• 14 Posts
  • 297 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • At scale the US system has too many layers of abstraction. We are not a direct democracy once you pass the small scale elections you mentioned. Those abstractions combined with first around the goalpost winning makes it so statistically the chance of third party success rounds to 0. So if you vote 3rd party in a major election when you otherwise would have voted Biden then you helped Trump because that 3rd party vote’s only impact on the election was to reduce Biden’s total by 1.

    The only chance 3rd party has of gaining ground is if we switched to ranked choice voting as this would allow people to realistically gauge and react to support for 3rd parties without aiding the major party they dislike in the meantime.

    Also need to ditch the Electoral College as it is the worst of our voting abstractions that is only amplified by gerrymandering.








  • Obviously it isn’t, if it was there wouldn’t be a user facing cost. The fact this is a private venture basically proves that wherever this is, the municipality or building owner is only committed to providing tap water (which we see here is “free”) the cost is for the extra, private, infrastructure that has been added in order to provide cold filtered water. If you aren’t US, I’ll note that municipal water treatment and filtering vs the more “Britta” level implied here are entirely different and very much a thing for some people.