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.

Why wouldn’t Democrats want ranked choice?

Right wing people tend to be subservient and just fall in line and vote Republican. People on the left tend to be less pragmatic and can be enticed to vote for Green or whatever even when it’s obvious they won’t win “because of my principles!” Someone voting Green or whatever will be very likely to choose the Democrat candidate down the list of choice before the GOP candidate. When the votes are tallied they will end up with more votes with a ranked choice system than they’d have with the current system.

The real reason why this won’t happen is if the GOP have a majority since it is very much against their interests.

I like CGP Grey and all, but power dynamics is an important aspect of poltics. An aspect he completely ignores in favour of spreadsheet thinking.

Yeah so proportional representation systems kinda suck. Israel has one and it ended up with a conservative party making concessions to far right crazies to form a coalition. Sure minorities are in the parliament, but they have zero power because the only thing that matters is the backroom negotiations between parties to form a coalition.

The biggest problem with FPTP is the name. Really we should call it a community representation system (which is what it is) and call proportional representation system a “party coalition” system, which is what it actually is. In a party coalition system the negotiations between party leaders to form coalitions is all that matters, everyone else is just there to fill seats which are owned by the parties.

In a community representation system each seat is own by a representative of the community who can vote against their party or leave their party. Parties are incentivized to keep the community leaders happy or they could lose seats.

If you want third parties, it’s better to go with a ranked choice system. That gives people more choice over who represents their community, and allow them to have compromise options in case their top choice doesn’t get enough votes. You don’t actually have to give parties full ownership of the seats (making them redundant) to have more options.

IMO it should even be hashed on the client side before being sent so that it doesn’t show up as plaintext in any http requests or logs. Then salted and hashed again server side before being stored (or checked for login).

But if someone got that hashed version they could hack the client to have client side hashing code just send that hashed value to the server. You’d want to have the server to send a rotating token of some sort to use for encrypting the password on the client and then validate it on the server side that it was encrypted with the same token the server sent.

Seems complicated to me… https is probably has good enough encryption, so eh, whatever.

Voting Green has the exact same effect as not voting. Yeah, it shouldn’t be that way, but it’s the way it is. There’s wanting the ideal system where third party votes matter and there’s pretending it already is an ideal system

You don’t get to an ideal system by voting for people that won’t have any power to change things. You make a difference by writing to and calling the people who do have power and ensure the people you call are at least sympathetic to what you want.

It is indeed not that complicated.

Yeah it’s a weird thing about parasocial relationships. You like someone based on things you’ve seen about them on TV and then you start feeling like you know them. But really, nope you don’t.

I think it’s fine to like famous people, but just understand that you don’t really know them. If you later find out they’re a horrible person well then don’t like them anymore and it’s no big deal. You only like the things you know about the person, but if you avoid going down the road of feeling like you really know them, it’s fine.

A ranked choice type system would mean a third party wouldn’t be just something that screws up elections. In fact it would probably really benefit Democrats as people who might not go to vote otherwise might go vote green as their top pick and then vote Democrat as their second pick. If the Green candidate won, that’s someone they could make some compromises with to get legislation passed. If the green candidate loses, then many of their votes would go to the Dem candidate making it more likely they would win.

Twice in this century a GOP candidate has won the EC without winning the popular vote. So it’s obvious why the Democrats would want to get rid of that.

But as it stands voting third party (or not voting) is just letting everyone else decide how things should be. The way it works now is you vote for the candidate most likely to care about your concerns (and who could feasibly win) and write to them and tell them what you want. Yeah it’s a pain in the ass to write to a representative, but it’s more likely to have an effect than anything you write on the internet. Be polite, tell them the things you want that can be reasonably be implemented. Also you’re probably going to have to vote in many elections to get what you want. But if it’s something you really care about you’re willing to vote in as many elections and write to your rep as many times as needed to get it done.

It takes time, but it’s more effective than doing nothing.

If you actually want a potential President Kamala Harris to have some good legislation to sign, you might want to consider voting for congressional candidates that will write the kind of legislation you want. And if you want to end the Electorial College bullshit, you might consider voting for state reps. And while you’re there, you may as well vote for Harris if for no other reason than you might someday say to your grandkids that you voted for the first woman President. That’s a better story to tell than explaining about how you were too angsty about “the system” to bother going out to vote.

The politcal system means that voting for a third party means you’re not actually opposing fascism. It has the exact same effect as not voting at all. While it’s not supporting fascism, it’s also not opposing fascism. So it’s just being fascism neutral.

It would be nice if you had a system where a third party vote wasn’t the same as not voting but that kind of system will never happen if you continue to waste your vote.

Most fascist movements die out before they can hold onto power long enough to transform society.

We tend to focus on the fascist movements that have obtained power on held onto it long enough to transform a country into a fascist state. Mussolini, Franco, Hitler etc.

But the danger is there so it’s important to be vigilant.

That being said… yeah, on lemmy.ml, anyone that fails the leftist purity test is a liberal and all liberals are fascists. Everyone is a fascist that isn’t an authoritarian with a red and yellow flag.