Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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2 yr. ago

part of every xkcd comic is the hover text.

Yes…that would be why you would link directly to the comic…?

This comment perplexes me. A direct link to the image? Why not either embed that link so the image appears here on Lemmy without clicking a link, or link to the comic page which has both the comic and the title text?

And I hope youhave learned to sanitize your inputs not fucking use generative AI for grading

Ftfy

You won't get disagreement from me. Being non-trinitarian is a pretty huge departure from regular Christianity on its own, without all the rest of their weird mythology.

But neither Mormons themselves nor, more importantly in this case, the general discourse, agree.

There's a good argument to be made that they shouldn't be, but they're usually lumped under the broader Christian umbrella

I thought it was "things a programmer says to a client (while rolling their eyes) after the client gives nonsensical feedback."

Ah right, thanks. I only searched for "meta", not "announcements" when looking for an answer to my question before posting. But looks like my instance stopped federating that community a year ago anyway.

Fructose consumed by real fruits is good.

Fruits are pretty good because they contain important micronutrients and fibre. But the fructose they contain is still just sugar, and not a whole lot better in its own right than the sugar in lollies and biscuits.

a bad president

Yes, he is.

Your comment could be construed as suggesting that the reason people should not boycott Jason Slaughter is that he's running a good YouTube channel, when actually the reason would be...he's not American.

Yes, but unlike the American Medicare, ours is universal healthcare.

Just a friendly reminder that text transcriptions of images help everybody. They help make the fediverse accessible to visually impaired users, obviously. But they can also help users on small screens where reading small text in an image may be difficult.

For me, it was this video. It came out shortly after I graduated high school, and though I was pretty good at maths, I struggled to really conceptualise the fundamental intuition behind trigonometric functions and the (polar) complex plane. Instead, I was relying on brute memorisation of the unit triangles. Learning about tau and how it relates just instantly caused everything to click with me.

Federally, the Reps has always had compulsory preferential. Things are different at some state and council elections though. For example, in Queensland state elections it's compulsory, but Council elections have optional preferential. It was an election promise by the LNP to change it to optional preferential in both state and council elections. Because optional preferential helps the LNP a huge amount, by causing some Greens and Labor voters to have their votes exhausted rather than going to the other.

For example, if you review the local candidates and determine that the Nationals candidate will best represent your interests then it doesn’t make any sense to vote for an independent just because a National candidate would ultimately support Dutton to form government.

Sure, that's technically true. But the fact that a Nationals candidate would support Dutton is part of how they represent your interests (or fail to). If you don't want Dutton to form Government, voting for the Nationals candidate is a grievous error. Because we have very strong party discipline in this country.

with the House of Reps using Instant-Runoff Voting with optional preferences

Not optional preferences.

Wow, that's interesting. I'm curious, if you don't mind me asking, what in particular did you learn from this?

Your vote goes where you want it. Preferences do not ever get fed anywhere in Australian federal elections anymore. There was a thing called "group voting tickets" prior to 2016, where you would vote 1 in the Senate "above the line", and the party could send your vote where they wanted. But these were abolished. They no longer exist. And they never existed in the House of Representatives, anyway. I'll address both houses separately, and pretend you live in Adelaide and it's the 2022 election (just because Adelaide is first alphabetically).

House of Representatives

You'll get a green ballot paper with a number of candidates on it. They are in an order that is randomly chosen by the AEC (but is the same for everyone in an electorate). In your case, 7 candidates, in order: Liberal, Labor, United Australia, FUSION, Greens, Australian Federation, One Nation.

All you have to do is number them in order, with 1 on your favourite, 7 on your least favourite. If your favourite does not achieve 50%, it'll go to your second favourite. If they don't get 50%, it goes to your 3rd, etc. In all likelihood, eventually your vote will be given to either the Liberal or Labor, unless you live in one of a small number of electorates where the last two candidates are different (e.g. Greens or an independent).

If you don't number every box, your ballot will be discarded and won't count for anything.

Senate

You'll get a large white ballot paper with a number of columns on it, each column containing up to 6 candidates. There is an "above the line" section and a "below the line" section. Above the line is parties, below the line is individual candidates within those parties.

As you're (in my hypothetical) from South Australia, your ballot contains 23 columns, labelled A–V, plus the "ungrouped" column. Independents can run entirely ungrouped, or they can form a small group together to get their own column. Like the House of Representatives, everyone in your state gets the same ballot paper, but it's chosen randomly.

In South Australia in 2022, Liberals are column C. Labor are D. Nationals are G. Greens are P. One Nation is S. You can choose to do research on the others if you like, but to keep it simple I'll stick with these.

If you vote above the line, you number at least 1 to 6, with 1 on your favourite party. For most people, this is probably what you want to do. If you vote below the line, you number at least 1 to 12, with 1 on your favourite individual candidate. The process is similar to the Reps, but instead of reaching 50%, they need to reach 14.3% (instead of 100%/2, it's 100%/7, because each state elects 6 senators). And, if a candidate gets more than precisely 14.3%, your vote actually goes to the next candidate on your ballot, proportional to how much more than 14.3% they got.

Voting above-the-line is the same as voting below-the-line for those parties in the order that party wanted. But only in the order that party wanted for their own candidates. So, if you vote 1 Greens, 2 Labor, 3 Nationals, that's the same as voting

1. Barbara Pocock (Greens)
2. Major Moogy Sumner (Greens)
3. Melanie Selwood (Greens)
4. Penny Wong (Labor)
5. Don Farrell (Labor)
6. Trimann Gill (Labor)
7. Joanne Sutton (Labor)
8. Belinda Owens (Labor)
9. Lisa Blandford (National)
10. Damien Buijs (National)

The only reason to vote below-the-line is if you don't like the order a party puts their own candidates, or if you want to avoid some of a party's candidates entirely. For example, if you kinda like Barbara Pocock, but you really love Melanie Selwood, and you're ok with Labor in general, but really love Penny Wong and really hate Don Farrell, you could vote below the line to do this:

1. Penny Wong (Labor)
2. Melanie Selwood (Greens)
3. Barbara Pocock (Greens)
4. Major Moogy Sumner (Greens)
5. Trimann Gill (Labor)
6. Joanne Sutton (Labor)
7. Belinda Owens (Labor)
8. Lisa Blandford (National)
9. Damien Buijs (National)

The other reason to vote below-the-line is if you want to vote for some of the candidates in that "ungrouped" section.

For the vast majority of people, there's very little reason to do this, just vote above the line. Your vote for the Greens can never go to any other party without you choosing to number that party.

Because you only have to number up to 6 in the Senate, it is possible for your vote to be "exhausted". In this case, it is as though you never voted at all. It does not make your vote for the candidates you did vote for any stronger than it otherwise would be. All it does is make it easier for the parties you disagree with the most to win. Because of this, I would strongly encourage you to keep numbering all the way until you have numbered every party with any reasonable chance of winning a seat. That means make sure your numbers include: Greens, Labor, LNP (or Liberals and Nationals), One Nation, Trumpet of Patriots, Nick Xenophon, any independents who are particularly strong, like David Pocock in the ACT.

You don't have to do this, but I recommend you do, because not doing it increases the chance that the party you like the least will win. For example, you might dislike Labor 90% but dislike the LNP 99% and dislike One Nation 99.9%. If you don't number all three of those parties somewhere in your list, it is more likely that One Nation will end up winning the seat, or the LNP will, rather than Labor. But it won't increase the chance a party you like wins, such as the Greens or Animal Justice Party. If you think Labor winning would be better than the LNP, or the LNP would be better than One Nation...even by a miniscule amount, you should number them all.

At the last election, I made the mistake of not doing this. I stopped once I got to Labor, I think, or maybe a few smaller parties after Labor. But I didn't number LNP and One Nation. And unfortunately, One Nation ended up winning the last seat in Queensland, by a small margin, over the LNP. I don't like either party, but, well...one is clearly worse than the other. I won't be making that mistake again.

Timing

Close of Rolls is 7th April. If you haven't already, make sure you're enrolled and have your address updated with the AEC by this date.

Declaration of nominations is 11th April. After this date you'll know 100% everyone who is running in your seat for the House of Representatives and in your state for the Senate, and can do research. In the meantime, this Wikipedia page lists most of the major candidates from most parties.

I hope that helps!

Out of interest, are the alternatives compatible with Lego? As in, made to the same sizes?

Mainly it's just a typical conservative culture war thing. Bikes are for the elite leftists, so we must get rid of them.

The usual argument against bike lanes is that they take away space from cars and therefore make traffic worse. It doesn't matter to conservatives that this isn't true, and they actually reduce traffic.