Schadrach

Now lie detectors don’t work at all…

Meh, they do work. They just measure stress response, not truthfulness. The idea being that you’ll have a heightened stress response to a question you are lying about the answer to, which may or may not be accurate depending on individual and situation.

Breath analyzers aren’t exactly accurate. There’s a bunch of things that can give them false positives, they often aren’t properly calibrated, and the science behind them is kinda shaky. They got challenged often enough in certain states that in at least one state if an officer has you breathe in a machine and that machine produces a number higher than the legal BAC limit, that’s proof of DUI regardless of what the machine may or may not do to result in that number.

That and their cops are paranoid as fuck and would rather overspend than risk getting a scratch.

Police can get decommissioned military equipment on the cheap, so long as they can basically write a grant proposal justifying why they want it.

I was thinking more or less the same thing - if you are here illegally it’s probably both cheaper and easier to pay you $1k per person and a free flight back whence you came than to track you down, go through the legal process, and remove you against your will.

They don’t give a fuck if murderers and armed robbers get away with their shit.

They care if murderers and robbers get away with their shit, they don’t care if murderers and robbers get away with your shit. Important distinction.

Cat: Pounces onto pillow at 5am “Wake up, bitch. It’s time for my breakfast. Now I’m going to meow repeatedly into your face until you comply with my demands.”

The solution to that is to make it very clear, from the beginning that you do not negotiate with terrorists but you do acknowledge her/him and return kindness with kindness. There’s a reason my wife’s relationship with our cat involves a lot more being bitten and meowed at until demands are met than mine does.

Once read a forum thread on “how your state/region is depicted in media” and had to point out that aside from one movie about a college the biggest things I could point to were the Wrong Turn movies (slasher movies about inbred cannibal hillfolk) and the movie version of Silent Hill (which is set in WV but based on Centralia, PA while the game version of Silent Hill is in New England).

Centralia, PA is one of those places with less than a dozen residents and a neat history. It’s been on fire since 1962, the government tried to eminent domain all real estate in Centralia and a handful of extremely stubborn folks fought back leading to an agreement where they get to stay there for the rest of their lives after which the property reverts to the government via eminent domain. All seven of them. Five of which are still around as of 2020, having lived under that agreement for forty years. The church still holds services, and their graveyard are still maintained, even the one that’s in a perpetual haze as the ground releases smoke.

It appears like most of Appalachia is under “swamp racists” and the rest as “NYC”, which I strongly reject. Very little of Appalachia is swamp, it’s mostly forested mountains. And it’s far to rural to be compared to NYC.

The difference being you weren’t desperate enough to take “any hole is a goal” as a motto worth following.

Apparently I married a unicorn. She explicitly didn’t want a diamond but a sapphire and explicitly didn’t want me to spend a fortune on it. Got her ring from an online jeweler on sale. Paid less than $300 for it. During the first Trump admin. We had talked about what she wanted and I found something close after shopping around. Then I held onto it for six months planning when to ask.

In the US, age of consent varies by state. In most US states the age of consent to sex with someone who is not in a position of authority is 16. Often with a close in age exception. 18 gets used in US media so much because that’s what it is in CA and NY, and that’s where most media is made.

18 is also federal age of consent, but that only applies when an incident involves crossing state lines.

Even today, the workplace death rate for men is something like 20x that of women.

Jello is just kinda… Meh.

Prior to the development of instant gelatin aka Jello, gelatin was extremely labor intensive and thus expensive. It was rich folk food that suddenly had a massive crash in price and difficulty to make. So it was in everything for a while, until it stopped being seen as this super high-class thing that the poors finally had access to.

Imagine the price of caviar suddenly plummeted to $0.01/oz, and what the next couple of years of cooking would look like as a result.

The more money someone makes, the few drug tests they take.

The more money someone makes, it’s also the less likely they’re working a job where people can be seriously harmed or killed by the direct, immediate effects of their behavior on the job. Jim from Sales being on smack is less likely to cause injury or death in the short term than forklift driver Klaus being on smack.

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

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

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.