I hate this line of reasoning. People who didn't vote are equally guilty, because they did not care enough to show up. Or, maybe, they just didn't make it to polling station on time for some reason (having to pick up kids from school, or working second shift or something). You should always assume that the result of the elections is representative of what society thinks. That's how elections (and opinion polls, for that matter) work. Unless you have a really good proof why some minority group was actively excluded from voting.
There is actually extensive mathematical history to fair voting, the output of which is super not in use, and of which I do find plenty of the alternative systems more representative:
I'm not sure I'd use the word "guilty" - that suggests some wrong doing.
However I agree with your premise - trying to remove abstaining voters from the math is incorrect. Abstainers are explicitly making their view known.
That view is "I don't care, but are equally good or bad". (Which in turn demonstrates a profound ignorance of what's going on - and frankly folk that unconcerned should probably not pick a side.)
I believe it's fair to say "America voted for this". America is a democracy and the voters spoke. Of course it's not unanimous but majority rules.
And it's not like his campaign was disingenuous. The man was on display, and most of the things he's done were signaled clearly in the campaign. (He's long been against foreign wars, so the Iran debacle seems out of character, but then again it's in line with his dictator instincts, and he desperately needs a distraction from the Epstein files.)
Many people don’t vote because it is difficult for them, they don’t see a difference in their lives because they get screwed one way or the other no matter who is in power, and if you’ll recall the last administration was complicit in genocide which is why I voted third party.
It’s true trump is bad but so is genocide. Really hard to make the case of the lesser evil when it’s just variations on top tier criminality. You have to offer something to voters.
Yes many people don’t vote because of deliberately fettered access to polling and/or a generally correct understanding that the electoral college nullifies or makes redundant their vote in their jurisdiction. Your vote for a third party is a signal but essentially a qualified abstention. Your high horse however is so misguided and absurd- to suggest that you held a moral high ground because the Biden administration supported the Gaza genocide is flatly wrong. If you want to place blame for that administration’s actions, blame Citizen’s United, blame AIPAC, blame the DNC, etc. And write letters, protest, get mad. But facilitating the ascent of what is objectively, obviously, candidly worse to make that statement is insulting to the intelligence of anyone to whom you make the argument. Perhaps your vote was in a jurisdiction where you could assume the electoral votes would go to the Dems anyway, but that just makes it flat out virtue signaling. The left will continue to cut off its nose to spite its face to the peril of US democracy and world peace. You nailed em tho.
Voted in PA. I suspect that regardless of who is president next, from either party, US policy will be changing towards Israel. The right, because they are anti-Semitic, and the liberals, because they lost an election over genocide. If the only thing the establishment wants from us is our votes, well they're going to have to earn them. They have no qualms about being transactional with other folks. They just get mad that we're transactional with them because we're supposed to behave.
Well, Slovenia is a small country and has land borders with many others. Imagine that gas in New Jersey was $1 per gallon cheaper than in New York and Pennsylvania. I guess a lot of people would drive to NJ gas stations.
And i'm saying that as a guy who drives to italy to buy pasta, booze and parmesan cheese. Two bottles of jack daniels and the cost of gas is covered by the price difference (well... not anymore).
Not at all. Some Europeans have indeed boycotted American goods but Europe is still a very important market for Jack. I suspect these boycotts are far less common than you would believe from reading Reddit and so on. The vast majority of people in any country don't really care about politics and just buy whatever they like.
I think OP’s point was that it would do more than 2-3x the workload, thus them stating “blow it out of the water” and specifying “performance-per-watt”.
In theory yes, but in practice those drones would have to take a really long flight over enemy territory giving more opportunities to shoot them down. And it’s not like they are difficult to shoot down, they are cheap crap, their only advantage being that there’s a lot of them
You really haven’t been paying attention to Ukraine. You can launch them from trucks. from boats. You can make them so cheap defense becomes too costly. What people don’t seem to get is that you that much of modern infrastructure is not scalable to an age of war and chaos the US is unleashing in bid to shift power dynamics from economy (which China is winning) to military.
Pipelines have endless vulnerability surface as Ukraine showed and just do the math on trucks vs a super tanker.
> You can make them so cheap defense becomes too costly.
That's because the US chose to shoot them down with Patriot missles, like morons. Ukrainians have developed cheap interceptor drones for this very purpose.
As low tech as they are, they fly low, can’t really be detected by radar and you only need one to get through. Pipelines are long and can’t be protected.
Yeah buried pipelines are common but I can’t imagine Iran is going to let them be built without interference. Also, a 2000 mile buried pipeline can take 2-3 years to build and that’s without account for 2-5 years of planning, permitting and land acquisition phase. None of this is going to happen soon.
Someone once said that this is because Waymos are novelty, and they still behave a bit weird, like being slow and undecisive. Which leads to humans being super-careful around them. So the Waymo safety record is actually not their own achievement.
I guess we'll have to wait to one of the two things to happen to really assess Waymo's performance:
1. They need to lose their markings and easily distinguishable features (like a big lidar on top), so they don't get any special treatment from other drivers.
2. They need to be majority of vehicles on the road.
That would make sense a while ago, but definitely not in SF for locals who have lived here a while. For me as a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist I actually feel safer around them than any other car.
Someone also once said that the Azores are the remains of Atlantis. I simply didn't put any credence in it.
While behavioral changes around a self-driving car are plausible; they're common enough now that, at least where I live in San Francisco, regular human drivers should be pretty well acclimated to them.
That info is pretty outdated: they were slow and indecisive in 2024, but now they behave pretty much like any top-decile human driver. I don’t think they get special treatment from other drivers either, I can’t read anyone else’s mind but I treat them like just another car and it seems like everyone else does as well.
The other day a human driver in front of me was doing 30 km/h under the speed limit down the middle of two lanes.
On that same drive, another driver doing around 15 under clipped a roundabout on the way in and on the way out. Guess they couldn’t decide to turn the wheel fast enough.
I refuse to believe everybody is hammered all of the time, but I’m starting to wonder.
It is less than 10km round trip, in the ‘burbs. Driving with humans scares me anymore. Bring on the robots.
Ugh - either the commons is an unregulated 3D space or we actually tag and separate moving bodies regulated by size/weight, purpose, owner, occupant type, etc. I don't necessarily hate commercial vehicles utilizing the various rights-of-way but clearly there is a difference in momentum, agency, and general "value" between some human wandering around and a heavy robot.
recently (past couple of months) they've been much more aggressive in the ways that make a good driver a good driver - confident and assertive when they should be. for me this has anecdotally been a massive improvement
one of the things that i noticed in a recent trip to austin is that the waymo vehicles were far more assertive and quick than the human drivers so maybe that has been addressed.
US constitution says that starting a war must be authorized by Congress, president has no authority to do it on his own.
The problem is: over time the US grew so powerful, that the definition of "war" became blurry. "No, we are not at war, our soldiers are just dropping bombs on Iran for fun and profit".
EDIT: Another problem, of course, is that current member of Congress have no balls to stand up to Trump and reclaim their constitutional powers.
Congress made its mistake a long time ago. Power is very difficult to reclaim once it has been relinquished. And it didn't even take a Caesar crossing the Rubicon in our case.
I wonder if Godwins law and such did more harm than good in the end? I mean: yes, Hitler was a terrible person and Holocaust was horrible, but, by putting so much effort into convincing everyone that Hitler and Holocaust were so unique things in the history of mankind you’re basically creating a blind spot, where the resurgence of fascism goes unnoticed because everyone thinks “it can’t as bad as Hitler and the Nazis, right?”
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