thirtyfold8625

This video suggests that the human population will stabilize at an appropriate level for a given environment, and that it can rebound quickly if that’s necessary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-oVwcDg5Uc

https://www.comicagile.net/comic/conways-law/

https://www.comicagile.net/?s=conway's+law&post_type=comic

Ah, I didn’t realize that “Con” meant “conservative”! I thought “Con” meant “scam”.

How do you know this is a con?

It is surely good to occasionally test whether unforeseen events will cause disruption. Do you know how often such a test is performed?

For example, nuclear weapons systems are tested occasionally, and seeing a failure is probably important information.

Giving moderators practice with moderating will probably improve their performance when they are actually needed.

There are things that cannot be communicated by reading alone.

Zen is said to be based on a “special transmission outside scriptures”

I suspect that actually looking at someone (preferably while you’re together in the same room) lets you understand things better.

The balance of power shifted in February 2021 when New Ideas (Nuevas Ideas), the party Bukele had helped found in 2017, and allied members of GANA captured 56 seats in elections for the 84-seat legislature. That two-thirds majority meant that Bukele had the legislative support he needed to replace both the country’s attorney general and five of the Supreme Court’s justices. With some of the checks on his power minimized, Bukele began to take an increasingly authoritarian approach to addressing some of El Salvador’s pressing problems.

I suggest making some reforms to state institutions before someone else gains control of at least two thirds of the political power. Having support from two thirds of a legislative body is sufficient to completely rewrite a constitution in many cases, so the only question is whether a “supermajority” can reach some consensus.

I personally don’t have a lot of hope for peaceful reform, given what I see from https://ballotpedia.org/Results_for_ranked-choice_voting_(RCV)_and_electoral_system_ballot_measures,_2024

I suspect that, when certain election methods are used, it’s possible to make your preferred candidate lose if you express support for them:

instant-runoff voting is also sometimes vulnerable to a paradoxical strategy of ranking a candidate higher to make them lose, due to instant-runoff voting failing the monotonicity criterion.

I can imagine that someone’s best choice can be to entirely abstain from voting in some situations. I don’t think it’s ethical to force people to vote if doing so would harm them.

Making a law about an obligation to vote will probably make future electoral reform harder (since people will have to figure out / get confused about whether a change will make it more likely for them to land in court), and making it hard to change bad systems is surely a bad thing.

Incentivizing someone to show up and just cast a blank ballot could make it harder to detect fraud. For example, it might be convenient to dispose of ballots that someone intended to misuse by mixing them in with the legitimate ballots, and having more blank ballots that are actually legitimate would make it less clear whether something illegal has happened.

“Voting in all federal elections in Australia is a legal obligation for citizens aged 18 and over”, but there isn’t a very steep penalty for not doing so (and you might even get your name published in a newspaper, which some people might value for its own sake):

Failure to vote in the federal election initially results in a $20 fine as per section 245 of the Act, which can grow if left unpaid to a $220 fine and court fees.

Having early voting and making the “main” voting day be a holiday for a large number of people seems like a good idea, since that makes voting easier for people who want to vote. Hounding people who don’t want to vote (regardless of their reasoning) seems like a worse idea.

If a non-personal email — such as an American citizen contact — was provided by the alien, notices may have been sent to unintended recipients, It does make me concerned there’re a lot more people out there like me who probably also thought this was spam, who probably didn’t realize, ‘I have a problem,’

Having a mistake in this situation makes it less clear whether other messages are legitimate or not, so we might see more cases like those described around https://www.yahoo.com/news/black-people-receiving-racist-text-012451742.html

There has been some confusion about this question: https://www.thewisedrive.com/turn-signals-in-dedicated-turn-lanes/ https://www.thewisedrive.com/yes-you-have-to-use-your-turn-signal/ https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/12/26/watch-live-trooper-steve-explains-whether-you-need-to-use-turn-signals-in-turn-only-lanes/

I think the idea of a “direct course” is useful:

No person shall turn a vehicle at an intersection unless the vehicle is in proper position upon the roadway as required in RSA 265:42, or turn a vehicle to enter a private road or driveway, or otherwise turn a vehicle from a direct course or move right or left upon a roadway unless and until such movement can be made with reasonable safety. No person shall so turn any vehicle without giving an appropriate signal in the manner hereinafter provided.

I do pay extra attention to giving a signal when I intend to make a U-turn rather than a typical left turn.

Are you saying that some functionality is not federated but some functionality is?

I suppose my main problem is lack of meaningful decentralization. I prefer to use networks that allow me to contact people using a local public Wi-Fi service or someone’s home internet connection, and I believe it would be expensive or impossible to do that using ATProto without depending on infrastructure maintained by Bluesky.

The only program I wanted to use but haven’t managed to access using the openSUSE package management system is one that’s unlikely to be available using Fedora’s either.

When there is a package provided by the original creator of a program, it’s less likely that openSUSE compatibility will be tested, and it’s probably more likely that compatibility will not be tested as rigorously. In my experience, a package intended for use with Fedora will be useful to use with openSUSE without needing to modify it most of the time (the names of basic dependencies/capabilities are probably the same for both operating systems in many cases). I think coverage is expanding over time, since the examples I thought only explicitly supported Fedora currently do support OpenSUSE too: https://brave.com/linux/ https://vscodium.com/#install-on-fedora-rhel-centos-rockylinux-opensuse-rpm-package

I don’t like the idea of using Flathub, but most programs that aren’t accessible while only using YaST are available using GNOME Software, and it might be true that the exact same set of programs is accessible using that method while using either Fedora or openSUSE.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/

Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/

I agree it seems that “smokeless tobacco” means “consuming tobacco by putting it in your mouth rather than putting nicotine into air and inhaling it”. I assumed that “smokeless tobacco” included “vaporized nicotine”, probably due to my unfamiliarity with nicotine products.

Regardless, it seems that using a vape leads to less harm than using cigarettes:

There is substantial evidence that e-cigarette exposure is associated with biomarkers reflective of cancer disease risk. However, the overall evidence on cancer risk is still limited and should be further investigated by future research, particularly rigorously designed clinical trials and population-based research.

FDA officials concluded that the health risks from Zyn pouches are likely lower than potential risks from using snus (low toxicant smokeless tobacco) and the FDA has already concluded that some snus brands are significantly less harmful than cigarettes.

I don’t consume any nicotine myself, but it seems that letting people use nicotine in a way that is less harmful to their health is a good idea.

There have been specific statements made that express that you shouldn’t use nicotine:

“There is no safe tobacco product,” the agency said. “Youth should not use tobacco products and adults who do not use tobacco products should not start.”

When I swear, I tend to use “fuck” or “bitch”, and maybe “shit”

Maybe the author meant to express, “Regardless, if the global system of interconnected computer networks is functioning properly and you have a connection to it, you can host a document on the web.” since a “global system” and “your connection to it” are separate things, and either can have a problem while the other does not have a problem. That’s me being charitable though, and I agree that it’s more likely that they were being redundant.

I also find it interesting that the original sentences reference “the internet” (with a lowercase “i”) rather than “the Internet”. “The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks”, so it’s interesting that the author might be referencing an internet that is not global rather than a global network. They probably are referencing “the Internet” though, since “many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case”.

I’m not sure that your reply is directly related to my comment. The full sentence I quoted is “Under these definitions, Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either.” by Christine Lemmer-Webber, but Daniel Holmgren talked more directly about “decentralised distribution of data”.

Because of what I quoted, I don’t think that “Bluesky” or “ATProto” are decentralized or federated, so it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll interact with them anytime soon. The particular reason that they are not decentralized or federated is not really interesting to me.

To get specific: it is a significant issue for me if “everyone can access the data but before it reaches the end users it goes through centralised applications”. A “centralised application” is able to restrict my ability to contact other people, whereas with a federated and/or decentralized/distributed system, it’s more likely that I will be able to contact someone that I want to communicate with. For comparison, consider how people would feel if using the United States Postal Service meant that all physical mail had to pass through the District of Columbia or if sending an email message required interacting with BBN-TENEXA just because that was the first machine to be capable of sending networked electronic mail. In the ideal case, the recipient of a message I send would not have to coordinate with me at all before they receive the message: “The first use of network email announced its own existence.”