• 5 Posts
  • 135 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2020

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  • You said to not vote third party, so you can’t vote for rcv.

    Not only did they literally not say that… actually no, let’s just pause on this. This is so confused it’s actually kind of amazing. Explaining how first past the post works is not saying don’t vote third party. You could still like a third party the most independent of electoral concerns. And explaining the strategic reasoning for choosing one of the two major parties isn’t the same as saying you “should” vote for them in a moral sense.

    Voting to enact a ranked choice voting system isn’t the same as voting for a third part. You could want rank choice voting even if you favored one of the two major parties but don’t want them to lose narrow elections when they might be the winning coalition. You could hate the third party and still want rank choice voting. You can both support a third party and support rank choice voting and understand that they are two entirely separate things.

    And I suppose the cherry on top is you referred to them as “you” like it was a single person in a comment chain where it’s three comments by three different people.

    Truly a magnificent multi-layered piece of confusion, chefs kiss, five stars, two thumbs up, etc etc.



  • I genuinely do believe we’re going to look back this time as inexcusable. Right now, Netanyahu’s extreme right flank is now advocating for settlement of the parts of Gaza that have been ethnically cleansed. Specifically, they’re saying that as long as the army stays there for a permanent long-term occupation, that can be the first step to proceeding with settlements.

    It’s so much worse than even the Iraq war. I’ve seen by some estimates that the Iraq war displaced 2 million people, and the deaths, before they stopped counting, were between 100,000 and a quarter million.

    I think the deaths and displacements in Gaza probably are going to exceed those, and it’s concentrated in a much smaller area, and it’s horrifyingly closer to affecting the whole population.

    Simply put there’s no excuse for this moral atrocity.

    And here’s the but: I don’t see how a strategic attitude of indifference to who runs the State department brings it closer to an end. And I don’t see that that attitude is one of even pretending to try for an alternative. I do think supporting politicians especially in their Democratic primaries is a positive step. And I do think, as with the Iraq war, galvanizing a sea change and discrediting everyone who is associated with what happened in Gaza is necessary. I believe it is urgent to do something, and the actual channels of aid that can meaningfully do something right now exist entirely outside of party infrastructure of either party. But I also think, for how true that is, using that to lose sight a very real and very serious differences between the parties that also affect human welfare in numerous ways, would be to needlessly visit tragedy upon tragedy. I wouldn’t want to lose American democracy into the bargain, and I don’t think it’s nuanced to be in indifferent to that.


  • One of the most commonly repeated and least thought through statements in politics.

    Unions stand a better chance of advocating before an NLRB board that has Democratic appointees. The FTC is going to do more to fight monopolies under a Democratic administration. The EPA is going to fight pfas and lithium mining.

    And god almighty is it fucking frustrating to have to say this out loud in a serious conversation to adults, but Justice Elena Kagan makes meaningfully different decisions than Brett fuddrucking Kavanagh. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you can’t acknowledge things like this, I don’t know how to treat you like a serious person.

    For instance, let’s just throw out everything other than the Supreme Court. To maintain the false equivalence, you have to say with a straight face that things like the Janus decision didn’t matter, or that overturning Roe vs Wade didn’t matter, or gutting the voting rights act didn’t matter, or getting rid of Chevron doesn’t matter. If you can make any of those arguments with a straight face, I won’t agree, but I’ll at least believe that you’ve actually thought this through.



  • I don’t even think that’s true. In this context it’s just an informal turn of phrase, basically being used as an analogy or a metaphor, and we’re supposed to interpret these things charitably and in good faith.

    With that in mind there’s no reason at all why it can’t be understood as similar, even to the point of directly invoking the idea of superpositions, given that it’s just an analogy. There’s nothing worth litigating or correcting here, and any supposed misunderstanding is something that can be cleared up just by choosing to exercise more charity in the interpretation.


  • What’s the issue if they’re ONLY using this info to improve my experience

    Suppose they start out entirely benevolent. That commitment must be perpetually renegotiated in upheld over time. As the landscape changes, as the profit motive applies pressure, as new data and technologies become available, as new people on the next step of their careers get handed the reigns, the consistency of intention will drift over time.

    The nature of data and privacy is such that it’s perpetually subjected to these dynamic processes. The fabric of any pact being made, is always being rewoven, first with little compromises and then with big ones.


  • SSRN is a kind of vast warehouse of academic papers, and one of the most excited cited and well-read ones is called “I’ve got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy.”

    The essence of the idea is that privacy is about more than just hiding bad things. It’s about how imbalances in access to information can be used to manipulate you. Seemingly innocuous bits of information can be combined to reveal important things. And there are often subtle and invisible harms that are systematic in nature, enabling surveillance state institutions to use them to exercise greater amounts of control in anti-democratic ways, and it can create chilling effects on behavior and free speech.

    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565



  • Probably my 2008 Suzuki Reno. It’s coolant system was made of such brittle crumbly plastic that it would crack and leak out all the coolant, and I didn’t realize this at first I didn’t know to look for it, so I get off the highway after driving 20 miles just in time for huge plumes of white smoke to be coming out of the front of my car.

    I got it fixed only for it to crack again and leak again. And it became this nightmare of whack a mole where I’m constantly adding coolant, constantly checking my temperature gauge, constantly bringing it in to be fixed.

    And then the whole engine died on the highway and I had to pull over while driving to my new job.



  • Trump outperformed polling in both of the last elections, and the polls are much closer now, so if he even just outperforms the same amount as before he wins.

    I think the polls have tried to correct for this, and I also believe Kamala has huge and sophisticated ground game operation aimed at turnout while Trump’s team seems completely disorganized. So I wonder if that advantage in operational sophistication counts for anything.


  • Right, and it’s possible that what’s really happened outdistances what’s publicly known.

    I still like to believe that our systems are resilient against such shenanigans, that Georgia Court just threw out some sketchy b******* that Trump affiliated election officials were trying to pull. Literally every Trump court case fell on its face last time around.

    But I’m a lot more worried now. When the history of this election’s written, something we never thought of is going to turn out to be one of the most important events in history.

    I’m not saying this will literally happen, but this is kind of what I think: some random election clerk in North Carolina is allowed to trigger a freeze on the counting of votes based on their ‘reasonable suspicion’, and after recounts and delays, it starts trending Kamala’s way, so they never complete the account. The Supreme Court invents some new legal doctrine that says we can’t allow the paralysis of one state to prevent the determination of a winner, the court throws it to the House of Representatives, the house holds the vote open for 16 hours until Trump wins, with God knows what violence and rallies and stuff happening outside.