You sure they're feigning?

It's like you're mentally incapable of reading a comment and responding to the words in it.

And that's how you permanently destabilize a market economy!

I know Lemmy isn't the place to speak badly of anyone far to the left, but honestly?

If they aren't going to be persuaded to vote Harris by the other side of the ticket, I'm not optimistic they'll be persuaded by people on the Internet being sweet and polite to them.

So imo, who gives a shit about insulting them? It's pretty clear OP wasn't intending a post like this to win hearts and minds.

Interesting that it works the other way...I assume that in that scenario, there's also no guarantee that the table would be anywhere close to level in whatever position eliminates wobble?

I'd be totally onboard with a system where they ran it as a tax incentive to vote. Better yet if it were a flat, fixed amount.

Like, in every precinct, you get your name checked off in the voter roll when you vote. It makes no record of who you vote for, only that you did, in fact, go to the polls and exercised your right.

Somehow export that data, send it to the IRS for cross referencing, and at tax time, if you voted in that year, it adds $100 to your tax return. Not a percentage of your income (which benefits the wealthy more than the poor) just a flat amount that basically is the government thanking you for voting. If you didn't vote there's no penalty... there's just no reward.

...that said, this system would depend completely on having election day become a national holiday with businesses closed, etc. Or at the very least, mandating that employers nationwide must schedule every worker for a half day, maximum, on election day, with the other half day being a paid holiday...which would cause an absolute uproar in American politics.

The only thing I know about vesicles is that microvesicles are gross... thanks to paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler.

What little blue house?

I get the concern, and it's a good concern to have when you're talking about what would be such a huge shift in so many ecosystems...

...buuuuuut...

I have to believe this change would happen slowly... mosquitoes wouldn't just go extinct over a holiday weekend. It'd take years, if not decades, of dedication to the eradication strategy and even then, certain populations may prove immune to the best efforts of science.

That being said, even if it did execute as planned, I feel like the gradual decline of the mosquito would coincide with a gradual increase in other invertebrate species that would fill that niche. So as mosquito populations slowly declined in a local pond or creek, you'd see things like say chironomids (midges) thriving with the reduced competition for habitat, and the fish that ate mosquito larvae replacing that part of their diet with more midges.

Not saying there couldn't be other complications, but I don't think we'd see results fast enough that we'd end up with a broken link of the food chain leading to ecosystem collapse.

This is one of those things that works in a simulated environment but not in practice in the real world.

That's just so wildly not true that I can't believe you didn't work it out for yourself in the time it took you to type that up.

To test your theory, envision a floor that is a perfectly level pane of glass. Then picture a 4 legged table where one leg is just an eighth inch shorter than the other 3.

You can spin that table all day and there's never going to be a position where it doesn't wobble.

I wouldn't want to make martyrs out of them, which is what that would do.

Instead, have a significant law enforcement presence on standby, and if things go that way, call them in, and round up every single one of them, in the moment, and put them all in jail, pending prosecution.

Speedy trial, sure, but another event like that will easily take months for investigators to sort out all the details and build the state's case against them. Meanwhile, they're all sitting in cells, losing their jobs, falling behind on rent and payments, having things repossessed, bringing shame and embarrassment to their families, and just so the state can't be accused of any sneaky legal maneuvers, their names and faces are to be plastered all over the media.

And bring reasonable charges, no plea deals or consideration of good behavior or lack of prior issues. When these people come out the other end of their sentences (years from now) make sure they have a nice felony conviction dogging any attempts to get their lives back on track for the next decade or three.

Make their actions and the consequences truly hurt. For them and their families. Make the spouses and children feel the pain, create resentment toward their flawed ideology that will last for a generation. And again, make it public. If these idiots want to overthrow our government, they don't get to slink back into the shadows of whatever armpit they crawled out of for the next 4 years. Let the media hound them, cameras in the street in front of the house, investigative reporters digging up embarrassing details of how they lost their jobs, the whole nine yards. Make their lives suck bad enough that the neighbor's wife starts telling her husband, "You can be pro-Trump all you like, but so help me, if you bring that shit storm to our family, I will divorce you and take the kids somewhere safe so fast your head will spin!"

In short, don't make martyrs out of them, make examples out of them.

I've long felt that regardless of the levels of "we factored that into our results" that pollsters can accomplish, at the end of the day, these polls can only survey that demographic of "people who agreed to be polled".

That being said, I feel that Trump gets a slight advantage in any advanced polling thanks to his cult of personality: between Trump and any opponent thus far, a greater percentage of Trump's followers are more likely to be "loud and proud" enough to want to have their voice heard by a pollster.

I feel this effect is even more pronounced now, with a significant portion of the voting public falling into the camp of "conservative, but put off by Jan. 6th". People who voted for Trump twice but who won't this year. These people are also less likely to want to participate in polls.

Where I feel this effect may have tricky implications is whether they stick to their beliefs in the polling booth or just cave in the final moment and still vote Trump...or if they simply don't vote at the top of the ticket (or vote 3rd party)...but still vote for Republicans down-ticket.

While I'm no pollster, I would not be surprised to find that Trump underperforms vs projections, even as the GOP overperforms in House and Senate elections.

Exactly.

My thought when opening the post was basically, "Can you imagine the depths that American corporations would sink to in a market where they can totally conceal the flavor, size, quality, etc. of their products until after the sale, and not have anyone from the company present, making them totally immune to any negative feedback?"

Presumably the companies behind these things in Japan are at least delivering a somewhat acceptable food item. I wouldn't be surprised in any way to find an American version of this thing dispensing literal dead rats.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Marjorie Taylor Greene looks like the second or third pic from an Animorphs cover.

As beautifully as the name fits, I feel bad for the actual muskrats of our creeks and marshes.

Share your art, not your fart!

It's really impossible to keep this brief, but I'll try to keep it understandable:

The EC is a body of "electors", who serve as an intermediary body between the direct democracy of a popular national vote and the actual selection of a president. Their purpose is literally and intentionally to serve as a middleman, both to give a safety net to the ruling classes to make sure that whoever wins an election is someone they approve of, as well as to install a system that takes a national popular vote and basically applies an overlay to it...an overlay that leaves the process open to manipulation, stacking the odds, etc.

I'm not just saying this as a criticism of the system (though it is), this is the explicit purpose of the existence of the system.

Now to the nuts and bolts:

The US has a federal government with three branches: the executive (headed up by the president and including all of the various "Departments" like the departments of State (handling all diplomatic affairs), Defense (the military), Justice Department (FBI), Interior (National Park Service), Education, Agriculture, Homeland Security, etc.

Then there's the Judicial Branch, which is the federal court system, spearheaded by the Supreme Court. In addition to criminal trials involving federal crimes, they also have the responsibility of deciding on whether laws or actions of other government bodies are constitutional. If not, they have the authority to strike them down.

Last there's the legislative branch, which is responsible for creating laws and deciding how to spend money. Within the legislative branch, there are two bodies: the Senate, and the House of Representatives. This is because when the government was being created, states were much more independent than they are now, and there was a serious disagreement over how not only the people, but also the states would be represented in federal government.

So for the House, the number of Representatives each state sends is (roughly) proportional to that state's population; ie. a state with more people living in it will have more representatives than a state with fewer people living in it. The specifics have changed over time, and the way this system works is another issue, but that discussion is for another time.

However, smaller states, and (especially) states with slaves were concerned that even though they had a serious impact on the nation, they had a small voice in government. They wanted a system where their state was on equal footing with more populous states. Where just because they had less people (and by "people", in that time, they of course meant "land owning white male people"), they wouldn't have less power.

Thus there were two concessions given to these states to get them to join the union:

First, the three-fifths compromise: when determining population (to see how many representatives each state could send to the House), states were allowed to count each slave living in that state as three-fifths (0.6) of a person. Yes, these slaves, who their states regarded as property any other time, and who sure as hell weren't allowed to vote...were nonetheless to be allowed to count toward how much voting power their owners would have.

And second...the Senate. The Senate is the other house of Congress, where instead of determining members by population, it's much simpler: every state gets two. Regardless of population. This puts the smallest state on equal footing with the largest in the Senate.

And since both chambers of Congress (the Senate and the House) must pass a bill in order for it to become law, this is why it's so hard to get anything done for Congress.

SO!

Now that we know about the house and Senate and why and how they are the way they are... what's that have to do with the electoral college?

Well...the number of electors from each state are determined by adding up the number of Representatives and Senators that the state sends to Congress. So a small population state like say, Wyoming has one representative because very few people live there...and they get two senators because they are a state and all states get two. 2 + 1 = 3. So in a presidential election, Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes. For a more populous state, like my home state of Pennsylvania, we've got 17 representatives. Adding our two senators to that means that Pennsylvania gets 19 electoral votes for president.

Adding up all these electoral votes, it works out such that whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes wins the presidency.

So you might be thinking, "Hmm... sounds like proportional voting and democracy with extra steps... what's the big deal?"

Well... there's two issues going on:

First: It's only proportional in allocation, but not so much in casting those votes. Of all 50 states, all but two (Maine and Nebraska) are set up such that whoever wins the state wins all of that state's electoral votes. So take my Pennsylvania for example: we've got about 13 million people living here. Obviously not everyone can vote, and not everyone that can vote will vote, but if next month, let's say all 13 million of us vote...if 12,999,999 people vote for Trump and 1 person votes for Harris, Trump wins all 19 votes. That makes sense. However, if Trump gets 6,500,001 votes and Harris gets 5,999,999 votes, that two vote difference means that Trump still gets all 19 votes. We don't split them so that he gets 10 and she gets 9. Winner take all.

Not only does this distort the popular vote, but it also has the effect of making a narrow victory in one area the same as a landslide in another.

Second: With the way votes are allocated, the fewest that any state can have is three (one representative and two senators). Even if ten people lived in that state, they still get three votes in the electoral college. Meanwhile, with the way congressional laws work, states with bigger populations do get more representatives...but as a state's population gets bigger and bigger, even though they get more electoral votes, each of those votes encompasses more and more people.

So looking (approximately) at Wyoming and California: Wyoming has a population of 582,000 and gets 3 votes, California has a population of 39,000,000 and gets 54 votes. That means that every vote in Wyoming represents about 194,000 residents, while every vote in California represents about 723,000 residents.

Doing the math, this means that every vote in Wyoming carries about 3.73x more power than a vote in California.

So in summary: the biggest criticisms of the electoral college are:

1. The lopsided way votes are allocated in the first place.

2. The winner-take-all system awarding the same number of votes for a landslide and a narrow victory distorting the actual voting numbers.

3. The lopsided allocation resulting in a situation where some Americans living in low population states having dramatically more power than others, based simply on where they live.

Of course these issues lead to lots of other weirdness and wrongness...for example: with the winner take all system, candidates don't even try to win states that are projected to safely go to one candidate or the other...they focus all attention on "battleground" states where the election is set to be close, ignoring millions of people nationwide because they happen to live in a state that's not competitive. A national popular vote would eliminate state political boundaries and make everyone's vote matter equally.

Likewise, this is how you end up with a case like 2016: more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump...but those people lived in the wrong states, so basically she won by bigger margins but the margins meant nothing because he won narrow victories in more areas...so even though more people wanted her to be president, because of the electoral college, he got enough votes in the right geographical areas to win the presidency with fewer votes.

Well...fuck em, I guess!

If they're charging so much that the local govt needs to pass that on in the form of a $5 fee on a $9 payment, they're either gouging, or have an unsustainable business model.

Either way, fuck 'em.

There's no justification from a pure convenience standpoint, but I could respect the pettiness if the electric company ran their shit like one local government office in my hometown, where there was this small annual fee they charged like $9 for...but then to pay it, you could either mail in a check, hand deliver cash or check or card...or pay online...where they added a $5 "convenience fee" to a sub-$10 payment.

You bet your ass that I paid that shit in person every year, in loose change, and requested a receipt (which they had to write up manually because they didn't have a system to process and print one).