chaogomu @ chaogomu @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

A bit rich, considering you refuse to acknowledge the simple fact that the Mexican-American war was one of open conquest.

The entire justification for the war was Mexico refusing to sell the land that the US wanted, so James K. Polk sent 80 soldiers into Mexican territory, then launched a war when Mexico easily overwhelmed them.

The war went badly for Mexico, because it was still recovering from a civil war, the Texas revolution, multiple invasions attempts by Spain and France, and their own war of independence against Spain.

The US actually took Mexico City, but decided not to just take the entire country because they didn't want to get into a long, drawn out occupation that would have sapped resources and manpower.

The Spanish had learned that Mexico is impossible to hold through force. A lesson the French would learn under Napoleón III.

The US at the time was smart enough to not even try.

Moving the goal posts now?

It was okay to launch a war of conquest because the Mexican government was weak?

All because a bunch of American slave owners invaded Texas and started a war of "independence".

But there's more to the story. Mostly Santa Anna. He became a national hero for beating back attempts at conquest by both Spain and France. He became president and then sparked a multi-front civil war by centralizing power in his own hands...

But yes, he also killed some slavers. Boo hoo.

If a guy takes your car at gunpoint, and then hands you a fiver, he did not just "buy your car".

A peace treaty at the end of a war of conquest is not a "purchase agreement".

No. It did not.

The US did offer to buy the territories, Mexico said no, then the US invaded and took them. During the peace process after the war, the US then paid less than half of the initial offer for the territories that it was never going to give back.

Later, the US bought a sliver of land on the border for a slightly inflated price, but that was its own thing.

But you can't really call an armed invasion, and then a pittance paid out in damages, to be "Buying them all".

He killed his wife and son in an attempt to distract from the 22 counts of fraud.

He didn't just kill them out of the blue, it was a calculated decision in an attempt to use their "mysterious murder" to try to protect himself.

This comment right here encapsulates a level of ignorance that is hard to believe.

So first, yes. Hamas does rule Gaza. They rule through fear and violence.

They were elected to power, but that was almost 20 years ago, and they ran on a platform of being moderate and peaceful. They barely won the election, and only because the other party was actively imploding.

Once they were in power, they quickly replaced anyone who could stand against them. This is still how they work when it comes to government services. They few that they do offer.

They've refused to hold elections or give up power in any way. And again, enforce their hold on power with violence.

Now, a bit over half of the population of Gaza are children. They were too young to have voted for Hamas.

In fact, the only reason why Hamas is in power at all, is actually Israel. See, the Israeli government has had a hand in Hamas since the beginning. They helped amplify the ultraconservative religious message of the founder of Hamas, all in an effort to weaken Palestinian solidarity. Netanyahu personally moved to prop up Hamas several times over the last 20 years, all in the name of keeping the Palestinians separate.

See, the West Bank has an actual, functional democratically elected government made up of Palestinians who are mostly secular. This is the "Palestinian government" that you seem to be alluding to.

They're in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation. They are literally not allowed to enter Gaza. No one has been allowed to freely enter or exit Gaza for decades. Israel has them under a full blockade.

It bought some of the western states. It flat out stole the rest.

Daily Driver

Here's someone using the term in 2011.

https://xdaforums.com/t/what-os-are-you-using-as-your-daily-driver.919218/

And I'm sure there are plenty of older examples.

But some others are here from 2015

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34990

2017

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=222919

2014 (ish?)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2njaz3/whatareyouusingasyourdailydriver/

All that from a simple google search.

I've never actually had problems with Manuskript, but then I don't write anywhere near as much as I tell myself I should.

I also once paid for Scrivener, back when I still used windows regularly.

I seem to have a history of looking for an interesting piece of writing software, and then using it to write a chapter or two, then nothing more.

Another fun writing program (that goes to the other UI extreme) is FocusWriter. I actually managed four or five chapters of a story using it.

A program that's similar in many ways is Manuskript

I'd say it does exactly the same thing, except you just download it and go. There are linux, windows, and mac os versions.

Then for the closed source world, there's Scrivener. I'll not link it because it doesn't support linux. But same concept.

That takes puppy play to a new level...

The main reason why STAR and other Cardinal voting systems can help grow third parties, is they don't punish the voter for supporting them.

That 3 rating that you give someone, You can give a bunch of them and not change the 5 rating that you also gave.

One of the most common attacks against a voting system is called Cloning. You take a somewhat popular candidate and run someone who has almost exactly the same platform. Both then suffer from splitting the vote between the two.

STAR and other Cardinal systems are immune to this attack. There's no vote splitting, because the (initial) votes are completely independent of each other.

Things can get a bit odd if two clone candidates make it to the final two, but even then, they theoretically have the same platform, and the voting public should be mostly happy with either one.

But that's where the tallied "No Preference" votes come in, to tell the winner just how little they're preferred over their closest rival.

Musk moved his headquarters to Texas during the start of the pandemic to avoid complying with pandemic restrictions.

You actually have it backwards.

Ranked Choice (otherwise known as Instant Runnoff Voting) is the worse system by far.

It comes down to the mechanics of both.

See, IRV is just a bunch of small FPtP elections all on one ballot. This causes issues and extremely odd behaviors, that can result in the Condorcet winner, actually losing the election.

IRV also has spoiler effects and horrible counting procedure.

Did you know that to count an IRV election, you need to transport all ballots to a centralized location? It literally cannot be counted at the polling location due to the way the counting (and recounting) works.

Also, IRV is one of the only voting systems ever invented to fail the Monotonicity criterion, i.e. ranking a candidate lower can sometimes lead to them winning the election. The likelihood of this happening approaches 100% the more candidates you have on the ballot.

In Contrast, with STAR, You rate each candidate independently of the others on the ballot. You can have multiple candidates rated at the same level.

This independent rating removes the spoiler effect completely, because you're never forced to vote A instead of B.

So, you've rated all your candidates on a scale of 0-5, then the counting happens. It can be done at the polling location. Each polling location reports the number of ballots cast, and the total scores of each candidate.

This gives you a lot of data about each polling location. Particularly, you can average out those scores. This lets you know how the total population feels about any given candidate, not just how their direct supporters feel.

Anyway, the total scores for the election are added up, and the top two candidates are then put into an automatic runoff.

This automatic runoff is done ballot by ballot, if A is rated higher on that ballot than B, the final vote goes to A. If they're rated the same, then the final vote is tallied as "No Preference" and here's the important part, the No Preference votes are also reported in the final count.

So in your example with four candidates, You have to ask more. Do Red voters also like Green? Do Blue voters like Yellow? That actually matters in the final count.

It's not just "my top pick didn't win, so now it's down to my less favorite" (Although that does happen as well).

The best way to look at the results of a STAR election is to average out the scores. So, the candidates with a 3.8 and a 4.1 end up in the automatic runoff, while the candidates who got 2.5 and a 3.6 are dropped from the election.

Then each ballot is checked, and if the candidate with a 4.1 does better on that ballot, they get the vote.

The actual averages will likely be different. Districts that lean heavily one direction or the other might see a candidate with a very high average, districts that are more competitive will see winning averages in the 2s and 3s.

This would also change the strategy around getting campaigning. Less negativity and mud slinging, more focus on issues and driving engagement.

You can't win on just being "Not the other guy".

I look that sort of stuff up myself.

Now I'm not finding a source for the guillotine machine... I've seen one in person, and it had a spinning disc blade, because there are Jewish dietary laws that say you can't press the blade into the neck, it must be a slice.

It might also have been a case of an enterprising butcher being inventive and sidestepping the rules...

Yup, a bunch of people want to push third party candidates.

They either ignore the fact that under FPtP (First Past the Post), a third party candidate is always a spoiler candidate, or they've been paid off by conservatives to weaken the chances of Democrats doing the bare minimum and holding on to power that they should have been actually using.

Which bring up the second evil of FPtP, as long as conservatives are batshit crazy and openly embracing fascism, all the Democrats have to do, it not be conservatives... And sadly, that's a very high bar for them.

The fix to all of this is, of course, to ditch FPtP voting. My current favorite replacement is called STAR. It's about the single best single winner voting system ever created. (another link)

For anyone else who finds voting systems fascinating, there's an entire wiki devoted to just that. I'll admit to having read most of it over the last few years. I might need better hobbies.

Similar, but in practice it's quite a bit different.

Halal requires a swift cut with a sharp knife across the throat of the animal. Severing the spine is expressly forbidden.

The animal then bleeds out, which can still be a quick death, but nowhere near as fast as decapitation, which is most commonly used in kosher butchery.

The bolt pistol used in modern butchery can also be instant. You place what looks like a pneumatic drill on the cow's forehead, and then pull the trigger. It fires a stainless steel rod forward into the cow's skull. The rod is captive at the end of its travel, so you just have to cock the tool, and you can use it again (provided it's actually pneumatically powered, and not powered by a blank round, or something else, there are a lot of versions, even some that are designed to not penetrate the skull.)

Ah yeah, Lamp. I've not gotten it to work at all.

As for Lutris, I tried both Vortex and the BG3ModManager. Couldn't get either working.

I even tried a straight wine install.

So I've been forced to do mod entries by hand. And even that isn't working, but at least I've stopped crashing the game.

Fun fact about Lutris and BG3ModManager, apparently a recent update to Lutris broke compatibility. I've yet to track down which version, I've just seen posts on various forums from the last few weeks talking about it.

Last week I ditched windows for linux on my last computer.

And yesterday and today have been spent working fruitlessly to mod Baldur's Gate 3.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what's going wrong. So far, I've gotten a grand total of zero mods to work. If I were still on Windows, I could use one of two or three separate mod managers.

Sadly, this new laptop didn't come with Windows 10, only 11. Which was what fueled the drive to ditch it for linux.

It is, but most of the actual killing in like 90% of the world is done as fast and cleanly as possible. If only to keep the process as efficient as possible.

Fun fact, if you want ethically killed meat (if such a thing can exist), the best option is actually Kosher meat. There are religious laws and such, and the easiest way to comply with them is a sort of guillotine. It's an instant death.

The animals of also generally better treated than most factory farm setups.