Americans: Our system is the best because we don’t have royalty, we have a President instead!

American President: Plating his palace with gold and being completely above the law.

The five syllable elements are all weird radioactive things. If Al has five syllables it might make my beer can radioactive or poisonous. Better keep the syllable count on Al to four or less like all of the other normal elements.

I mean, some of the taxanomic divisions do have common names as well - jawed fish and ray-finned fish

Searching for “jawed fish” takes me here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnathostomata

But that’s jawed vertebrates. So I’m not sure which taxonomic group you’re referring to when you’re saying “jawed fish”. The wiki page indicates salamaders are in the Gnathostomata group. Are salamanders considered to be jawed fish?

I think this just goes to further prove that using english words for taxonomy just causes a lot of confusion. My search results for “jawed fish” also returns a lot of results from national park sites and yeah, that kind of terminology for a national park conversing with a layperson is fine. Close enough for a layperson, but for a biologist they probably should use Gnathostomata when that’s what they’re talking about.

Was that the weird chapter that was just a biology lesson, but was also completely wrong?

Probably, but it’s been awhile since I read it. But it would be insane to read Moby Dick expecting it to be a good biology text book. You have to read it as people’s understanding of biology and terminology in the past, which is why I referenced it in the context of the evolution of linguistics about ocean animals.

It’s why taxonomy uses latin for this… the definition of english words are based on common usage which isn’t going to line up to any kind of scientific categorization. English is always changing and scientific categorization is also always changing when there’s more empirical data. These changes are independent of each other so it was wisely decided long ago to not even try to make english words consistent with scientific taxonomy.

So in common usage, yeah it’s based around the general shape but it isn’t a whale (big mammal) a dolphin (a relatively smaller mammal). A shark might be called a fish but more likely someone will just call it a shark instead of just using just “fish”. This is fine for communication among laypeople, if marine biologists are having a conversation about those same animals, they break out the latin and there’s no confusion.

Also my understanding is that in medieval times, the word whale actually refereed to a specific species of whale… what we know call the Right Whale, which is nearly extinct. So a word for a species became a word for a group of species and then it was awkward how to refer to that original species. What kind of whale is that? “It’s a whale whale… you know the original whale… the proper whale… the right whale.” There’s actually a paragraph in Moby Dick about this.

English is weird and changes in weird ways. Just use latin if you want to be scientifically precise.

“Showing up on time” is the lowest possible bar, isn’t it?

I’m reminded of the Chris Rock bit about people bragging about “paying their bills” and “taking care of their family” as if it’s a huge accomplishment. These are just things you’re supposed to do!

I’ve always thought of it as Ethernet is the protocol, maybe even the cable (but Cat5/6 would be more accurate for this), while RJ45 is the plastic connector at the end of the cable. You could have a telephone use an RJ45 connector, but it wouldn’t be an ethernet port it’s being plugged into. Unless it’s an IP phone and it actually does used ethernet protocols and cables I guess.

But yeah if you’re using different connectors I guess you’d have to specify it’s an RJ45 ethernet port. But I’ve never seen an ethernet port use anything other than RJ45, so if someone is just saying “ethernet port” we can probably assume it’s RJ45.

One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.

And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.

Theoretically, yes… but the reality is that most people just let algorithms decide which junk they’re going to watch.

Waterfall is more like: You want to go to Mars. You start to build the rocket. Managers that don’t know anything about building a rocket starts having meetings to tell the engineers who do know how to build a rocket what they should be doing. Management decides to launch the rocket based on a timeline that’s not based in reality. Management tries to launch the rocket based on the timeline instead of when it’s actually finished. Rocket explodes. Management blames the engineers.

The various methodologies don’t actually change what the engineers need to do. But some of them can be effective at requiring more effort from management to interfere in the project. Bad managers are lazy so they’re not going to write a card, so they can be somewhat effective in neutralizing micromanagement. I say somewhat, because bad management will eventually find a way to screw things up.

They could certainly be replaced by the LLMs they’ve dumped billions into. A large chunk of middle management too.

Is that why autistic people are trying to convince everyone that Pluto isn’t a planet?

Yeah lettuce seems the biggest challenge to me. All the heads of iceberg lettuce come from the US. What pisses me off is that under the romaine lettuce it says “Product of USA or Mexico”. Which is it? I have no problem buying it if it’s from Mexico (they’re in the same situation as we are) but not getting it if it’s from the US.

I have noticed on some products the grocery story is putting a maple leaf beside the price when it’s made in Canada, but it’s not universal yet.

chmod 755 sonic

Yeah back in my smoking days I bought a unique looking lighter so I wouldn’t accidentally steal someone else’s. After a night of drinking, I noticed I somehow had two of them.

Sorry! I tried my best not to steal your lighter, whoever was unfortunate enough to have one that looked like mine.

Have you ever bitten into a road apple?

People come up with funny names for things sometimes.

But your personal experience probably doesn’t give you a representative cross section of Americans.

Neither does yours. The fact is that there are Democrats pushing legislation pushing to move towards Ranked Choice Voting. It’s only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it’s all for show.

There’s also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd.

Yeah but they didn’t form a new party did they? And I don’t think the Dems want to be dependent on the GOP running another unpopular candidate in 2028. They have campaign workers that actually talk to a lot of voters so they’d know better than either of us about the cross section of Americans.

Most people don’t know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don’t really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don’t even know about it?

Yeah I’ve seen all of these videos before. Problem is, these aren’t isolated concepts. There are very specific power dynamics within a proportional representation system that aren’t the same as the power dynamics in a community representation system. He doesn’t go into those details in the rules for rulers videos, only the broad concept of democracy is mentioned. He only goes into a some math on the FPTP video but doesn’t discuss the differences power dynamics for those different systems.

Basically in a community representation system (called FPTP by people trying to make it sound arbritrary an unfair) the power flows up from the communities. In a proportional representation system the power flows down from the party leadership.

Considering the “rules for rulers” video it seems CGP Grey thinks all government has to be top down, so he doesn’t seem to have even considered the possibility of power flowing upwards from a community. This is what happens in the system he thinks is bad, so I’d say he hasn’t adequately considered everything about the subject.

We don’t actually elect rulers we elect people to represent our communities. Sure they’re usually part of a party but because we elect representatives, not parties, that representative has the option of leaving the party if it serves the interests of the community they represent. Since parties can lose seats between elections they have to listen to the the elected representatives (community leaders) to avoid losing seats. People in a community put pressure on their representative, the reps but pressure on the party leadership, power flows upwards from the people.

Proportional representation only seems better if you think as CGP does and believe we can only be ruled over and we need to find a better way to select rulers. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of representative democracy.

It’s been a long time since Ross Perot.

I’m basing it on trends. We saw with RFK being offered whatever he wanted as soon as it looked like he was going to take more votes from Trump than Harris. He dropped out and backed Trump. While not all of his supporters might not automatically go vote for Trump (just as not all Libertarians won’t pick R for their second choice) it probably helped.

The Libertarians got what? 1/3 of the votes in 2020 than they did in 2016? Seems like they’re on the decline to me.

We’re seeing more of a push by various internet influencers (who knows who’s paying them, LOL) to push people on the left towards voting third party. And maybe I’ve spent too much time on lemmy, but it seems to be working. People want to vote for Cornel West or Jill Stein.

It’s probably exhausting for campaign workers to have to constantly explain they shouldn’t vote third party as it might result in Trump getting in. It would be far easier to say “sure I kinda like [Third Party Candidate] too, but I like [Democratic Candidate] more because blah blah blah, but the most important thing is you go out and vote!” and be fairly confident that vote will cascade down to their candidate. The whole “don’t vote third party” schtick that’s going on now may just result in that person not voting at all.

A lot of emphasis now is in getting turnout. If a third party candidate can energize some turnout whose votes will cascade down to the Dem candidate, that means the third parties are helping them instead of hurting them. And what people think now about how voting third party will push the Dems more towards that position would actually be true. Right now it’s not true but the internet is teaching them otherwise.

Well someone is being fooled, that’s true.

Well I’d say it’s still pretty bad with the super delegates and such. But yeah it’s runoff system of sorts and people should pay more attention to it.

But a lot of the “system is broken” angst comes from people being not happy over who the majority of people vote for. But that’s just democracy, baby.

But the Electoral College, yeah that shit is broken.