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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • Trump has basically openly admitted that if he had his way, this would be our last election.

    JD Vance is a weird corpo-monarchist. He’s written about it a bit, but his corpo-daddy Peter Thiel has openly spoken about it.

    Then there’s Project 2025, a literal blueprint for Trump to follow to turn the country into a christo-fascist dictatorship. Vance wrote the forward to the book form, but the author is holding it back until after the election. Not out of shame, but because they know that being so open with their plan has hurt them in the polls.







  • Lenin betrayed the revolution. You mention the banning of the political parties. While it’s true that they “took up arms against Sovnarkom”, you’re leaving out the part where Lenin used Sovnarkom to coup the newly elected government because his party didn’t win.

    Again, Lenin was flat out wrong. But I don’t think he ever actually cared about Russia ever reaching the true Marxist communist utopia. Lenin cared about power first and foremost.

    He built up that dictatorship, and then handed it over to a monster.


  • Tried a bunch, but tried wrong.

    The Lenin model of communism is inherently flawed for one simple reason. An Authoritarian Communism is an Impossibility. It cannot exist by pure definition.

    The true ideal communism is a stateless utopia.

    So yeah, the Lenin model is flawed to the point of uselessness. Or worse because any authoritarian government is going to kill its own citizens, while also being a low grade threat to neighboring countries.

    No. The only path to true communism is via democracy. And there are countries that are moving in that direction.


  • Hydrogen fuel cells actually show quite a bit of promise. Mostly for large trucks. Batteries have a scaling issue. A battery powered 18-wheeler needs a much larger battery for a much shorter range.

    Adding more load means you need more battery, and that larger battery is just more load that you need to haul.

    This is sort of true with everything, but the important note is that a full battery and empty battery weigh the same.

    Anyway. Commercial use is where it makes sense. There are actually a few other technologies that make sense in the commercial transportation space. Like ammonia.

    Keeping these rather dangerous fuels commercial also allows for more strict safety standards.





  • The more important point where the graph is misleading.

    While their market share went down, that says nothing. The market exploded over that period.

    Total installs is the thing you want to graph.

    Or Monthly Active Users, which has been mostly flat or slightly declining since 2019, the oldest date that Firefox currently lists on their website. Because all sorts of graphs are publicly available on that site.

    I’m also certain that I can find data going back further.



  • Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.

    Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.

    Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.

    After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.

    It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.

    STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.

    Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.



  • Ranked Choice is an Ordinal voting system that fails Arrow’s Theorem.

    In some rare cases, it can produce a result even worse than First Past the Post. There are a bunch of flaws in RCV, because it was invented before mathematical evaluation was as robust as it is these days.

    Simulation, and some unfortunate real world examples, show that if you vote in and election with at least three somewhat viable candidates, and keep strategy in mind, you can rate your preferred candidate second and improve their chances of winning.

    No voting system should be able to do this. RCV has more flaws in addition to this already game breaking one.