Schulze is great, but good luck explaining how it works to my mother.

Schulze is good for elections at STEM organizations. For the general public, something like approval voting or STAR are better.

If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

No?

Proportional representation is where parties get a number of seats proportional to the percent of votes they get.

Proportional voting methods are often nation-wide, although there’s also e.g. mixed member proportional and local 3-5 member districts elected via STV like they do in Ireland.

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

I assume his point is that calling Manchin or Sinema “liberal” isn’t super accurate.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

The beginning of the ‘Final Solution’ was in June of 1941, and began with the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen murduring Jews as part of Operation Barbarossa.

The commander of Einsatzkommando 3 submitted a fairly detailed report of his squad’s daily murder count by location. Through November 25th of that year, his squad alone murdered 57,338 Jewish men, 48,592 Jewish women, and 29,461 Jewish children.

Babi Yar happened on September 29th and 30th, 1941 - only about 4 months into the Final Solution. Germans put posters up in Kyiv, saying that any Jews who didn’t show up to be relocated would be shot. They took the crowd of 33k people to a ravine, herded them forwards and machine gunned them all down.

Is the Holocaust really the most apt historical comparison? Yes, the Holocaust is in the past, while this is ongoing. But the early days of the Holocaust were incredibly bloody; the massacres didn’t ramp up slowly once the killings commenced.

Two things can both be bad without being equally bad.

The war has been terrible. But do you really think it’s been as bad as Treblinka or Babi Yar?

Not particularly, but I can at least recognize that electing a third party practically requires getting rid of the electoral college.

If no one gets a majority of EC votes, the winner is picked by the house of representatives. So any third party president needs to get a majority of the vote in a majority of states to win. No third party candidate has ever come remotely close to that.

Under STAR, score, condorcet or IRV? It’s unlikely but possible. With the EC? It’s essentially impossible.

Suppose one year you spend $60k, but only earned $50k. You lost $10k.

The next year, you spend $57k, and earned $53k. You lost $4k, and your losses narrowed by $6k.

Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.

That doesn’t really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.

It’s not that there’s anything unnatural about water. It’s just not a remedy for anything but dehydration.

Oh, yeah.

If your point is that ICE car batteries have problems in the cold, so cold batteries is a problem for everyone and worse for ICE cars, that’s fair.

If your point is that ICE car batteries suck therefore EVs suck, that’s not really valid logic.

Lead-acid batteries aren’t lithium ion? And the car starter battery isn’t equivalent to that of an EV?

You might as well say that I have trouble starting my gas weed wacker, therefore cars are hard to start.

The lubbavitcher rebbe said a couple years before he died that he wanted his synagogue expanded.

There’s been a bit of a power vacuum since he died, and expanding the building hasn’t been possible due to court cases over the building’s ownership.

A bunch of the students think that the rebbe is coming back as the messiah, were bored and decided that they could start the expansion by tunneling into the basement from a couple buildings over.

The main problem is just that getting a product from a one-off in a lab to a cost-competitive mass-market product is hard and can take a lot of time, to say the least.

For example, Don Sadoway initially published about a molten metal battery in 2009. He gave a Ted talk in 2012. They’ve run into assorted setbacks along the way and are apparently just starting to deploy the first commercial test systems this year.

It’s less that these breakthroughs are bullshit, and more that commercializing these things is hard. The articles about the breakthroughs are often bullshit, though, or at least way too rosy.

You might be able to do a naked short, though.