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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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    1. fair point, agreed. I typically like things that move with changing times so the same logic works in 100, 200 years. Ages are more static than dollar amounts. Not tying the gas tax or minimum wage to inflation or cost of living has put us in a major bind, which is what I was thinking about.

    2. Let them play that game (and hopefully get caught). Better than the in-the-open shit they do now. At least try

    3. I’d rather it not specify so we can play around changing it with laws instead of having it hard coded in the constitution. There are ones that I like even more than straight ranked choice. Just get rid of the EC, though maybe just dictating ranked choice would be the right move.



  • Articles of impeachment is fine as this process stinks and I think this court failed, but we really, long-term, we need a constitutional amendment to make it clear that this is not okay.

    I love the constitution, wonderful framework, but it needs the following amendments:

    1. Anti-corruption measures on the judiciary (looking at you Thomas). Provide some teeth to enforce recusal and avoid conflicts of interest.

    2. Term limits for justices and age limits on all elected/appointed officials at the highest level (justices, pres/VP, congress). Tie those to either the retirement age or a percentage of life expectancy (as we get older as a society, and work into our later years, federal officials should be able to remain longer too).

    3. Divestment requirements for all federal elected and appointed officials. i.e. no more insider trading, sorry.

    4. Replace the electoral college with a popular vote.

    5. Replace the filibuster with nothing. Fuck that thing. Let the legislators legislate. If, whatever it is, is a bad idea, it’ll be shown to be a bad idea and the next congress will fix it. This is especially important now that Chevron is no more. The court just replaced rules created by executive offices with the most dysfunctional branch of government (congress) without any prospect of undysfuctionalizing themselves.

    6. Congress shouldn’t be allowed to block supreme court justices without a vote. Once they are announced, they have X days to approve/deny or they are auto-approved.

    7. (edit) I can’t believe this has to be done, but the President is not above the law. The president must follow the law while in office, following “official acts” or not. This is a fucking democracy, not a dictatorship.

    While I know there are other ways to approach a lot of these and those ways are easier is not the point of my post. These are things that the constitution is currently WRONG about and it should just be fixed.


  • This is not really that surprising. Trump’s line is that Biden “stole” the 2020 election. People who believe the big lie actually think that Biden circumvented democracy. There’s no clear thing to fix this, that I can think of.

    The only good thing with this in my mind is that, in their minds, they think they’re protecting democracy by voting for Trump, which means, if you take away the lies and fraud, the norms/belief/expectations of democracy including peaceful of transfer of power and regular elections are still expected to happen. Once the liars stop lying to them, our democracy should kind of self correct. The downside is they’re too far invested in Trump to recognize that democracy might be taken from them by a dictator and they’ll believe they still have power.

    Our best hope is that, once Trump dies or is out of the picture, no one else can capture their imagination the way he has and he was a one-off. However it’s a big country and I think Trump might be just a blueprint for someone with higher aspirations than just narcissistic personal benefit.






  • This is why I didn’t switch until this year. Valve really did a great thing by driving this adoption and I feel like with Proton in the state it’s in, there’s really not much you’re giving up by going to Linux these days.

    The list of actual pain points is ever shrinking now. I can’t imagine switching back in 95. You had to put up with so much inequity for a lot of that time.





  • Some of the recently reported ones have been traced back to Reddit shitposts. The hard thing they have to deal with is that the more authoritative you wrote your reddit comments, shitpost or not, the more upvotes you would get (at least that’s what I felt was happening to my writing over time as I used reddit). That dynamic would mean reddit is full of people who sound very very confident in the joke position they post about (and it then is compounded by the many upvotes)