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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.














  • 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.