Countless was a little under 2000 people (at least as far as Harris is concerned) That’s about half of what her predecessor in the same office did over roughly the same time period.

Now, that conviction is for “possession, sale, or cultivation”. Most paid a fine rather than serve jail time. We also don’t know the exact breakdown of possession vs sale vs cultivation.

We also know that Harris pushed for decriminalization and legalization in California, and has pushed some of the same as vice president. I think Joe is the roadblock there, even if he was convinced to pardon a bunch of people for simple possession.

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The difference between red and blue is often about 5-10 percentage points. But if you’re up 5, that means your opponent is down 5. Because it still has to add up to 100.

To turn a state green, that party would have to be up at least 50%.

You see how that’s a problem, right?

But while Green is pushing ahead, where do you think those votes are coming from?

If the Greens pick up 5% of the vote, they need to take those votes from someone, and that’s most likely the Dems. Now they have 45% of the vote, because percentages still have to add up to 100, the Republicans have 50%, and handily win the election.

For greens to replace, most likely the democrats, would involve the left loosing every election for about a decade or two. Just completely having no voice in government.

You see what parties don’t switch like that right? No, the party has to collapse, and then a replacement has to step in.

And in order for a party to collapse, it needs to be a coalition party. Like the Whigs. https://www.history.com/news/whig-party-collapse

Something that is unlikely to happen to a modern party.

Thus the only way for the greens to gain power is to change the voting system. Real voting reform needs either Approval or STAR as the voting system. (there are a few more, like Ranked Robin, but the main point is that it needs to be a cardinal voting system.)

The Green party under Jill Stein mildly supports RCV, a system that deeply flawed and will not actually fix things.

I will say, the voting system that we advocate for is important.

There are three common choices. RCV, Approval, and STAR.

RCV has some momentum, but is just a bad voting system. It’s arguably worse than Fist Past the Post, because in a way, it is FPtP. Or rather, it’s several FPtP elections in a row, dropping the lowest each time.

Which is where a problem creeps in. See, it’s drop lowest, and then never hear from that person again. So if they are the literal second choice of 99% of voters, they’re dropped in the first round and never seen again.

This leads to ballots that look like this;

1 - dropped in 4th round 2- dropped in 1st round 3- dropped in 2nd round 4- dropped in 3rd round 5- Guy you kind of hate and only listed because the rules said you had to list 5. He’s the one who got your vote.

If you had dropped your first choice, Your second through third might have won.

There’s also a version of the above ballot that doesn’t have a number 5, in that case your ballot is just thrown out as exhausted. Up to 18% of ballots get thrown out as exhausted. At least that’s what the data from California and Maine has said.

Most countries that use IRV (RCV’s real name) don’t publish any election data, so we use what we’ve got.

Anyway, Approval and STAR are both immune to shit like the above, because how you rate one candidate has zero bearing on how you rate another. Woo for cardinal voting systems.

You just completely missed the point.

You literally cannot “values vote” your way to a functional First Past the Post voting system.

And trying to get others to join in your misunderstanding of basic reality is actively harmful to your, and their interests.

Maybe that’s the problem. You don’t want to admit that you’re the bad guy…

Maybe someday you’ll actually understand then.

Your little party literally cannot win at anything beyond the local level.

Has your third party run for any local positions? No? They only show up in presidential election years?

That tells us they are horrible people who know damn well that they’re helping Trump.

The definition is that Tesla is shit.

They’re selling a spotty lane assist as Self Driving when it is not.

Other companies are selling actual self-driving cars, (even if those companies are fucking up as well) but Tesla is nowhere near that level of autonomy. All because Musk cheaped out on the sensor package.

Teslas will never be self-driving, because they literally cannot detect the road and obstacles with just their little camera setup.

They should not be allowed to call it self-driving, or autopilot, or anything else that implies that you can take your hands off the steering wheel.

The reason conservatives don’t like research is that to truly take advantage of it, you need a strong university system, and a lot of students.

And universities are breeding grounds for leftist ideals.

Education in general moves people to the left, but universities take that to 11. And that’s why conservatives hate it.

but you need to supervise it because you are both responsible and because it’s not perfect

Not self-driving then. Words have meanings.

Then it’s not “Full self driving”. It’s at best lane assistance, but I wouldn’t trust that either.

Elon needs to shut the fuck up about self driving and maybe issue a full recall, because he’s going to get people killed.

That’s not exactly how it works.

Most research is based around understanding the universe. Often called Blue Sky research (Why is the sky blue?).

Now that’s a very broad category, so you break things down into something more manageable. Like the lifecycle of a specific insect, or the behavior of crowds in shopping centers during holidays.

The point being that you can absolutely tell someone what to research.

Now, you are correct in that you cannot dictate the results of research.

Except that you can, and it’s the second type of research.

Goal oriented research, or maybe practical research? starts with a goal or a problem. Like a disease. The goal is a cure or prevention. How you get to that point doesn’t matter as long as you do, but in practice the way to meeting that goal is going to be more research centered around understanding the goal or problem.

Now, all that said, pure Blue Sky research has a guaranteed return on investment. NASA estimates that their return is 3-1. 3 dollars back for every dollar of their budget.

All that said, there is no ethical reason to constrain research topics or even to reduce spending on science.

That was mostly England. The Balfour Declaration kicked it all off, and then post WW1 British Colonialism locked it in, even though the people who founded Israel were actively fighting England to do so.

Proportional representation would be good. But the true fix is to change the voting system to one that supports multiple parties.

The easiest system that does this is Approval. The slightly better option is called STAR.

Both systems have proportional versions, but single winner is honestly good enough.

The actual plan is to crash the economy to theoretically rebuild it stronger.

The thing is, that’s still crashing the economy and the only people with the money to rebuild it will be buying up everything for pennies on the dollar.

A tungsten cube that size would weigh a fuckload.

To just deliver it would be an undertaking. There will be roads between you and the where ever this came from that are not rated for that weight.

You may need a specialized truck just to move it, and a crane to get it on and off said truck…

1.7% is more than enough to flip some swing states. Most swing states.

And two in particular have more than an average number of Puerto Ricans.

So yeah, it matters.

Not really. When the Constitution was adopted, there weren’t political parties at all, no one knew what the spoiler effect was. The smartest among them might have had an idea that there had to be a better way, but no one knew what it was.

And remember that as bigoted and racist as the founding fathers were, some even considered such for their time, they were extremely egalitarian towards each other. Most of them truly believed in a nation run by free (white) men. A nation of the people (white men).

A few actually voiced displeasure when candidates won with less than half of the vote, and talked about it with their French counterparts. A man named Condorcet actually came up with a few alternative methods of voting, hoping one of them would allow the best candidate to win, now known as the Condorcet winner.

The Condorcet winner is the candidate who could win in a 1v1 race against every other candidate.

Condorcet had a lot to say about elections and such because he was tasked with writing the French constitution. But then a rival power block gained control of the developing government, and they introduced a new constitution that they had written in secret, then ratified it and had Condorcet thrown in prison, where he died two days later.

Anyway, election science has come a long way since then, and the I’d like to think that at least some of the (white) men who first wrote the American constitution would have advocated for a better voting system had one been available. But not the Montagnards. Fuck them for killing someone as cool as Condorcet.

A quote;

‘The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.’

But he’s also a fat bastard who never exercises. His diet is shit, and yet he might still live for another decade.

Trump would get a fine, if he hadn’t violated the judge’s orders and been held in contempt multiple times.

Trump burned through all of his rich white guy privileges with judge Merchan. Delaying the sentencing until after the election was a way to make sure that Trump gets prison time.

See, if the sentencing had been before the election, then the Supreme Court could have held an emergency session to keep him out of prison.

They will not hold an emergency session for a two time loser.

The main worry now is if Trump flees the country.

This is one of the laws forcing Biden’s hand.

https://www.congress.gov/110/plaws/publ429/PLAW-110publ429.pdf

There are more, little bits slipped into appropriations bills and shit.

How does the Leahy Act jibe with laws that specifically require the Administration to sell weapons to Israel?