Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.
It literally was though. Not a military intelligence tool, but a big business intelligence one.
Niantic was founded by Google and their first product, Field Trip, and their first game, Ingress (a much better-designed game than Pokémon Go, btw) were pretty obviously about gaining geolocation data for Google to improve their products like Maps and Shopping.
Honestly I’m a light hobbyist myself. My exposure to history is primarily via YouTube channels like the excellent Historia Civilis (their series on Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Roman Republic is stunning) and via games like Age of Empires.
I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.
How much of that sounds familiar…?
Yeah, it’s one of the very few advantages of the fact that their elections—even federal elections—are not actually standardised nationwide. States run them according to their own rules. Mostly this is a bad thing, but it does mean that one place can improve their system like this as an experiment, without needing to convince the entire country to do it at once.
So I think there are 2 states that do IRV currently. And there might be a few more places where IRV is used in non-congressional/presidential races.
Oddly, IRV is actually seeing some success, slowly growing across the States. But compulsory voting is basically a non-starter over there.
As someone who’s worked at elections a few times before, please please don’t do this. We’re barely above minimum wage and receive an hour of online training. We don’t know how to handle that situation. One voter, one cross off, one issued ballot, it’s supposed to be. It’ll make things very awkward at the end of the night when it comes to reconciling the ballots if the numbers don’t add up.
Just take the ballot and put it in the box. What happens between then, I don’t care.
One of the advantages of compulsory voting is that it necessitates fixing some of the problems you mentioned. If voting is compulsory, you can’t have a situation where people are unable to vote due to work. You either need to make prepolling easily accessible, or put voting at a time that most people are going to be able to get to the polls without their work being affected (Australia uses a Saturday, or you could declare the polling day a public holiday) while mandating people have enough time off to go and vote during the day. Ideally both. You also need to have enough polling places open with enough staff that lines don’t become unreasonably long. At my last election here in Australia, I had a 40 minute wait, and it was a huge scandal because of how poorly managed that election was. The idea of lines taking hours is entirely foreign to us.
Not voting is still an option. You must turn up, get your ballot, and take it straight over to the ballot box, without writing anything. Or you go and draw a picture of a penis. Or write some shitty message. The only thing that matters is that you turned up and put a ballot in the box.
But the truth is—and this is really the biggest factor when I look at Australian compared to American elections—the vast majority of people do have an opinion and they know who they think would be better. Many just don’t care quite enough to get off their couches and go and vote. In America a big part of the campaigns are about “get out the vote”. It’s getting people who agree with you (or at least prefer you to your opponent) to actually vote for you. You end up with the more extreme voters voting reliably but not the less politically engaged. And so of course politicians are less likely to pander to the less engaged. They aren’t going to vote for you anyway! Compulsory voting flips that. You now have to actually care about everyone. Your campaign has to involve not just convincing your supporters to go and vote, but convince the public at large that they should vote for you.
It’s not perfect. Not by a long shot. But it really is such a massive improvement with one quite easy step.
I suspect the people who would set this test would be the exact opposite of the people you want to set this test, in more than 50% of the seats.
FPTP is the shitty undemocratic system America and the UK use.
We use Instant Runoff Voting, which is a type of preferential (also called “ranked choice”) system. Which, as you say, means you aren’t wasting your vote by voting third party.
This is beehaw, they won’t see it.
CCTV produced an article asking “six shocking questions” about “US doping scandals.”
Hilarious, considering they had a known doper on their swimming team at the Olympics who was banned in 2014 and then banned again after destroying testing samples in 2018. Not sus at all…
I know you’re being flippant and it definitely is a real issue, but my first reaction was the same. I’ve played plenty of games with some sexual content in them, but never one with sexual violence other than implied, and usually even the consensual scenes were fade to black, or close to fading to black. I was a little surprised to hear that this is going on.
Aoe2 is a modern game. And it’s the only modern game. Everything else is a distraction.
Tell me, when was the last time you went to a concert?
Because you should know, it’s very common for someone to talk a little before the concert or before the piece about the piece itself, what inspired it, how it fits into the programme, etc.
That’s what he did here. He explained what inspired the writing of this piece. No different to a conductor explaining that Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony was dedicated to the city of Leningrad, which at the time it was premiered was being besieged by the Nazis. Or explaining how his 9th Symphony was a deliberate mockery of earlier composers’ grand 9th symphonies, as a way to subvert expectations placed on him by Stalin’s regime. Or how Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony was written at first in honour of Napoleon, and then later changed to “celebrate the memory of a great man” after Napoleon went against Beethoven’s republican idealism and crowned himself emperor.
Music has always been political, and in modern times no concert is complete without at least some discussion about the context in which the piece was written. That should be as true for a piece written to commemorate victims of a modern-day war as it is for mid-20th century or early 19th century pieces.
I think it’s pretty obvious how this is political. Far, far more than the other recent thread about lateness, anyway.
The amount of free time people have is a result of the economic situation we live in, where people are expected or required to work a certain amount of hours in order to be able to afford basic necessities, and some people end up needing to work even more than others because the kind of work they do is not valued enough. That’s politics.
You said exactly what I was thinking.
I came into this ready to agree with OP. In fact I wanted to add an additional point about how neurodiverse conditions can make it difficult for some people to keep track of things and arrive on time.
But the idea that other people should put their schedules on hold? Nah, sorry. You lost me there, OP.
I just went and checked and yes, it is indeed real. He also shares all his Xits in both English and French, which is amusing, but surely must be annoying for his followers. Why not have @JustinTrudeauEn and @JustinTrudeauFr?
Yeah I swear from when Nadella took over until like 2 years ago, Microsoft really seemed to be on the right route. They were becoming the “good guys” of big tech companies.
WSL, actually being really good stewards of GitHub, Chredge actually (at first) being way better for users than Chrome, the amazing revitalisation of some of their oldest and most loved game franchises like Age of Empires and Flight Simulator.
But then recently we’ve had Microsoft adding shitty AI to everything, from Edge to Windows. We’ve had that AoE revitalisation tarnshined by showing off a really shitty official mobile game with all the makings of a typical pay 2 win time sink. The Age of Mythology remake has obvious AI art featured in it despite them insisting no AI was used (though thankfully the actual gameplay is as good as hoped for, at least). We’ve got large layoffs and other shitty corporate bullshit towards workers.
This is absolutely fundamentally wrong. What you’ve described is what Nodatime calls an Instant, and it’s a very important data class, but there are valid reasons to use other classes.
A LocalDateTime cares about the date and time locally. An event scheduled for 8am every Monday might use this. It would update accordingly if you move locations to a new locale.
A ZonedDateTime can almost be directly translated into an Instant, except that one time zone might change. If you go into or out of daylight saving time, or your region decides to change its time offset. Oslo time is still Oslo time. You use this if your event occurs at a specific time in a specific location.
An OffsetDateTime is like a ZonedDateTime, but instead of being tied to a specific time zone (e.g. “Oslo time”) it’s tied to a specific UTC offset (e.g. UTC+1).
You don’t have to use Nodatime, but you should at least think deeply about what your time objects actually represent and what is the best way to represent them.
See the creator of Nodatime’s presentation about thinking deeply about time for more.
True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.
But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.