Former KKK leader David Duke endorses Jill Stein
chaogomu @ chaogomu @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 417Joined 2 yr. ago
chaogomu @ chaogomu @lemmy.world
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Biden wasn't that bad a choice. I would have preferred someone to the left of him, by a lot, but I can acknowledge that he's done an objectively good gob, all things considered.
That infrastructure bill is already righting the economy. I think it could go further, but these things take time. Even so, we're in a much better position today than 4 years ago. We could be better, but where we are isn't horrible for where we came from.
So yes, Biden has enacted policy competently. Overall a C+. Maybe even a B- but there are things I'm unhappy with.
Like his DoJ slow walking the Jan 6th prosecutions, and not being aggressive about them. I mean, it was an open conspiracy to overthrow the US government. That had the wife of a Supreme Court Justice involved, along with about a dozen former and current Republican lawmakers.
The sentencing hearings for all of them should have been held last year, and yet most of them haven't even been charged.
Then there are the genocides.... I can understand the ones where the US is not involved at all (beyond them being organized on Facebook, we should be doing something about that after all...) but the genocide in motion that the US is actively enabling... that shit needs to stop for Biden to get that coveted A.
Still miles better than Trump... And due to First Past the Post, that's the options we have. Come November 10th (for incumbents that win, Jan 10th for the newly elected) I'll be sending letters to my congressmen, and anyone else who's address I can find, talking about voting reform. Real voting reform, not the flawed RCV bullshit. But things like Approval and STAR.
Harris seems like the sort of person who will at least focus on the DoJ, so carrying on the Biden policies, and maybe a few tweaks of her own, she'd be in solid B- range. Maybe up to a B+ if she enacts some actual social policy. But no A until the Genocides stop, or at least is US stops enabling them.
I was ahead of the curve and liked Ron Paul in early 2008. He made some damn good points about the housing market back in 2007. Turns out he was right and the market collapsed.
That bought him some credibility, but then the Tea Party happened. It was ugly enough that I took a harder look at Paul.
Economic policy has a 3-4 year lag time until it's felt by the average citizen.
Biden has been picking up the pieces and putting the economy back together after the fiasco that was Trump. Just like Obama had to pick up the pieces after Bush, and Clinton had to after Reagan and Bush Sr.
To a lesser extent, Carter had to do the same, but Nixon and Ford didn't fuck the economy as hard as Reagan.
And if you go back a bit further, FDR pulled us out of the depression caused by Hoover, Coolidge and Harding.
The crash was due to the policy of Coolidge and Harding, but the depression, that was pure Hoover. He made a bad situation so much worse.
Kind of like Trump taking a pandemic, and making it worse.
Eh, it's honestly safer than you'd think. The size of the reactor plays a huge role in safety.
A reactor sized for a container ship would be literally incapable of melting down, because there just isn't enough fuel to get to those temperatures. You could then limit the ship's speed, and over build the reactor a bit, so that the reactor is never truly stressed during normal operation.
Then for refueling, you just remove the entire reactor and replace it with a new, fully fueled one every 10 years or so.
That's where you want your controls.
Other than that, yeah it would be safer than oil. A crash just means your reactor casing gets wet.
The main worry is someone cutting into the reactor to take out the spicy rocks... and there are easier ways to get spicy rocks.
Fun fact, -40C and -40F are the same temperature.
Then 575K and 575F are the same.
Why are people just repeating the same thing over and over?
Yup, at that point, round up Musk and Thiel, Leonard Leo, the Repubs who refuse to certify, the Jackasses on the court, the rich assholes who have bribed the jackasses on the court, and anyone who has any power at all and on project 2025 or their schedule F list, and put them up against the wall.
Biden should then pull the trigger on Trump and Vance (for that personal touch) and then take his place at the end of the line. Because once house has been cleaned, the cleaner is also reveled to be a monster needing to be put down.
But yeah, I doubt Biden will have the balls to do any of that.
Also, that site seems to ignore the fact that you can rate candidates the same under Cardinal systems, It's pretending that everything is Borda Count, which is an overly complex system that's only barely a cardinal system. All because their favorite system is Condorcet voting. A system with some serious flaws, but not as many as something like IRV.
Hell, their Range voting example is just fucking weird. Why would you have to choose to rate the candidates lower? If the two candidates are equally appealing to Dems, why didn't they both get equally high scores?
It's all nonsense. Just vote how you want under Cardinal systems because strategic voting only hurts you. Seriously, that's the take away of that site. Be honest and be rewarded, be contrived and "strategic" and you lose.
Rated voting Main article: Rated voting
Because rated voting methods are not affected by Arrow's theorem, they can be both spoilerproof (satisfy IIA) and ensure positive vote weights at the same time. Taken together, these properties imply that increasing the rating of a favorite candidate can never change the result, except by causing the favorite candidate to win; therefore, giving a favorite candidate the maximum level of support is always the optimal strategy.
Examples of systems that are both spoilerproof and monotonic include score voting, approval voting, and highest medians.
Strategic voting in cardinal systems is just voting.
You have to decide if you like someone enough to vote for them or not.
Unlike Ordinal voting systems where you must rank someone above or below someone else, Cardinal systems count votes for candidates independently of each other.
Your main avenue for strategy is deciding if you support someone or not. Being honest is best, but at times you might decide to include someone who you don't necessarily love, but find acceptable.
So, your example of the centrist. You might feel like they have a chance of beating someone worse, and thus you can mark yes on them. That doesn't negate the yes you gave to the candidate you actually love.
And if your guy doesn't win, well, that's an election. Sometimes your side loses, and nothing you do can change that. I will say, under Approval or STAR, you literally cannot cause your side to lose by supporting them.
(Causing your side to lose because you supported them is something that happens with regularity under Ordinal voting systems, often referred to as the Spoiler Effect)
That's sort of what he did while president. But Trump's pill slinger, who was likely Trump's contact to the Oath Keepers, got himself elected to Congress. And boy has he been a shitbag ever since. Not that he wasn't a shitbag before as well.
But sure, there's probably another Doctor Nick level jackass out there who will vouch for Trump.
Fun fact, we know how it gets into the states.
The fentanyl, or the precursor chemicals are shipped to Mexico, and then white Americans drive across the border and pick up one or two brick sized packages that then sell for millions.
The packages are easy to hide, and racist border control doesn't search the white guy crossing the border with nearly as much enthusiasm as they do the brown guys crossing the same border.
Windows has always had broken versions. The old advice was to always skip every other version.
NT, Millennium, Vista, 8... 10... 11... More misses than hits really. And the bad updates are turning hits into misses.
RCV does have some money behind it, but it also has some deep-seated structural problems that come up with disturbing regularity.
Which leads to a situation where the results of an RCV election can be so bad that the district/state decides to axe voting reform entirely and go back to First Past the Post.
This has happened a few times now, and it sets efforts for real voting reform back. If you walk into Burlington, Vermont and say "I have voting reform that will fix the problems of First Past the Post" They will tell you to fuck off because they tried RCV, and it failed horribly because it's a bad system.
So an attempt to get STAR going will face that much more pushback. So it's better for everyone to resist RCV and push for STAR or Approval.
Approval has gotten some wins, and is also picking up steam. I'd be happy with it, even though STAR is slightly better.
Can I persuade you to consider Approval or STAR?
RCV has some structural flaws that make it less than optimal. Flaws that exist in an Ordinal voting system but RCV puts a slightly odd twist on them, in some ways making them worse.
Approval or STAR on the other hand, are both Cardinal voting systems. They work on a different core principle and thus are immune to the flaws found in Ordinal systems.
Ordinal voting systems cannot support third parties due to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
I don't get why RCV proponents constantly lie about it. But then again, it doesn't actually fix the problems present in First Past the Post, because at its core, Ranked Choice is First Past the Post, just repeated a bunch on a single ballot.
That leads to some odd situations where you can actually decrease support for your preferred candidate to help them win.
How that one works is if you have A, B, and C, with the election normally being a contest of B and C, C voters can strategically boost A until B is knocked out of the election. Then B votes get redistributed, with a percentage going to C, so that C now wins.
All because C lowered their first round support a bit, while demonizing A among B voters.
This same sort of mechanism has resulted in odd candidates winning real world elections. Like the Burlington, Vermont Mayoral Race of 2009.
Also, if you add more candidates to the ballot, this sort of attack becomes easier, not harder.
Then there's Ballot Exhaustion. This is where your ballot no longer has any viable candidate left to transfer votes to. But here's the kicker, your ballot can be gutted down the middle before your vote can transfer. If you have A, B, C, D, and E, on your ballot and B, C, D, and E, get eliminated before A, your vote gets thrown away. Even if transferring it to B, C, D, or E would have had them win. It doesn't matter at all, because the rules of the system so that those candidates are out.
Even if literally every single voter puts B as their second choice, with no other candidates reaching that magic 50% in the first round, B is eliminated.
And about that magic 50%. It's not 50% of the initial vote, it's 50% of the ballots that are left in that round. So with Ballot Exhaustion sometimes reaching as much as 18% of all ballots cast, you can have a winner who is only supported by 41% of the population. Or rather, 41% of the voters in that election.
Let's see, other red flags... RCV needs to be counted in a centralized location, so you have to transport the ballots. That adds to the time that counting takes, and adds security issues. Makes it very easy for the people counting to steal an election.
Then there's the complexity of the count itself. That has caused problems, like the wrong candidate being sworn in, because the people counting screwed up.
Overall, the system is actually a step backwards from what we have, and gets in the way of actual election reform, because people say "we already tried that, and it made things worse".
The actual reform needs to be a Cardinal voting system, Like Approval or STAR. Cardinal voting systems actually live up to the promise, and allow third parties to grow and flourish without punishing voters for wanting something different.
Unfortunately that's not how RCV works.
There's a lot of misinformation about RCV, claims that just aren't supported in reality. And one of those is false claims is that RCV is in any way good for third parties.
At it's core, RCV is just a series of First Past the Post mini elections on a single ballot.
That creates problems.
I do understand Ranked Choice, and understand that it's actually worse than our current system except for one small area. And that's the elimination of non-viable spoiler parties.
Ranked Choice eliminates them from consideration.
As to its real world application, Ranked Choice is constantly fucking up elections.
https://electowiki.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election
If you'll notice in that breakdown, the number of exhausted ballots was twice the margin of victory.
All this stems from the fact that RCV is really just First Past the Post, but done a bunch of times on a single ballot.
You cannot solve the problems of plurality by iterating plurality.
It's a bad system that is, in many ways, worse than the one we already have.
See, it's that one thing you mentioned.
The voting for the candidates people actually want.
That's what it doesn't actually do.
What Ranked Choice actually does is remove non-viable third parties from the election. That's it. You can throw a sympathy vote over to the third party of your choice, but the next line on the ballot will be the major party candidate, because you certainly don't want the other side to win. Say you throw a vote for the Greens, but your next choice is going to be the main ticket Dem, or else you risk the Republicans winning.
The problem comes when that third party just reaches viability. See, if the Greens are eliminated first, all the votes on the ticket then go to the Dem, but if somehow the Greens slip past the Dems, then the Dems are eliminated first, and the Dem first voters likely didn't list the Greens as their next choice.
And here's the thing. Republicans know that if the Greens knock out the Dems, then Republicans win. So a chunk of the Republican base strategically vote for the Greens as their first choice, and Republican as their second. And by lowering the support for their own candidate, they've secured the election for that candidate. This is the only voting system in existence that lets you show less support to a candidate to help that candidate win.
Tell me that shit isn't broken, and I'll call you a liar.
And that's just one of a dozen show stopping faults in that voting system.
The next is ballot exhaustion.
If you rate A then B then C, but they get knocked off the ballot B then C and then A, your votes for B and C are thrown out completely. So if literally every single vote listed B as their second choice, B would be eliminated even if they were universally acceptable to the voting public. But it doesn't matter, they were eliminated in an earlier round so universal support just isn't looked at.
And finally, what's the little issue of the rankings themselves. All we know is that you prefer A to B, and B to C. But how much do you actually prefer A to B by. and is that the same amount that you prefer B to C by.
Do you rate A and B as mostly the same but then rate C as a sort of horrible monster who you only begrudgingly support? We don't know because that info isn't collected on the ballot. STAR fixes that one, each candidate can have the same score in STAR, and with the scale going 0-5 you can get somewhat granular with your preferences.
Yeah, the moment they started to gain any media attention.