PaintedSnail

Both the student loans and the ACA were actively gutted by Republicans, so they are a perfect example of why getting Republicans out is beneficial to you. You want student loan forgiveness? Get rid of the Republicans that are blocking it. You want single-payer or socialized medicine? Get rid of the Republicans that are blocking it. Both have been introduced by Democrats, both were voted on along party lines and failed due to Republicans.

You are missing my point: you are only hurting yourself and your goals with that strategy. Voting third party only helps Republicans and isn’t seen as any kind of protest by anyone who matters. No one says you have to LIKE voting for either of the parties, but only one party is closer to your goals, is actively trying to achieve your goals, and has a chance of actually getting elected so your goals can be achieved.

Why engage with people you don’t agree with? Because they will get you closer to what you want. What you want is voting reform, so vote for the people who are pushing for voter reform:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/3313/text

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/5048

https://raskin.house.gov/2024/9/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections-across-america

And not just federally, but locally as well:

https://fairvote.org/ranked-choice-voting-legislation/

It’s no coincidence that these bills are being introduced by Democrats. If you want these bills passed, they also need support to get them passed. As long as the house and senate are split between the Democrats and Republicans, these bills will not get passed. Simple as.

I’m not saying that voting Democrat will make them reverse course. I’m saying that voting Democrat so they have enough control to get these bills passed will let them complete the course they are already on so that you can get what you want.

And what happens in the mean time? Third parties almost always take votes from the Democrats. (That is to say, most of the people who vote third party would have voted Democrat if the third party was not on the ballot.) This gives a huge advantage to the Republican party on close elections. The result is further entrenching of the party that has the larger vested interest in not reforming the system. As a result, any generational movement has no chance of succeeding because the party that directly opposes their goal is always in power.

(To expand: since Democrats lose votes to third parties, they are the ones who would greatly benefit from any kind of ranked choice voting, so they tend to support such reforms. Since Republicans benefit more from FPTP, they tend to oppose such reforms.)

It’s all well and good to send a message, but that message will be received by the people who benefit most by ignoring that message.

The better method is to get people in power now who support election reform, get those reforms passed, then third party candidates become viable.

How can I make sure that the citations are real and actually useful? Citations-cartels are already a thing.

I’m thinking that citations in papers can be actual links (akin to hyperlinks) to the location in the cited paper itself. This way it can be automatically verified that there are no citation loops, that citations reference current revisions, that the papers cited have not been retracted or otherwise discredited, and following citation trails becomes much easier. Would that help the citation-carcel issue, you think?

How can the review process be ported to that approach without losing the independence of the reviews? They are supposed to be anonymous and not affiliated with the authors in any way?

How important is anonymity in reviews? My thought process is going the opposite way: by linking reviews and comments on papers to the person/institution making it, it encourages them to be more responsible with their words and may indicate potential biases with regards to institution affiliations.

How can the amount of articles be reduced? Currently, you’re forced to publish as much as possible, published articles in “good” journals are your currency as a reseacher.

Here I’m also thinking the exact opposite: the issue isn’t the numbers of papers, it’s how the papers are organized that’s the problem. We actually want MORE papers for the reasons hinted at here: important papers are going unpublished because they are (for lack of a better word) uninteresting. A null result is not an invalid result, and its important to get that data out there. By having journals gate-keep the data that gets released, we are doing the scientific community a disservice.

Of course, more papers increases the number of junk papers published, but that’s where having the papers available openly and having citations linked electronically comes in. The data can be fed in to large data mining algorithms for meta analysis, indexing and searching, and categorization. Plus, if it later turns out that a paper is junk, any papers that cite it (and any papers that cite those, and so on) can all be flagged for review or just automatically retracted.

Thoughts?

I know little of the ins-and-outs of scientific publishing, but that didn’t stop me from having a dumb thought: could the fediverse be a potential solution? Each university or research group could host their own instance of some software specifically for publishing papers, papers can cross-link citations to papers on other instances, people can make comments across instances that are tied to their own identities from their home instance, paper revisions can be tracked easily and bad citations spotted when a paper is updated or retracted, that kind of thing. The currency then becomes the reputation of the organizations and individuals, and this opens up a ton of data for automated analysis. I just don’t know enough to know what problems would arise.

The metrics are the only important part! How else are we supposed to know how good the line is unless we constantly stress test the line by collecting data? Your ability to use the line is not a useful metric, so we don’t worry about that.

We know when you lie. We can see uptime stats.

And now you compare the Republicans to some natural force, as if they are inevitable and inescapable. Gravity has no will, no plan. It just is. Republicans have a will and a plan. Getting mad at the Democrats for not being good enough to stop that is akin to victim blaming. The Republicans should never have gone down this road in the first place.

Do you blame the thief, or do you blame the homeowner for not having better locks? Who do you hold accountable?

We’re not talking about a diseased animal, we’re talking about people who are making conscious decisions knowing what the results will be. I can and so absolutely blame people for that.

Your metaphor insinuates that Republicans are unable to control their actions. If that were the case, that’s all the more reason to vote and get them out of positions of power.

Because the Republicans control Congress, and at this point only an act of Congress can restore it.

It comes down to this: a Republican president would veto any abortion protection law, but a Democratic president would pass it. But the law has to get to his desk first.

And it took a lot of hard work by a lot of people to adopt new date standards to avoid that problem. Now it’s time to adopt new IP standards, and it’s going to take a lot of hard work by a lot of people.

I’m not saying planned obsolescence isn’t a thing (because it is), but that’s not the only reason. Making phones smaller, lighter, faster, and more feature-dense all mean that the phone has to be built with tighter manufacturing and operating tolerances. Faster chips are more prone to heat and vibration damage. Higher power requirements means the battery has a larger charge/discharge cycle. And unfortunately, tighter operating tolerances mean that they can fall out of those tolerances much more easily.

They get dropped, shaken, exposed to large environmental temperature swings, charged in wonky ways, exposed to hand oils and other kinds of dirt, and a slew of other evils. Older phones that didn’t have such tight tolerances could handle all that better. Old Nokia phones weren’t built to be indestructible, they are just such simple phones that there isn’t much to break; but there’s a reason people don’t use them much anymore. You can still get simple feature phones, but the fact remains that they don’t sell well, so not many are made, and the ones that are made don’t have a lot of time and money invested in them.

Now Voyager is an extremely simple computer, made with technology that has huge tolerances, in an environment that is mostly consistent and known ahead of time so the design can deliberately account for it, had lots of testing, didn’t have to take mass production into its design consideration, didn’t have to make cost trade-offs, and has a dedicated engineering team to keep it going. It is still impressive that it has lasted this long, but that is more a testament to the incredible work that was and is being put into it than to the technology behind it.

Nope, you can do that with GPay, which is not the same as Google Pay, which is not the same as Google Wallet, but they all connect to the same account. Yay Google naming 😑.

“Google Pay” app is going away, but the “GPay” app is not, and you can use that for person to person transactions. Yay Google naming conventions.

Because Google is Google and can’t keep their own shit straight, there is a bit of confusion. “Google Pay” is going away, but “GPay” is not. You can still use the GPay app for person to person transactions. Google Wallet is used for things like tap-to-pay. Both apps link to the same underlying account.

Focusing on the general idea of the last statement of your first paragraph, I completely disagree. I would much rather have a smart evil person in charge over an evil idiot.

A smart evil person will, at the very least, work for their own self-preservation. They can be negotiated with, even reasoned with, because they know that some give and take is required to meet their own goals.

An evil idiot will just break everything and take everyone with them if they don’t get what they want simply because they don’t understand what it is they are breaking.

Correct. Infant botulism can result from bacteria in raw honey that is otherwise harmless to anyone with a developed immune system.

Also QA, issue tracking, and litigation protection. This includes worker protection.

“Those bolts? We have the record right here from the very wrench that tightened them that shows they were tightened to spec on that plane.”

ZZ

Roulette is not a positive sum game, though. If you keep playing, eventually you will lose everything to the house.

A positive sum game is where repeated plays will average out to a net gain. The secret is having enough initial capital to keep you alive if your initial gambles don’t pan out. People living paycheck to paycheck don’t have that