Instigate

…does the chicken’s power level need to be over 9000 in order to be safe to eat?

The US needs a a legitimate grassroots movement that is well-funded (fucked if I know how to be honest, hopefully it’s just a lot of small donations from regular people) that consistently lobbies for voting reform. The following changes should be up for debate:

• Replacing FPTP voting with ranked choice voting
• Instituting proportional representative voting where appropriate, particularly for state senates
• Referendum on changing the number of federal senators per state to better represent population
• Referendum on abolishing the Electoral College and instituting a simple, ranked choice popular vote for president
• Systematic review of every single electorate by an independent organisation to unwind gerrymandered districts; this organisation then sets the districts on an ongoing basis in an apolitical way
• Expanding ease of access to voting by every sensible measure possible (much of what AG Garland is doing now) and then considering mandatory voting
• Real-time full disclosure of all political donations to all political bodies (especially PACs)
• Sensible caps on political donations
• Truth in political advertising laws

I’m sure there are plenty of others but if all of those things were managed to be achieved, the body politic’s state and Overton Window of the US would shift dramatically.

At this point Trump is trying to delay everything he can until the presidential election, because he’s hoping that he’ll win again which will give him some kind of immunity against civil and criminal prosecution for another four years. I assume he thinks he’ll get into power and arbitrarily change laws to try to exonerate himself, despite the fact that that won’t really work because he’s being sued/tried under state laws, but I don’t think he’s smart enough to figure that out.

I would hope that sharing polls showing a trump lead would help insofar as it may motivate apathetic anti-Trump people to get out and vote where they otherwise wouldn’t.

Side note: the only reason he’s ever won anything is because the US doesn’t have mandatory voting. The fact that you have to encourage people to engage in the most fundamental expression of democracy is a little bit baffling.

The kind of people that eat up his “debating” style are people who treat the idea of an open debate of concepts the same way - that is to say that they’d be flipping tables and shitting everywhere themselves. They’re uneducated and hold unqualified and unjustifiable positions, and the only way to maintain those positions is to simply ignore or reject all rhetoric to the contrary.

They eat it up because that’s exactly how they’d act when faced with reason, logic, facts or statistics.

That’s a fair call. I just think all reasonable measures should be taken to limit the attractiveness of vapes to children, and that’s just one piece of the puzzle. It’s not a necessary piece, but I think it would have helped as part of a suite of measures to regulation. I think you’re right in that online glorification definitely had a role to play here as well.

If the government, 5-10 years ago when it would have been apropos to do so, looked into vaping and drew up specific regulations to have legal vaping, we wouldn’t have the issue we have today. Instead, because of almost a decade of inaction, we now have a new generation of nicotine addicts that they’re hurriedly trying to stop.

We needed regulated, plain-packaged and limited-flavour vapes available to legally buy at a reasonable price to quash out both smoking and prevent kids from getting addicted, but that horse has already bolted.

The cynic in me says they intentionally didn’t regulate vapes because the science wasn’t ready yet, and they didn’t want to accept any blame for legalising something that could end up to be pretty harmful in the long term. So, because they didn’t want to accept that risk then we now have a whole generation of vapers whose health issues we’ll be dealing with for 80+ years to come.

Spoken as an ex-smoker, current vaper as a smoking cessation method.

Racism is not an immutable concept. People are not either “racists” or “not racists”. Racism is a behaviour that people engage in.

Calling people ‘a racist’ implies that that’s all they’ve ever been and that’s all they’ll ever be. It leaves no room for improvement. Don’t call people ‘a racist’, call their behaviour racist.

People can grow and change. I’ve met a good handful of people who were raised in households that engender conservatism, racism and sexism who have been able to deprogram that bullshit and become well-rounded human beings who care about social justice. When they were young, you’d have incorrectly called them ‘a racist’ and may have driven them further down the conservative rabbit hole.

The way we speak to and about one another needs to get better. We need to identify that people are flexible and have capacity for change if we ever want to see that change. People cannot be bullied away from these positions, they need to be guided.

Your idea is right, but your numbers about population are wrong. Republicans definitely don’t make up 50% of the country given that your voter turnout for presidential elections tends around 50-60% and many who vote Republican in a given year are independent or swing voters who aren’t rusted-on voters. It’s hard to get a 100% clear number on it, but I’d estimate that Republicans only make up around 20-25% of the country at most.

It only seems like they’re 50% of people because they win a lot of elections, but a lot of that has to do with the Electoral College, First Past the Post voting, and a lack of mandatory voting coupled with low voter turnout.

I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.

This is absolutely what a ‘Smurf’ account is - someone who is very experienced or has a significant backing behind them accrued from other account(s) creating a newer account to pose as an inexperienced player in order to be matched with them. In World of Warcraft, a ‘Smurf’ is a character that you intentionally don’t let past a certain level and throw a tonne of gold and gear at so that when they come up against regular players that level they have an insane advantage.

Well, yes and no. Paying that fine once would just be a cost of doing business, but now that the precedent has been set if they continue to do it they’ll continue to get fined in that order. Those fines won’t need court cases, so they’ll need to be paid quickly and in full. Sure, the fine they received didn’t really hurt them but it will change their behaviour. It will also prevent others from engaging in the same behaviour.

I don’t think the EU wants to bankrupt companies like Apple - it’s not in the collective best interest. They need to guide behaviour by setting up punishments that are deterring but not destructive. I think €500m fits that pretty well - it’s akin to giving a child a timeout while their friends play or a smack on the back of the hand. It’s doing what it’s intended to do.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

• Jean-Paul Sartre

Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.

Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.

Apparently according to the wiki entry, it’s Daffy Duck that calls Elmer ‘Nimrod’, while Bugs later calls Yosemite Sam ‘Nimrod’:

The usage is often said to have been popularized by the Looney Tunes cartoon character Bugs Bunny sarcastically referring to the hunter Elmer Fudd as “nimrod” to highlight the difference between “mighty hunter” and “poor little Nimrod”, i.e. Fudd. However, it is in fact Daffy Duck who refers to Fudd as “my little Nimrod” in the 1948 short “What Makes Daffy Duck”, although Bugs Bunny does refer to Yosemite Sam as “the little Nimrod” in the 1951 short “Rabbit Every Monday”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod

It’s also such a dehumanising concept. The ‘First World’ is the Anglosphere and Western Europe, the ‘Second World’ is the Sovietsphere, and the ‘Third World’ is just everything else. How the hell are Eritrea, India, the UAE and Brazil in any way related to one another or even similar? What a stupid way to group nations that’s extremely outdated for the modern world.

While I prefer the modern term ‘Global South’ as encompassing developing nations, it still has its own issues - particularly as an Australian because we’re southern hemispheric but definitely don’t fall under the banner of ‘Global South’.

If it’s public domain, then by definition anyone can upload it, for any purpose, and monetise it however they see fit. YouTube could ban anyone else from uploading Steamboat Willie and only have their own version to watch, or they could let literally millions of people upload versions. They can basically do whatever they want with it now.

Yeah, as are NT and QLD. My comment was stating that all bicameral parliaments in Australia have proportional representational voting; not that all parliaments in Australia are bicameral.

Utterly insane that elections are held on weekdays. I’m so thankful we have mandatory voting, easy early voting, voting by mail, elections on weekends, and protections for employees who need to vote on the day they if they’re working in Australia. We also already have ranked choice voting by single transferable vote as well as proportional representative voting in most jurisdictions (all bicameral parliaments).

I think it’s even better to compare the US with other federated nations - Canada, Australia, Russia, Brazil, India, Argentina etc. as they’re all constitutional nations of federated states with separations of power between the federation and the individual states.