Schadrach

Why I said usually. Most gay men and most straight women are the exceptions.

VBNMW was always “we want to give you a shitty candidate, you’ll vote for it and you’ll like it.”

I would assume they meant “of boobs”, but you present an interesting question of terminology. Unfortunately it begs the question, what exactly would we mean by “on boobs” in this context, so that we can question if “off boobs” is it’s opposite?

Also, boobs. The answer to boobs is usually yes.

The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.

Then you put it beside a truck from 30 years ago that’s a quarter the overall size but has the same bed capacity and towing power along with much better visibility instead of not being able to see the child you’re about to run over. And then you understand what people mean when they say massive trucks - giant ridiculously unnecessary things that are all about being a status symbol and dodging regulations rather than practicality.

I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind also being able to tell it to start to preheat while I’m on my way home. Would save a chunk of time if I could literally walk in the door and throw the food in the oven without the extra wait for it to preheat which is usually long enough to be annoying but not long enough to do anything else.

Correct.

Since math is a language and is itself described by language, that folds all the natural sciences (as they are described by math) into social constructs as well, and since engineering is just applied science, engineering is a social construct. Which means that civil engineers assign whether or not a bridge will hold under a given load and conditions, as opposed to it being some properties of the bridge itself independent of the language being used to describe it that determine what loads and conditions it can successfully operate under? No?

Sex is the same way. Sex predates language. Sex predates humans. Sex predates the entirety of organisms we would classify under Kingdom Animalia. It predates any living thing complex enough to have a language. It exists independent of the language used to describe it. You can easily make the argument that’s not true for gender, because unlike sex it doesn’t exist outside the language and societal structures built around it.

You underestimate the number of people you wouldn’t class as intelligent. If no one wanted massive trucks, they would have disappeared off the market within a couple of years because they wouldn’t sell. They’re ridiculous, inefficient hulks that basically no one really needs but they sell, so they continue being made.

is still a social construct in that it’s a label made up in order to explain

By that logic, literally everything that can be described with language is a social construct.

often non-consensually ‘correcting’ them.

I am against the medically unnecessary cutting of children’s genitals in all cases. Whether it’s FGM, “correcting” intersex kids (in cases where it’s not going to cause problems with things like urination), routine circumcision, etc.

they assign sex

I hate the use of the word assign, but it doesn’t fit with what doctors are doing. Sex is a biological rather than social construct. They’re looking at how you are, and trying to identify what your reproductive organs are. It’s like saying a doctor assigns you a medical condition rather than diagnosing a condition that is already present.

Best I can give him is that she got the job at least partially because she’s a black woman. Putting a black woman in SCOTUS was a campaign promise. One made early enough that I doubt he had Jackson already in mind when he made it. She’s presumably the most qualified black woman his admin could find, if not the most qualified candidate overall.

Why have a primary if you’re not going to go with the results? That’s not a primary - that’s just bullshit.

Welcome to the DNC. Their primaries (at least the bigger ones) have been bullshit for a long time. Like, they’re notorious for bullshit regarding primaries. I like to point to my own state in 2016 as an example, where Clinton won the primary despite getting around 35% of the vote while Sanders won in every county and Clinton didn’t even manage second in every county.

The main difference is that this time the “wrong” candidate won despite the bullshit, so now he needs to lose the general, whatever that requires. Again, welcome to the DNC.

The only rational response is to grab a can of spray paint and graffiti the door with “~355/113”

For one, because the misconduct named in the impeachment is something every president in the 21st century at least has done (military strikes with congressional approval), which makes it a lot harder to justify it as an impeachable offense to people more concerned with law than finding any excuse to try to punish Trump.

We already know from real-world AV elections that voters largely prefer to vote honestly, there’s no reason to think they would get more strategic when it gets harder to figure out the optimal strategy.

In plain AV, voting honestly is the optimal strategy - there’s no incentive to vote any other way. It’s not for SPAV. And yes, strategic voting in SPAV is harder to figure out than strategic voting in FPTP, but it’s far from impossible - basically you don’t vote for a popular candidate you support so your vote for other candidates counts for more, relying on the assumption that enough other people will vote for the popular candidate you support to allow them to win anyways.

He’s probably talking about the electoral college, and likely supports abolishing it in favor of a direct election which would mostly just shift the epmhasis away from the largest states that are close to flipping over to emphasizing a handful of the largest cities.

There’s actually a bill that’s made the rounds to several states that makes it so that once enough states (read a number equaling half plus 1 electoral votes) pass a similar law they will all switch over to assigning their electors based on the national popular vote rather than what they’re state does. Unsurprisingly, California and New York jumped on this, as did some smaller solid blue states that are willing to hitch their wagon to “whatever California wants” going forward, but it’s probably never going to actually take effect because if it could get to that point because if it could then we wouldn’t be worrying about the GOP winning another election for the foreseeable future.

Or they aren’t a fan of House apportionment. Or both. Though electoral college apportionment and house apportionment are related, so…

If they’re from the EU, I’d have a question for them: Do you feel like Germany isn’t given remotely enough power by the EU parliament, or that Malta has ridiculously too much to throw around? Because it’s literally the same problem - if you try to represent people with a fixed number of seats apportioned between territories, and you try to minimize the mean difference in voters/representative, and there are a couple of territories that just blow the curve on each end that’s what happens.

Still think merging the Dakotas and creating Montoming (merging Montana and Wyoming) is a good idea… Maybe go whole hog and if your state gets one House seat and is adjacent to a state with one House seat, you get merged to be one state from here on out. Where multiple options present, join the ones with the largest shared land border. Repeat until no examples remain, recalculate House seats and do it again if necessary. It probably won’t help California much just because of how much CA blows the population curve, but it would likely push the states with the worst population/representative ratio up by one. Should probably pull out the math and see.

Not a fan of SPAV, in part for the same reasons I’m not a fan of STAR:

1. It doesn’t eliminate strategic voting. For example, imagine you support two candidates for a multi-seat election. Under straight AV you vote for both of them because there’s literally no incentive to do otherwise. Under SPAV, you might decide that since one of those candidates is much more popular and thus a foregone conclusion to win that you should avoid voting for them so the value of your vote for the other isn’t reduced. Too many doing this can cause negative effects, like strategic voting in other methods.
2. You can’t tell me how my vote will actually be counted until every other vote is counted, because how the ballot will be measured in the end depends on every other ballot as depending on how everyone else voted your votes for some candidates may be worth less than your votes for other candidates. Straight AV doesn’t have this problem, your vote is exactly what is says on the ballot and is counted exactly as it is on the ballot. The extra math also makes it more complicated to explain to voters en masse, which is a problem with other systems that have transferable votes.

I get that the goal is apparently to make every state elect a split legislature/congressmen by making so that if any seats are even vaguely competitive the parties will essentially be forced to take turns.

…for any natural number of repetitions of “buffalo”, no less.

It’s not “fine”, but it’s also not him acting outside his authority. Fuck, who was the last president that didn’t bomb anywhere without Congress declaring war? Who was the last president to even get Congressional approval before all bombings? I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t in the last 25 years.

“Trump does thing that other presidents, both Democrat and Republican have done without issue in the past” is poor grounds for an impeachment.

I think there was a pretty short limit on how far in the future you could write someone’s death.

23 days. You had 40 seconds to write a cause of death and 6:40 to write the details, and could even pre-write the details and add the name(s) afterward but the Death Note could not effect anything that occurred more than 23 days in the future, with the exception of dying by a disease that would take longer than that to progress and not writing a time (in which case they develop the disease but die when/how the disease would take them). The real problem is that you also can’t use the Death Note to directly extend someone’s life by writing that they die after they normally would - if you try they just die however they would have died if you hadn’t used the note. You can however use the Death Note to kill someone who is a threat to another, indirectly saving their life.

So you can make a police officer shoot some random people but you can’t make him save a black child /s

Oh, now, you could make him accidentally save a black child. Or get blinded immediately beforehand so he doesn’t know the child is black.