If we’re going to go all conspiratorial, here’s my theory:
Both campaigns are dealing with old men with diminished faculties.
There’s some drug cocktail(s) that both campaigns have been using to pep the doddering old farts up for public appearances.
If you’ll remember, very shortly before the debate, the accusation that “Biden’s on drugs” made the rounds, and Trump made some noises about demanding a drug test.
For some reason - possibly fear, possibly determination in the face of a challenge, possibly a subtle communication that the Trump campaign had some hard evidence they would, if pushed, release publicly - that led to the Biden team withholding his customary drug cocktail.
Trump, meanwhile, was dosed to the eyeballs.
And that was the contrast we saw - Trump was on drugs, while Biden, for whatever reason, for that night alone, was not.
Remember - for the Republicans broadly and especially for Trump, every accusation is a confession.
Ok… sooooo… has anyone ELSE seen the photo of the most blood thirsty terrorist group in history? Had uh, the Clintons, the Bush Family, the Obamas, etc in a nice snug family portrait. Was missing a certain orange baboon & his ilk however :| they’re clowns not terrorists though
The investigations uncovered Epstein’s close ties to former President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew, as well as his once friendly relationship with former President Donald Trump
Dear AP, why the fuck are you downplaying Trump’s ties to Epstein? Trump hung out with child diddlers to diddle children. He was hilariously cagey when asked if he’d release Epstein materials as president.
There may not be enough evidence to get him in court, but he should be held in the same group as Clinton and Andrew.
Bro the guy was literally “the leader of the free world” and said nothing about his friend selling children to child diddlers and you are going to come at me with a “but akchually WHICH LAW DID HE BREAK?!?!?!?”. Go piss.
Laws should follow and codify ethics, not dictate them. If a transgression (such as not reporting CSA to the relevant authorities) is not already banned by law, that doesn’t mean it’s fine. It means the law needs to be amended.
In this specific case I agree, not reporting CSA should be illegal (and probably is?) I’m not so sure that we should codify the current ethical understanding into law though.
We need to leave room for development. Forcing new ideas to first go through the battle of legalization isn’t helpful in this regard. Laws are there to regulate what normal social regulation can’t do properly.
I think people who cheat on their partners are morally speaking bad people. But writing into law you can’t have multiple partners at once is quite obviously a bad decision, because there are happy polyamourus relationships. The government doesn’t need to get involved here, being treated like the ass that you are for cheating is punishment enough, and leaves the room for developing new ways of living together.
I guess we need to distinguish between legislation, regulation and case law established through judicial precedent. Legislation is definitely too cumbersome to react to shifting moral standards. Regulation and judicial precedent are more flexible in cases where legal consequences are warranted.
As so often, there is nuance to the topic. General statements are hard to make both concisely and precisely. I opted for brevity, but you are absolutely right.
Either way, we agree that complacency about CSA is fucked up.
There is this, where a anonymous person has reported beeing raper by Trump as a Teen girl (please read this at your own discretion). She never went to court because she was intimidated.
Median earnings grew faster than inflation every quarter between Q2 2022 and Q4 2023, a year and a half straight. Ticked down in Q1 2024 but basically back to pre pandemic levels.
That alternative would replace Ohio’s current system for drawing congressional and legislative maps, which relies on elected officials, with a 15-member panel of Ohioans without close ties to politics.
Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it’d make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.
Like, if you want to have non-partisan oversight of the algorithm selection, great, but I’m not at all sold that partitioning up the election map requires anything beyond a simple, mechanical process.
reads further
Fed up with politicians manipulating maps to ensure reelection, a crowd of Ohio voters took a key step toward offering a redistricting alternative on the November ballot.
The commission would draw maps that “correspond closely to statewide partisan preferences of the voters of Ohio.” Unlike redistricting proposals approved in 2015 and 2018, this requirement is explicit and mandatory.
If you divide up electoral districts to try to clump similar voters, you kind of guarantee that you’re ensuring re-election. In fact, from past reading, that’s what gerrymandering tends to do. It isn’t primarily that politicians try to get an edge for their party overall. It’s that they try to ensure that they have safe seats without serious competition, even if that ensures that politicians from the other party also enjoy the same situation. Think of an oligopoly, where companies divide up territory or something like that, and each has a monopoly. Like, if you’re going to mandate that under this district-drawing system, what you’re functionally doing is minimizing the power of the public in elections relative to that of incumbent politicians.
Researchers found tactic, widely used in 2020, made little difference in partisan numbers but yielded safe seats, less-responsive representatives
Basically, what gerrymanderers principally aim to do is to reduce how much a politician in an electoral district tends to need to care about what their electorate wants, by eliminating realistic challengers.
One of the most consequential outcomes of this redistricting cycle has been the continuing decrease in the number of competitive congressional districts. Under new maps, there are just 30 districts that Joe Biden won by less than eight percentage points in 2020 and, likewise, just 30 districts that Donald Trump won by less than eight points.
All told, there are now fewer competitive districts than at any point in the last 52 years. If the good news is that both parties emerged with reasonable opportunities in coming years to win control of a closely divided House, the bad news is that they will fight that battle on the narrowest of terrains under maps artificially engineered to reduce competition.
In the end, a closely divided House remains up for grabs, with reasonable opportunities for both parties to win control in coming years. However, barring unforeseen political shifts, most voters will watch that fight from the sidelines due to maps that artificially reduce competition. If Americans hope to reverse the long-term decline of competitive districts, reforms to create fairer, more independent map-drawing processes will be essential.
That’s a good deal if you’re an incumbent politician who wants to be in a position to make use of political influence without being at political risk. But it’s the worst deal you could get in terms of your own influence if you’re a member of the voting public.
Ted Linscott, the retired bricklayer from Athens, said Appalachians tell it like it is: “When we see BS, we call BS and the way our districts are drawn is BS.”
I’m not saying you’re wrong there, dude. But being happy about this proposal is kinda, well…I’m gonna need Gary Larson to help me out on this one.
Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it'd make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.
Like, if you want to have non-partisan oversight of the algorithm selection, great, but I'm not at all sold that partitioning up the election map requires anything beyond a simple, mechanical process.
Agreeing on the algo, its params, etc. is going to just be another never-ending fight. It now also requires teaching any oversight committee about all of this. Even if it were left to some "non-partisan" (I'll believe it when I see it) engineer, each successive government would just replace the algo and/or engineer.
In my opinion, an algo should be legislated with its implementation forced, but I'm not holding my breath.
I feel like a big part of how districts are drawn should involve asking the people which areas are important to them.
It would definitely have to involve some algorithms to sort out and keep the populations roughly equal.
But in general, I kind of envision a system where maybe every 5 or 10 years or so you’d sit down in front of a computer, maybe on election day, or when you renew your driver’s license, or something like that, and you’re presented with a map of your county and the ones that surround it. You select all of the places you live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or otherwise spend most of your time or have particular interests in or concerns about
The computer then draws a district around as many of those points as possible, keeping the population fas even as possible even, and snapping the borders to obvious places- city and county borders, rivers, school districts, major roads, etc.
Then it averages them together into maps that more accurately reflect where the people in those districts actually spend their time.
Pretty big undertaking on the software side, we’d run into the same kinds of issues we do with voting of how to get people to actually show up and fill in their maps, but if we could implement it, to me that seems like the best way to actually draw districts that make sense.
Because I know when I look at the district map where I live, I see a lot of areas included that I have absolutely no connection with, I don’t live there, work there, drive through there, go shopping there, know anyone who lives there, and in general if they burned to the ground today I probably wouldn’t notice for a year or longer, and then there’s other areas where I do spend a lot of time and have other connections to that are not part of my district.
Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it’d make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.
I’ve thought about this exactly. Here’s my idea.
Crowd source the algorithm every X years. Anybody with basic skills in map making and programming can submit a candidate algorithm. Candidates are scored by…
A) how well they evenly distribute the population across districts (eg +X points for every extra person a district has above a perfectly even distribution), and…
B) how simple the districts are (eg. +Y points for every corner each district boundary has.), which would prevent any kind of gerrymandering.
Lowest score with above example points system wins. Winner gets to have their name on any ballots used while the districts chosen by the algorithm are used. Or something. 🤷
The real median household income in the United States for 2022 was $74,580, which represents a 2.3 percent decline from the 2021 estimate of $76,3301. This figure is based on money income, which is pretax and does not account for the value of in-kind transfers. It’s important to note that this calculation excludes billionaires and focuses on the broader population.
It seems that they are already excluded for some reason.
If you use median, removing or not of 1000 people from a pool of millions indeed has zero impact. My guess is that they worded it like that because they assume people don’t knownwhat a median is, so they describe the practical effect
Is that why I was fired after training my replacement that was paid less than me? Is that why nobody is paying the amount I was formerly paid for my skill set now?
Cuz, from my point of view, nobody wants to train and nobody wants to pay employees what they’re worth.
Do you just do things entirely at random with no input from your understanding of the world?
No? Then congrats, you’ve got ideology. I’m gonna assume it’s liberalism, since they’re typically the only ones both dumb and arrogant enough to think they’re not only non-political, but non-ideological.
I am definitely saying the liberals are more likely to be impartial.
liberals tend to favour fairness of outcome, not the conservative fairness of opportunity. Hence they are better able to better put themselves in other people’s shoes and go against their core beliefs (ideology) if that means a failed outcome for other people.
Fuck that. Biden should make them regret this decision. If his candidacy is as DOA as everyone is pretending it is, then there’s no incentive to play by the rules. Move fast and break stuff and get some shit done for a change.
Also,
Biden, under intense pressure after his disastrous debate performance against Trump last week
They just had to get it in there. Not a mention of Trump making shit up the whole time, or the raving lunatic shit he’s saying on the campaign trail. 90 minutes of Biden being low energy and it’s all over. “The other guy is too old, maybe we can do a little fascism. That will be OK, right?”
It’s crazy that this is the kind of shit we’re counting on now. It used to be the Guardrails and then it was the Wheels of Justice grinding exceedingly fine and now it’s Maybe Something Good Will Happen at the Last Minute
I’m just saying with this ruling Biden could do something really weird in the transitional period and it probably would take the rest of his life to go to court for it.
Almost every article I saw posted following the debate touched on Trump’s falsehoods.
But also, Trump lying is not news. He lied all the way to his 2016 win, and lied decades before that, and still lies now. Absolutely no one new is going to be convinced that he’s bad because he lies. If absolutely anyone is thinking of voting of Trump at this point, him lying is not going to be the deciding factor.
Because Trump lies. It’s old news. There was no way that debate was going to play well for Biden. He had nothing to gain. People voting for Trump are voting for Trump, people not voting for Trump are either Voting for Biden or staying home. Biden has to convince people not to stay home, not convince people not to vote for Trump.
The people that vote for Trump are people so sick of the current state of politics they want to burn it all down. Very few actually think he’s a great president. He’s a troll vote. Biden’s performance made more people want to watch the world burn.
Sorry, are you suggesting that the media is against Biden? Cause they’ve been for him for months. Any apprehension about his future prospects have nothing to do with Trump being a lying sack of shit. I won’t apologize for Biden sucking. I do like the idea of him turning the scotus ruling on them.
Drop. The. Fuck. Out. You are going to fucking lose you geriatric fuck and SCOTUS just ensured that Trump will use his power to be a dictator when he’s elected.
I believe people are going to do the right thing this November. We need to be vocal and vote. But no matter what happens, no one deserves fascism. We’re all still people.
Biden has the power to do something now, but instead he’s using it to campaign. What good will voting him in do if he’s just gunna sit on his hands and do nothing? That has little to do with him being old. Not saying that I won’t vote for him, but it’s understandable to be frustrated, and people definitely don’t deserve fascism for that.
Germany has the same problems. After the reunification they merged the east and west state railway companies into a private enterprise, the Deutsche Bahn AG. Since then, the service progressively became worse and the prices unaffordable.
They engaged in a downward spiral of cutting infrastructure investments and reducing coverage/offer and having less private travellers. Now the infrastructure is such a bad state, that the bad quality of the service is a running gag in Germany. Voyagers now expect their train being late and hope that it will not be cancelled last minute.
In the last couple of years, there has been a push to invested in the infrastructure, but it’s too little too late and it’s going to take decades to make the train an attractive option again.
One of the reason why they are still getting by financially, is because the have very good marketing.
Here’s a good video about it. It’s in German, but you can get the English auto-translation.
Biden needs to make some harsh executive orders, fixing the court (adding more judges or removing them), disbarring Trump from running and forced jailing, then claim all the bullshit changes made by the bad apples are unconstitutional and be reversed.
It’s because it’s only bad if the opposition is furnished with those abilities.
No president Left, Right or otherwise would relinquish such power. They’d complain about an opponent gaining it but would see nothing wrong with having it themselves.
I couldn’t see any government shying away at a chance to have more power.
He should have all the justices arrested and put in Gitmo indefinitely, then jam 6 Dem justices to the court and have them undo all the shitty decisions over the last two decades. Arrest enough senators and house memebers to pass decent legislation and ban Trump from being eligible. Then arrest Teump.and have him put to death for treason. Arrest the rest of the Jan 6th insurrectionists and throw them in Gitmo too.
Then put the structures in place to cover the things that let the Republicans set up a dicatorship so we can have a democracy again.
But no, he will.play fair and shoot himself in the dick so that the slide into fascism continues.
They should also sue israel because i doubt they didnt help them get in. Basically most protected country in the whole world and some fuckers “accidentally” slip-in.
news
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.