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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • Countless was a little under 2000 people (at least as far as Harris is concerned) That’s about half of what her predecessor in the same office did over roughly the same time period.

    Now, that conviction is for “possession, sale, or cultivation”. Most paid a fine rather than serve jail time. We also don’t know the exact breakdown of possession vs sale vs cultivation.

    We also know that Harris pushed for decriminalization and legalization in California, and has pushed some of the same as vice president. I think Joe is the roadblock there, even if he was convinced to pardon a bunch of people for simple possession.



  • The difference between red and blue is often about 5-10 percentage points. But if you’re up 5, that means your opponent is down 5. Because it still has to add up to 100.

    To turn a state green, that party would have to be up at least 50%.

    You see how that’s a problem, right?

    But while Green is pushing ahead, where do you think those votes are coming from?

    If the Greens pick up 5% of the vote, they need to take those votes from someone, and that’s most likely the Dems. Now they have 45% of the vote, because percentages still have to add up to 100, the Republicans have 50%, and handily win the election.

    For greens to replace, most likely the democrats, would involve the left loosing every election for about a decade or two. Just completely having no voice in government.

    You see what parties don’t switch like that right? No, the party has to collapse, and then a replacement has to step in.

    And in order for a party to collapse, it needs to be a coalition party. Like the Whigs. https://www.history.com/news/whig-party-collapse

    Something that is unlikely to happen to a modern party.

    Thus the only way for the greens to gain power is to change the voting system. Real voting reform needs either Approval or STAR as the voting system. (there are a few more, like Ranked Robin, but the main point is that it needs to be a cardinal voting system.)

    The Green party under Jill Stein mildly supports RCV, a system that deeply flawed and will not actually fix things.


  • I will say, the voting system that we advocate for is important.

    There are three common choices. RCV, Approval, and STAR.

    RCV has some momentum, but is just a bad voting system. It’s arguably worse than Fist Past the Post, because in a way, it is FPtP. Or rather, it’s several FPtP elections in a row, dropping the lowest each time.

    Which is where a problem creeps in. See, it’s drop lowest, and then never hear from that person again. So if they are the literal second choice of 99% of voters, they’re dropped in the first round and never seen again.

    This leads to ballots that look like this;

    1 - dropped in 4th round 2- dropped in 1st round 3- dropped in 2nd round 4- dropped in 3rd round 5- Guy you kind of hate and only listed because the rules said you had to list 5. He’s the one who got your vote.

    If you had dropped your first choice, Your second through third might have won.

    There’s also a version of the above ballot that doesn’t have a number 5, in that case your ballot is just thrown out as exhausted. Up to 18% of ballots get thrown out as exhausted. At least that’s what the data from California and Maine has said.

    Most countries that use IRV (RCV’s real name) don’t publish any election data, so we use what we’ve got.

    Anyway, Approval and STAR are both immune to shit like the above, because how you rate one candidate has zero bearing on how you rate another. Woo for cardinal voting systems.




  • 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.








  • Not really. When the Constitution was adopted, there weren’t political parties at all, no one knew what the spoiler effect was. The smartest among them might have had an idea that there had to be a better way, but no one knew what it was.

    And remember that as bigoted and racist as the founding fathers were, some even considered such for their time, they were extremely egalitarian towards each other. Most of them truly believed in a nation run by free (white) men. A nation of the people (white men).

    A few actually voiced displeasure when candidates won with less than half of the vote, and talked about it with their French counterparts. A man named Condorcet actually came up with a few alternative methods of voting, hoping one of them would allow the best candidate to win, now known as the Condorcet winner.

    The Condorcet winner is the candidate who could win in a 1v1 race against every other candidate.

    Condorcet had a lot to say about elections and such because he was tasked with writing the French constitution. But then a rival power block gained control of the developing government, and they introduced a new constitution that they had written in secret, then ratified it and had Condorcet thrown in prison, where he died two days later.

    Anyway, election science has come a long way since then, and the I’d like to think that at least some of the (white) men who first wrote the American constitution would have advocated for a better voting system had one been available. But not the Montagnards. Fuck them for killing someone as cool as Condorcet.

    A quote;

    ‘The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.’



  • Trump would get a fine, if he hadn’t violated the judge’s orders and been held in contempt multiple times.

    Trump burned through all of his rich white guy privileges with judge Merchan. Delaying the sentencing until after the election was a way to make sure that Trump gets prison time.

    See, if the sentencing had been before the election, then the Supreme Court could have held an emergency session to keep him out of prison.

    They will not hold an emergency session for a two time loser.

    The main worry now is if Trump flees the country.




  • There’s a law the Republicans forced through that specifically forces the Biden Administration fund Israel. That “bypassed Congress” claim is kind of wrong.

    See, Congress said pay this, and then didn’t pass a budget that actually allocated money for it.

    Biden actually tried to slow roll the funding the last time this happened, but this time around Republicans in Congress made sure he wouldn’t be allowed to slow roll it.

    And the money has to come from somewhere.