Liz @ Liz @midwest.social

Posts

5

Comments

1,119

Joined

2 yr. ago

Probably because most people are too lazy to explain that deflation is a bad thing and incredibly hard to get unstuck. The "ideal" scenario is one where inflation stays low and wages outpace it. A small amount of inflation is a way to stop billionaires from sitting on piles of cash. At least with inflation they're incentivized to spend it on investments, some of which are good for the economy.

Sure thing, here's an example paper.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3769896/

It's not totally vestigial, it helps regulate colon bacteria. People without their appendix take longer to recover from diarrhea, which is important when bad water and spoiled food are a more regular part of your life.

Yes. They had a control group with only black stripes along with an unpainted group. I would have to assume they also checked the paints for potential repellents, but I only skimmed the article.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6776349/

The two-party system. Regardless of where you live, if it's under a two-party system, you probably agree that it sucks.

Assuming we're starting from "choose one" single-winner elections, you need to first switch your elections to Approval Voting. This would make it always safe to vote for your favorite candidate, and the full support for every losing candidate would be reflected in the vote totals. This will weaken the two party system, but no single-winner system can dismantle it.

After that, switch as many single-winner elections to multi-winner as you can (like city council or a legislative district) and use Sequential Proportional Approval Voting to award seats. This will enable minor party candidates to get into office after the major ones, and the seat totals will look a lot closer to the vote totals.

A few places already use approval (Fargo and St. Louis) and a few places are just begging for SPAV (Cincinnati City council).

At this point it's entirely a self-referential joke. People bring it up to reference the stereotype itself, not to actually call the French cowards.

Yeah, but your fridge doesn't break every six years. I'm totally on team repair (FrameWork will be my next laptop when this one can't go on any further, my shoes can be resoled, I just touched up my jacket, etc) but a 10x premium doesn't exactly make sense, even when you factor in that repairability is unfortunately a niche feature these days.

CF being short for what, in this case?

So I looked them up, and the cheapest home-style refrigerator they sell costs $10,000. Am I missing something or are they really just that expensive?

That's not what a fail-safe is. A fail-safe is just what it says: the device fails into a safe configuration. In this case, someone has to press a button to quench the magnet, which is not really a failure mode of the machine.

A typical fail-safe is something like a solenoid valve. The valve has a default position when no power is given to the solenoid, and you should design your machine so that the default position is safe (whether that be open or closed). The most likely failure mode is a power loss, so the configuration is said to be fail-safe.

I really hope AI continues to have noticable failures. I have my doubts, but one can hope.

It very strongly depends on how you're using the word cult.

Yeah, what is it, 70% energy lost to heat in an ICE?

Even if we assume all the electricity is coming from carbon sources (there's no need for any of it to be carbon sources) it's still more efficient because power plants are way better at turning that chemical energy into electricity. Even with the losses in the lines, charging, and in your motors, electric cars are still significantly more efficient on a mile per kg CO2 basis than gas cars. Throw some solar panels on your roof and they become essentially carbonless.

I'd happily hang out in a sealed room with a nuclear reactor.

We got constitutional carry in Ohio. Just practice shooting the locks off.

I think there's a difference between experiencing objectification and being objectified but not knowing.

Most people have zero understanding of how programs work. I have slightly more understanding than the average person and I didn't catch that a crash log would nearly always be a text file.

Nope. I meant for running elections. You need multiple winners in the same election for SPAV to be different from just straight Approval (vote for one or more, most votes wins). With my suggestion of 5 members per district, the candidates all run for legislator of the district, and then 5 winners are chosen using SPAV. Any semi-proportional method will work, but SPAV is arguably the way to go for a whole pile of reasons.

Anyway, so if you're a voter in that district, you will have 5 representatives you can go talk to. With a 2-party system, usually 2 or 3 of them will be from your party. The legislature as a whole would be made up of some number of these districts, each with 5 officials. They all participate in the legislature like normal, there's no difference between the 1st awarded seat or the last.

The reason you do this is because the people in each district will be much much more likely to have at least 1 legislator that actually represents them and their district. The legislature as a whole will also approximate the voting population as a whole in terms of votes per party vs seats per party. It makes it functionally impossible to gerrymander because if you try cracking and packing you'll really just be moving around who wins the last couple seats in any given district, but you'll have a hard time actually changing the overall makeup of the legislature.