony convictions might go away now.
But the truth is that the Supreme Court didn’t say that every “official act” was immune from consequences. The more nuanced reading is that any act that the Court declares official is immune from consequences.
The Conservatives on the Court declared the president King, but only when they feel like it.
Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.
Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.
Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.
After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.
It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.
STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.
Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.