Ertebolle @ Ertebolle @kbin.social

Posts

7

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466

Joined

2 yr. ago

Sigh. \

OTOH, "have a great 1440 minutes" sounds sort of like an uplifting Rent reference.

Relatedly, Amanda Plummer would be an amazing casting choice for a Trump biopic

It sounds from the article like the environmental destruction has been going on for decades and that it's already affecting crop output in some places.

In general: bad.

But the lion's share of that groundwater is going to agriculture, and much of it specifically to animal feed, so unlike with carbon emissions, this feels like the sort of environmental disaster that market forces are at least going to be somewhat responsive to; less groundwater - spike in alfalfa prices - spike in beef prices - people eat less beef - people use less groundwater.

Dax was 6 feet tall?

Don’t own an Xbox or PC, I’m going to wait until they decide milking money out of an old game exclusivity and play with the future GOTY edition on a smart refrigerator or a Playdate or whatever other weird platform they repackage it for.

She was elected by the conservative majority to a second two-year term as chief justice in May.

This seems like a pretty stupid system, honestly - when the composition of the court changes there should be a new election, fixed terms for chief justices that overlap an election for another seat make no sense.

EDIT: apparently this was a recent change, in a referendum, replacing a previous system where they conservatives were stuck with a liberal chief they didn't like; from Wikipedia:

After passage of a referendum on April 7, 2015, the chief justice of the court is elected for a term of 2 years by the vote of a majority of the justices then serving on the court, although the justice so elected may decline the appointment. Previous to the change, the justice with the longest continuous service on the court served as the chief justice. Opponents of the referendum called it an attempt to remove longtime Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, a member of the court's liberal minority, while supporters called it an effort to promote democracy on the court.

So they literally passed a referendum to fix the problem of the chief justice not matching the politics of the majority, and now they're mad that the liberal justices are trying to fix the same problem again.

That's actually kind of my point - they're spending the money on something that gets less effective every year, and it's not clear if there's any other expense that'll replace it. And most politicians hate fundraising, so if they can mount an equally effective campaign with less money I expect an awful lot of them will do so.

Sure, but isn't big donor influence largely due to how much their money can swing elections? If TV ads fade in importance and you can saturate your audience with cheaper targeted internet ones, rich guys are reduced to regular old bribery and you can only go on so many junkets a year.

OK, but:

upend a well-established political ecosystem for TV advertising

boost candidates with TV ads

Even my Boomer parents are going streaming-only now; political consultants still love TV ads because they make lots of money off of them, and the need to spend lots of money on TV also powers the small-dollar fundraising / "can you rush me $17 RIGHT NOW" machine from which all sorts of awful people likewise take a generous cut, but how much of an impact is this actually likely to have?

I'm assuming that the majority of members are fine with this, otherwise they'd simply change their bylaws to exclude trans women (and probably get away with doing so for the same legal reason). These 6 members were probably the losers of some internal battle who went to court to try to get their way anyway and failed.

MMP doesn't require multi-member districts; the extra seats are not tied to a particular district, they draw from a list of names submitted by each party.

Worth noting that this was not a great leap - the judge didn't rule anything particularly interesting about trans rights, he simply said that freedom of association means you can't go to court to force a private organization to exclude someone.

Just barely, though, and in large part thanks to the Democratic party's boneheaded decision to waste enormous amounts of money trying to beat Rubio in Florida and not spend enough on the much more winnable race in WI.

Foxconn is the shadiest of all of the shady contractors getting rich by whitewashing Apple's iPhone manufacturing

So you'd prefer it if Biden just, like, did a little fascism and sent a bunch of goons to drag Trump off to Guantanamo or wherever?

I'm a fan of MMP voting (used in Germany, New Zealand, and the Scottish/Welsh parliaments in the UK), where you vote for a district representative and a party and the parties get extra seats to ensure that the proportions balance out. It's easy for voters to understand - no ranking or rating or whatever - and it simultaneously lets you support third parties (because they'll get some seats even if they don't have a majority in any district), lets you vote for the best candidate in your particular district without regard to their party (if you like your local Republican but you hate national Republicans you can simultaneously vote for your guy + for him to be in the minority), eliminates gerrymandering (since party representation comes from a percentage of the overall vote), and makes every vote count (since even in a deep red district your blue vote still contributes to the national total for your party and therefore its share of legislative seats).

If that proves successful then we can explore other systems for national/presidential votes, but you're never going to get a serious third-party movement in the US if you insist on starting with the White House - reforms to support third-party presidential candidates are the sort of thing you do after you've got 40 or 50 minor party representatives in Congress.

'Cause I'm G PL
Yes I'm the real PL
All you other letter PLs
Aren't actually PLs

Yep. It sucks that this is the choice we have to make, but it is, at least until we figure out a way to fix our voting system.