The senate is by no means fair or democratic, but its borders reflect something that exists apart from the purpose of electing senators and whose borders are not drawn for the (sole) purpose of obtaining a majority in the Senate.
It’s not gerrymandered in the way that a “whites-only” sign isnt sexist.
I’m not going to get into a pointless argument about whether or not the worst part of your proposal is “people” or “math”, since this is a system question and the distinction is irrelevent.
Humans will attempt to distort whatever system you decide. The only thing that has ever constrained this impulse is other humans with opposing interests. If you do have that what math is actually used becomes irrelevant, and if you don’t then the math is just a game that the humans who want to break your system may play or ignore as they choose.
There was intentional miscounting in the 2020 census, even though that was only used to determine relative distribution of representatives among the various states. Every politician in the country already has huge lists of where their supporters live, and it is already obvious when they’re pulling shenanigans. And yet they do it anyway, because mere shame is not enough to keep humans from being jerks to obtain power and wealth.
My preferred alternative is not to rely on software or laws, but other humans and a dramatic expansion of whose votes matter in the country from “just those who won” to “essentially everyone.”.
I don’t know whether it’s cute or terrifying that you think you can solve a political problem with software.
Humans can and will game how many people are reported as living where. And they’ll intentionally misinterpret the algorithm you write. And they’ll lie about what your magic box says. And if they’re ever caught doing it they can and will be either ignored by the humans who enforce laws or just be given pardons by the governing humans who wanted the system mucked with in the first place
The only thing in our species’ history that has ever served as a check against the selfish creativity and audacity of humans is the selfish creativity and audacity of other humans.
Passing government functions off to a computer only encourages corruption and distortion in either the implementation, the input, or how the output is handled.
It’s like trying to engineer anti-cheat on a system where not only does the user own their own hardware but also the marketplace vendors, the courts, the OS vendors, and your servers.
Algorithmically generated districts just give a sharper target, and allowing the existing systems to include multi-member districts just makes gerrymanding easier.
The only way to prevent gerrymandering is with either districts that don’t change (statewide), or changing the rules of the legislature so gerrymandering doesnt matter
My favorite potential fix is direct proxy voting. Tie vote weight in the legislature to how many citizens voted for you, and send either the top N vote-getters or everyone who gets at least X% of the votes cast to the legislature.
“At Large” means that the senators would be elected by the whole state, which is the only way to avoid gerrymandering and identical to how the current rules work.
Having all of Congress be at-large would essentially eliminate gerrymandering by just letting any majority in a state decide everything.
I think thats the single worst change we could make, beating out term limits. ~Because if only lobbyists and staffers can be long-term careers we’d never have principled professional politicians, just short-term figureheads~
CA can have four at-large seats for the whole state up for election every two years.
They would have the same long-view that existing senators have, and would not be internally less responsive than the current system
The senate was conceived at a time when the most populated states were filled with slaves and disenfranchised poors who couldn’t vote. There’s no reason to discard a longer-termed gerrymanderjng-immune chamber of Congress just because we want the 70 million Americans in California and Texas to not be subjects of the 1 million in Vermont and Wyoming.
Stacking the senate to reflect population is fine. Especially if we change the house to only care about voters
Because drug dealers are people who couldn’t get better jobs. Which suggests they aren’t quite as competent as the lawyers and plumbers and bodyguards who also on occasion kill their rich clients, leading to having a higher rate of the economically unsound activity.
Plus growing up rich is apparently a disability that can get you off a rape charge, so the rich kids are more likely to do the things that you’d kill them over, and drug dealers are more likely to be armed and willing to kill than pizza dealers.
Wherever you are on earth, regardless of season, the only stars you don’t see at night are the ones blocked by that rock you’re standing on.
ISome of the stars rise or fall under the horizon as the planet spins, and which ones of those you see can and do vary based on the season. These are the ones that the earth (and the sun) block due to the orbit of our planet.
There will be stars due north or due south that you’ll see all year. This part of the sky isnt blocked by the earth or the sun at all. In fact, if you use a camera with the right hardware to see through the diffuse sunlight that makes the sky seem blue, you could see the same small disk of the sky at any time during the year, regardless of season or time of day.
Note that the above assumes you’re in one of the temperate bands between the tropics and the polar bands, where sunlight varies throughout the year but every day has a night.
On the poles you only get one night a year, and it’s always the same stars. And on the equator you need a clear horizon to see the polar stares, while the seasonal constellations will be more or less right overhead.
What sort of circumstance could possibly make buying cheaper compatible batteries unethical?
For a typical consumer in America, and likely most professional contractors, the answer is “no” to all of these. And DeWalt apparently only offers a one year warranty that specifically excludes “normal wear and tear”.
https://www.dewalt.com/en-us/support/warranty
Anything up to and including prying open the proprietary casing and swapping in new cells is entirely ethical.
I’m very confident that when my cats meow they are always saying a variant of “hooomaaaan!”
They’re like little eternally drunk roommates who walk around naked and are way too touchy for a household with children.
It’d kinda work, but not so well with uranium itself.
(A bunch of other atomic age materials like plutonium are radioactivley deadlier.)
The real goal of terrorism is to make people afraid, so they either change behavior or exert political pressure on their government to change behaviour. It doesn’t often work, often backfires, and when it does on occssion work we tend to stop calling the guys who set the bombs as terrorists.
You are largely resistant to the black plauge, though, if you’re of European descent. It killed a bunch of people when it initially evolved, but never really went away. The humans who survied had modest resistance and adopted social habits that were both passed on to their kids. (Nowadays it’s a simple course of antibiotics)
Your larger point stands, though, since part of the end of any pandemic is the overly effective pathogen succumbing to the evolutionary pressure to not kill the host, since the bacteria that infects living animals does terrible when those animals die.
Echoing this:
Being dehydrated has real and generally unpleasant symptoms which drinking water alleviates. Dehyrdation is not just when your urine has a color.
If you have to go #1 on a regular basis, you’re probably not dehydrated.
There are few adjectives which are both homophones and homonyms for verbs.
I wonder if there are any such pairs not related to violence or sex…
My guess is that you really just aren’t paying attention. Possibly because right-wing oligarchs keep buying traditional news rooms and turning them into weak propaganda factories.
Without control of even a single chamber of Congress the Democrats American Left has managed to:
Democrats and the rest of the left are fighting. But because the basic rules of American federalism and rule of law are still mostly being followed, that fighting is done by traditional peaceful channels rather than through violence.
There are four things that matter for transfer speed between storage devices.
USB sticks tend to be flash memory with relatively equal read and write speeds, but the spinning disks in a hard disk drive are noticeably unequal. So, unless the USB is very slow, you’d expect a USB to HDD copy to be slower than either USB to USB or HDD to USB.
You can also be slowed down by antivirus scans, on-disk encryption, search indexing, or even the need to move bits from the USB bus to the HDD controller.