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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Best I can give him is that she got the job at least partially because she’s a black woman. Putting a black woman in SCOTUS was a campaign promise. One made early enough that I doubt he had Jackson already in mind when he made it. She’s presumably the most qualified black woman his admin could find, if not the most qualified candidate overall.




  • 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.orgtotumblr@lemmy.worldDeath Note
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    6 days ago

    I think there was a pretty short limit on how far in the future you could write someone’s death.

    23 days. You had 40 seconds to write a cause of death and 6:40 to write the details, and could even pre-write the details and add the name(s) afterward but the Death Note could not effect anything that occurred more than 23 days in the future, with the exception of dying by a disease that would take longer than that to progress and not writing a time (in which case they develop the disease but die when/how the disease would take them). The real problem is that you also can’t use the Death Note to directly extend someone’s life by writing that they die after they normally would - if you try they just die however they would have died if you hadn’t used the note. You can however use the Death Note to kill someone who is a threat to another, indirectly saving their life.




  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldHAAAAAAAANNNNKKKK
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    8 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.







  • The individuals at the company are the problem. The internet tends to comment like they don’t get this.

    You make it sound like if you make and sell a thing, people are required to buy it. If you tried to sell me an AI bed that would not function without an active internet connection, I’d laugh at you.



  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtocats@lemmy.worldMy cats right now
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    13 days ago

    The fourth is catnip. Always the 'nip.

    Once my mom asked me to clear out a planter box that had become overgrown because she wanted to plant tomatoes. I pulled up this 3ft tall stalk plant with little purplish flowers, and as soon as I shoved it in the trash bag, the cat came running from the other side of the house and dove face first in the bag. After a minute or so, it was backing out of the bag with the stalk between his teeth dragging it out of the bag and once it was out of the bag started nibbling on it and rolling around on the plant. Looked up what the plant was and apparently I had just pulled up his catnip grow operation. When he came down, he was mad at me for a few days.