• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’ve been thinking about this a bit, I’m not sure it’s been considered and I may be going out on a random tangent…

    Isn’t this whole ‘immunity’ decision just another power grab, or rather further cementing of their power, by SCOTUS? Think about it. They’re essentially the arbiter of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ now, as there’s no further avenue of appeal save for amending the U.S. Constitution.

    Put aside the vagueness of ‘official’ vs. ‘unofficial’ acts for a moment.

    • Trump did something definitely illegal, and Trump argues was ‘official’, like his classified records case. Immune.

    • Biden did something questionably legal yet unofficial, such as forgetfully retaining classified documents after his tenure as VP (which he immediately returned). Supreme Court decides ‘not immune’, and some idiot decides to prosecute.

    Trump might end up as a king, but the conservative majority of SCOTUS are the kingmakers and protectors.





  • Problem lies in the ‘first-past-the-post’, aka ‘winner-takes-all’ system. There are others, like the electoral college, but I digress.

    Third party candidates only ever bleed votes from another in FPTP. Assuming RFK is going after Democratic/‘swing’ voters he’ll potentially end up costing the Democrats votes in key states which, at the margins we’re currently seeing, would potentially allow Republicans to win, holding slightly more votes to be ‘first-past-the-post’ at the end of ballot counting even though a majority of people would’ve preferred a Democrat representative anyway.

    Under the FPTP system, voting for RFK as a protest vote, at his 10% margin, becomes a wasted vote because of how FPTP works.

    The only true way to fix this is ‘single transferrable vote’, or ‘ranked choice’ voting. Voters simply rank their preference from most desired (1) to least desired (n) on a single ballot.

    If the first round of counting doesn’t yield a winner (usually 50% of ballots + 1 ballot in a candidate’s pile), the candidate with the least amount of ballots is eliminated. Ballots are then redistributed from the eliminated candidate, according to the voters next preference on their ballot, amongst those candidates who remain.

    Process continues until a candidate has 50% of ballots + 1 ballot in their pile.

    The best version of this is ‘full’ preferential voting (every candidate must be numbered), rather than ‘optional’ (number at least one candidate; better versions of this are ‘number at least n candidates’). Optional preferential votes ‘exhaust’, potentially becoming wasted, if the voter didn’t number all the boxes.

    This will allow people to protest vote, without actually wasting their vote.




  • firebyte@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    5 months ago

    I was skeptical at first though let me tell you, Kagi is so much better. I get exact search terms, which is immensely useful as a programmer, rather than providing results for what Google thinks I want to search for. It’s also really, really nice not seeing ads as search results anymore, ad blocker or no ad blocker.

    Is it as comprehensive as Google search? It meets about 95-96% of my needs. I still use Google very infrequently for some really obscure domain specific searches if Kagi doesn’t find anything useful, though that’s getting rarer and rarer.

    It’s also easy to block AI generated sites that pop up providing just enough likeness, but really are regurgitated AI trash, or are ‘Wikipedia clones’.

    I have no financial interest in Kagi, other than paying to use it. It has certainly been worth it for me.