From wikipedia:

Lev Parnas is a former associate of Rudy Giuliani who was involved in the Trump–Ukraine scandal and the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory. He was convicted of illegal donations to Trump’s campaign and sentenced to 20 months in prison in 2022.

In 2019, Parnas served as a translator for a legal case involving Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin and self-admitted Russian mob connections, who is fighting extradition to the U.S. to face bribery charges. Firtash has been free on bail in Vienna since 2014.

Strikes me as somebody who has a vested interest in adding more fuel to the fire. Either way this is scary and fucked.

I know its unlikely, but I hope they make another attempt and it’s successful.

In an ideal world, starlink should be internationalized by the U.N.

We don’t need half a dozen companies in every developed nation putting their own garbage in orbit just to provide rural internet for a minority of a minority of the planet. Those systems are in orbit, they can provide internet to the overwhelming majority of humans.

But instead we’re gonna fuck up our ability to use a load of space telescopes needed to help see potentially dangerous asteroids, and all these satellites burning up in orbit are gonna fuck up the atmosphere, opening up the hole in the ozone layer even more.

It dying is better than it being in the hands of a billionaire fascist.

Then don’t reimburse him.

Ignoring the lack of evidence or argument presented here for that, I’d rather take a slowdown than Musk get a single new dollar.

I’m not in the same boat, but I empathize. I want the fuck out. Best of luck, and I hope you’re safe.

Don’t need to, Trump is actively stopping federal progress on climate change. Kamala having zero policy on it, doing literally nothing and maintaining the status quo is always better than accelerationism under Trump.

I also mentioned immigrants, and etc. Etc because there are lots of other people being targeted that I don’t have the energy to list.

Trans people, immigrants, etc fearing for their lives, being kidnapped to a foreign death camp, and going full conservationist on climate change is a lot bigger of a difference than 1.3%.

Idk I kinda like being able to take a shit without having to fill out a form every time.

I just wanna make video games and eat carbs.

IDK LGTM

One of the currently open ones is this one:

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/pull/11

Hilarious

It’s already got 4 PRs

lol

Simplicity tends to sell better than complexity, and RCV is the one that’s known of already.

Agreed. And that’s why I think approval is such a big improvement over ranked choice.

“Tell us who you approve of, candidate with the most approval wins”

Is a hell of a lot simpler than

“Rank every candidate without ranking multiple as the same level, then we check if any candidate has a 50% majority, if not, the lowest candidate gets booted and the next wave of second choices comes in, repeat until there is 50% majority.”

And that’s before the peripheral benefits.

So far they’ve been more than happy to ignore everything except the status quo, unfortunately.

Agreed. It’s honestly sad.

My city/state has been warming up to these kinds of talks and candidates at least, which gives me a glimmer of hope. But for now it is not enough.

Arguably, RCV is just as complicated as STAR, and approval is simpler than RCV. And part of the difficulty in the heavy lift to get RCV is that it has some pretty rough flaws, flaws that don’t exist within the alternatives.

And the political environment is easing up to the idea of moving towards better voting methods. I’m not saying we should let perfection be the enemy of progress. All I am saying is that if we are going to be making changes, we should at least attempt the better options.

I absolutely agree with pushing the issue at a local level, however we should probably be aiming for approval or STAR voting:

https://dividedwefall.org/star-and-approval-voting/

RCV is way better than our current system, but even RCV has flaws.

We also need regulation requiring election reform within party primaries, because as of right now it is a clown show.

They wouldn’t be able to finish stealing that car before a thousand hungry lawyers ate them alive. Why do we let media companies do that?

They would probably actually have a decent shot at getting away with it, at least at first.

And to answer your question, it’s because the anger that companies generate by doing this shit ends up turning into piracy. Why would you try to punish a corp for doing this (likely wasting your time) when a cheap VPN and basic tech literacy gets you what you want?

The effort ratios are way out of wack when it comes to digital products. It’s easy to get around digital bullshitery, not so much in the real world where we are all car dependant.

Yeah, the NPVIC is… I mean, let’s be honest here. It’s not great. It’s better than our current system, absolutely.

Agreed.

But it’s far, far inferior than rank choice.

I’d say it goes like

Approval >>> Ranked >>>>>>>>>>>>> FPTP (popular vote) >>> FPTP (electoral college)