Can’t wait for them to make another episode like the Brazil one and crank my anxiety to 11.

It’s hard to tell these days. It’s a miracle The Onion is still in business.

So then don’t carry flour and rice, go with pemmican or something similar, high protein, high caloric, high density food.

A brick of pemmican is better than nothing, which is what they currently have.

I know it’s stupid, but I have this nagging thought that they should use a narco sub next time.

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.

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

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.

The republican/right wing party attempted to overthrow an election. And they are unabashed about that. And somehow they still have a 3rd of the country still supporting them.

Is that not enough for us to qualify as having a real fascism problem?

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)

Agreed.

We would need election reform for that to change, and while we are getting closer to that state by state, I don’t think we will ever get enough states to sign on for the laws to kick in.

I assume you’re talking about the NPVIC. But yeah, we are getting marginally closer to reform each year. And public sentiment towards FPTP voting is changing, which is good. The only downside is that it is slow, and people seem more keen on rank choice instead of approval (IMO the best).

And these changes will never happen with our current system in place, so it’s a catch 22. Can’t change the system without reform, can’t reform with our current system.

Honestly that’s the case with most problems in the U.S., it’s just a bunch of catch 22s the whole way down, and the whole way up.

Yeah, congress needs to be stacked with representatives that actually give a shit about protecting workers and democracy. And that’s never going to happen with a 2 party system and legalize bribery (“lobbying”).

And those things won’t get fixed until people start giving a shit and voting accordingly, and/or we have massive protests.

I don’t think that’s a starter.

I wasn’t being literal. There are a million things that need fixed, a few of them you’ve listed and I 100% agree with. The one I named was just one of them.

IIRC about 2/3rds of americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That is not an economy that is working for the people.

We need dramatic overhauls that Biden, and especially Trump will never deliver. We need employee ownership of companies for starters.

nobody should use chatgpt to generate long rambly paragraphs complaining about nothing in particular with no point or ending or punctuation coupled with maildrop.cc as a temporary email

Gay - Anon was constantly terrified of shooters, which means they were constantly thinking of other men

That, and a land tax

as “literally anyone except felons”

Oh don’t worry, they’re revising that part too. They want no limits whatsoever. They want felons to have guns.