Mastodon has definitely improved, but more to the point, there’s really nothing else. Particularly not anything that anyone is using. Unless you widen your definition to include Bluesky.

Honestly, I’d say that Mastodon’s perceived complexity in the past was kind of an illusion anyway. The problem of choosing a server was really made out to be this huge hurdle, when in fact it was no big deal at all; I was a member of several different servers over time, and I didn’t feel like my experience was substantially different on any of them. Just join one that seems interesting or is near you or whatever, and you’ll be fine. After that, it operates pretty much the same as Twitter did. Following people on other servers can be a little bit trickier on web, but in the app it’s pretty seamless.

Indiana was a blue state in 2008. It could happen.

Yeah, this is a bonkers map. The idea of districting someone on North Meridian in Rocky Ripple with the Cincinnati suburbs, but a friend of theirs who lives less than a mile further east in a district that also includes a Danville, Illinois suburb?

Honestly, I’m too flabbergasted to be angry. This is just bizarre.

Maybe this could be idiotic and indefensible enough to get people to recognize how stupid gerrymandering is.

But how would one wash the dish? Surely not with a dishwasher pod?

The point: “stop wine-ing”?

By French law, bread can only contain flour, yeast, salt, and water. Sadly, he must be cake.

Whoa, the Eat The Rich people are serious.

The process honestly sounds to me a little bit like decaffeination, which also feels like witchcraft to me. So it might work!

Adrenochrome is a real thing. It’s a byproduct of the breakdown of adrenaline, and it itself breaks down into a compound that can be used as an anti-hemorrhage drug. It’s also mass-produced and doesn’t need to be harvested from humans.

But it was also in F&L.

As far as I’m concerned, disabled folks should be able to be hired to do any job that a normally-abled person can do, if they can do it with reasonable accommodations. But I’m going to have some questions if a blind person wants to do color grading, or if a nonverbal person is applying to be a live interpreter. The answer isn’t no, but I do have some questions.

Those questions grow with the number of lives that are at risk. A potential surgeon who has a motor control disability is probably going to need a longer interview. An air traffic controller with sensory processing issues, even longer. A nuclear bomb technician with uncontrolled hallucinations, let’s block out most of the day.

A really old guy with memory, processing, and concentration issues wants a job running a decent chunk of the whole world? A job that takes heightened focus and quick decision making, and that regularly burns out people half his age? A job that has a lot of handles on foreign and domestic policy, and the nuclear codes? I think we should probably spending a couple of months talking about that, and poring over his medical records.

And then we should hire someone else instead, because come on

Anything even slightly better than the idiocy we have seems amazing to me, apparently

Speaking only for myself: because the American government has, for 250 years, claimed to act on behalf of the American people. When it was liberating concentration camps and sending people to the moon, that was something to be proud of.* When it was upholding slavery and winking at Jim Crow laws, it wasn’t.

It’s a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and so he purports to speak and act on my behalf. That’s deeply embarrassing and shameful, even if I couldn’t have done anything differently to prevent it.

* (Yes, I know that even those “good” examples are complicated. I’m just forming an example here)

As an American, I have no room at all to judge this decision. But

proposals need a majority of both voters and cantons to pass.

That sounds amazing. Let’s do that, please.

I mean, straight popular vote would probably be better. But this could really do what the Electoral College stans say that it was made to do, without doing what it actually does.

🤚 yo.

I came over in 2023, like so many others, in protest of the API changes. Originally, I was sad that there were so few users here, but actually it pretty quickly started to feel more comfortable. I still maintain an account over there, but I haven’t posted there in ages. I like it better here.

“Wing” has started to lose meaning, yeah. All of the explanations I’ve seen for this have essentially described women moving left and men moving right. To call either move a move into a “wing” seems pretty unfounded.

He hasn’t announced or anything. Neither of them have. The pollsters just provided some hypothetical names to compare; I don’t know who other than Vance or Jr, but if I had to guess I’d say probably people like Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ted Cruz.

All models are wrong. Some models are useful.

True, and I guess I’m not sure which one is more prevalent, but this one is the one I hear most often.

Correct. Gerrymandering means several different specific ways to cheat by drawing the districts, but one way is taking a district that’s going to be a blowout for you—say, you’re expected to reliably get 88% of the vote—and sharing that 88% with a nearby district, where you’re expected to get maybe 37%. If you draw the lines right, you can get two districts where you win with 66% of the vote, instead of winning one and losing one.

But why stop there? 88% is a huge lead, and in first past the post it doesn’t matter how much of the vote you get, so long as you get more than the next most popular candidate. It may require some truly unhinged district drawing, but what if you could get, say, five districts where you’re going to win with 46% of the vote, due to a strong (but not strong enough) third party spoiler candidate? Now you’ve spread out the voters in that 88% area and used them to bolster four other districts that you were going to lose (or were going to be competitive) into solid and reliable wins, or at least turn solid victory for the opposition into a competitive contest.

Except, oops, the guy at the top of the ticket is a literal supervillain except without any superpowers, and now it’s starting to weaken that original 88%. Now, instead of one blowout district, and instead of five solid wins, you’ve got, maybe, two competitive contests and three solid losses. If you’d left well enough alone, you might’ve still been able to win that blowout district with 58%, but because you got greedy you’ve lost everything.

That…seems so obvious, now that you say it.