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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The fact that the number of delegates is not exactly proportional to the population of a state has never resulted in a popular vote mismatch eoth the college. It may happen, but it’s incredibly unlikely. Every time there’s been a mismatch has been because states allocate delegates in a winner take all manner. One of these this is a real problem amd one is a hypothetical problem. Solving the real problem is straightforward, and involes state level action of only a few states. The hypothetical problem is difficult to solve smd requires coordinated effort of many states at ones. You can spend your time solving a hypothetical problem and maybe achieve success in 70 years. Or you you address the real problem and succeed in 20 years.




  • The real solution is to allocate delegates proportionally to how citizens vote, as is done in Nebraska and a couple other states. This achieves exactly the same purpose as the NPVC but is actually politically tractable.

    No state has any incentive to assign its delgates to a person the citizens of the state didn’t vote for. You can do what the NPVC does and make it contingent upon everyone playing along, but that requires everyone to play along and is incredibly tenuous. Even if it ever goes into effect, as soon as states allocate delegates to someone who wasn’t the most popular candidate in their state they’ll pull it, and the whole thing will fall apart.

    Every state has incentive to allocate its delegates proportionally. That’s exactly what people want. They want that more than winner takes all. It doesn’t require a huge chuck of states to buy into it amd it isn’t tenuous. But it accomplishes the same goal; if states allocate delegates proportionally to how they vote, then the most popular candidate gets the most delegates. If you’re in one of the many states that has winner takes all, advocate to do what the few more democratic states have already adopted and are happy with.









  • All insurance is paying to reduce risk, which is why I said it would be borderline crazy to not have general health coverege - that’s a lot of risk. Dental insurance for the most part covers routine costs, not high risk scenarios. Things like oral cancer are covered by more general plans. So I think largely I agree that dental insurance is a racket. However, I’m sure it makes sense for at least some people so it’s hard to make a blanket statement that no one shoud have it.


  • The fact that insurance is provided through employers in the US is strange. Other products are purchased directly. Presumably there’s some advantage a sort of collective bargaining, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way for this, in part because the employees aren’t really part of the bargaining and in many places employees needs are too diverse to reach am agreement that works well for everyone.

    Better solutions aren’t coming any time soon. You can possibly make some better choices though. Although, not participating in the health insurance is borderline line crazy, dental and vision plans don’t make sense for a lot of people. I would pay more for my dental plan than I pay to visit a dentist, including two annual cleanings, periodic x-rays, and infrequent work like cavities - basically the care you need to maintain tooth health. I don’t get the dental plan. You can figure out your own out of pocket costs and see if a dental plan works for you. Going to a dentist that is not in an insurance network is the way to go when doing this. Offices in network are required by the insurance company to charge exorbitant fees to out-of-network customers (the dentists don’t get the same pay from the insurance company though). So say a normal dentist charges $200 for a cleaning. A dentist in a network would be required to charge $400 or something nuts. If a patient is in network, it will say $400 on the EOB, and that the customer is responsible for $50, making it look like the customer saved $350. The insurance company only gives the dentist $150 though, so the dentist gets $200 anyway, the customer really only saved $150. The insurance company gets a bunch of money in annual fees from the employer.

    You can see if it makes sense for you. Not everyone will be in the same situation, and maybe it doesn’t eork out. If you have an option for an FSA or something similar, this option is even more attractive, since all those expenses can be paid from untaxed income, whereas the money taken out of your paycheck to cover insurance is after tax I believe.



  • I’m throwing out a guess, but the force required to stop an object is related to the square of velocity. You’d need to integrate force over the stopping distance to know for sure, but with that squared term going downhill it’s almost certainly better to apply even force over a longer time. You’re going to speed up otherwise, requiring more total force.

    For a flat surface, the force is proportional to stopping distance, so the total force is the same regardless of distance, but you need to apply that total force in a smaller time, which for extremely short stoppimg distances surely results in different wear. In that case, it’s probably much more complicated and there’s some optimal braking distance or optimal braking curve, rather than some simple way to figure it out. I’d say simple advice is that if it’s not comfortable for you, that’s a good indicator that its causing more wear.

    The best thing to do is to anticipate when you’ll need to stop, and stop accelarating. Then you’ll need far less force to brake. Every day I see people speed up to a light that just turned red, so there’s no chance it will be green when they get there. Then they brake and wait 3 minutes. Just let off the gas as soon as you can tell you’ll be waiting at the light. Of course be aware of people turning or whatever, but mostly there’s no reason to quickly arrive at a light you’re sure you’ll be sitting at.


  • I have no evidence of her motives. Campaign donations are public record, and she receives funding from oil companies. The idea that politicians are not swayed by finance is absurdly naive. They don’t need to accept that money. And, regardless whether convincing swing voters is a part of the campaign’s consideration, it should be clear that influence from corporations is not an influence. Then we could sit here an take them at their word. As it is, it’s impossible to think that millions of dollars from oil companies is not affecting the decision to make a complete u turn on supporting fracking.