PaintedSnail

Slippery soap all over the floor would complicate matters.

OP: posts example of Republicans taking credit for things they opposed

ITT: “Roads are bad!”

Kinda missing the point, here.

This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

It also has built-in Facebook Container to isolate Facebook links.

https://newrepublic.com/post/187332/trump-biden-tough-netanyahu

When Trump says that Biden should not be holding Netanyahu back (regardless of whether or not he is) and that Netanyahu is doing a good job, then it can’t be much more clear that Trump is going to enable even more.

You know, at first I was thinking that this is a really bad take. But then I realized something: this is a classic trolley problem.

Sparing the details because you probably already know them, it comes down to a choice: you can do nothing and five people will die, or you can actively perform an action and only one person will die. The only choice you have is to do nothing or do something.

So the problem becomes: which is the morally correct choice? On one hand, does doing nothing absolve you of the five deaths you could have avoided? On the other, does actively participating make you responsible for the one death even if it was to save five?

Back in the real world, you have the same choice. Since voting for a third party that has no chance of winning is functionally equivalent to not voting, it plays out the same way. You can do nothing and the genocide gets worse, or you can actively participate and try to reduce the damage. Which is the moral choice? Which will help you sleep at night?

That is a question philosophers have struggled with for centuries, and there’s no good answer. From my personal perspective, doing nothing IS a choice, so no matter what I do I’m still an active participant. Therefore I will choose to minimize the damage.

Yes, it’s bullshit that the current administration hasn’t takes a tougher stance on the conflict. But it will be worse under Trump, as demonstrated by both his words and his actions when he was last in office. So the question is: which will help you sleep at night: doing nothing and telling yourself that you are not responsible when Trump wins, or doing something even though you know it won’t be enough?

As powerless members of the masses, it’s the best we can do.

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.

I would suggest doing so anyway. If they come across a firearm by happenstance then they at least won’t panic and will know what to do to be safe.

Dr. Who

We used to have them until several years ago they were deliberately removed. Their roots were destroying the roads and sidewalks, as well as infiltrating the underground infrastructure.

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.

Yeah, the side quests are rather unimaginative in their tasks. For the most part they’re not worth doing unless you want a bit more of a dive into the world lore. (A few give unique rewards, though.) Even some story quests are “player does menial chores for good karma with the locals because the devs need to pad things out a bit.”

Shadowbringers is worth it, though. It’s my personal favorite story arc. Endwalker, the one after, is my second favorite.

Come to FFXIV! We have decent stories, a voluntary PvP arena with multiple modes, and cat girls!

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.

Basically, yes, though I think they have special hydraulic pullers, too. I forget the exact name. They have to take special measures if the day is too cold.

https://youtu.be/zqmOSMAtadc?si=FCG7HxiPWXNQY6Uj

According to Practical Engineering, tracks are no longer given a gap. The gap causes premature wear and excess noise. Instead, they lay the track under tension, and weld the joins between sections.

There is still a limit on how much heat they can handle before buckling, of course. I just thought that was a neat innovation.