From 2002-2022, Florida has held six elections for four statewide political offices: governor, attorney general, chief financial officer, and agricultural secretary. Of the 24 combined elections, democrats won two: CFO in 2006 and agricultural secretary in 2018. Dems won two senate races in that same time frame (2006 and 2012 with incumbent Bill Nelson), and two presidential elections (2008 and 2012, with Obama).
The state has been drifting right ever since the early 2010s. That’s been magnified lately.
The best outcome for democrats is they leave Florida in a mass exodus and go to other states that are close. Locking down nearby Georgia and North Carolina would be way more useful. Any gains in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would be invaluable. Further away, moving Texas left quicker would be great, and Arizona is far from locked down. Adding more house seats (and electoral votes) to blue states would be better too, since Florida is going to stay gerrymandered to reduce voter power as much as possible.
All we’ll get out of Florida is heartbreak. The state is already lost and we should act with that knowledge in hand. Turn it into a republican vote sink so that conservatives leave purple states for it and have the left leave Florida for purple states.
One way to put some perspective on this too is with some numbers.
In 2022 every statewide democrat on the ballot got over 3m votes in Florida. In 2020 Biden got over 5m votes. Turnout craters for midterms so this is not atypical.
In 2022 dems lost the NC senate election by 120k votes, the WI senate election by 30k votes, the GA governor by 300k votes, AZ superintendent by 10k votes, WI treasurer by 10k votes, and NV governor by 10k votes… Among many other close elections. There were also absurdly close calls in the elections we won in NV, WI, and AZ all off the top of my head. Texas needs bigger numbers to get over the finish line, but we lost the governor’s race by 900k in 2022 and the senate race by 215k in 2018.
Ignoring Texas and Georgia, all of those lost elections could be flipped with absolutely trivial population shifts out of Florida. I’m not going to pretend that the left is magically going to start leaving Florida in electorally strategic ways (people don’t think like that!), but even just getting 500k FL voters to leave is going to see those trivial shifts start to happen organically anyway.
New York fell 89 residents short of keeping its 27th congressional district in 2020. I cannot for the life of me find the actual numbers for other seats, but Arizona would have had seat 440, California seat 441, Virginia 442, Michigan 444, and New Jersey 445. It wouldn’t have required too huge of a population shift to those states to give them each an additional house seat, and if the exodus was from red states that would be a shift of red->blue in the electoral college and hopefully also the house.
Went to a restaurant in LA today and when I got the check I noticed that it was a bit higher than it should be. Then I noticed this 18% service charge. So… We, as customers, need to help pay for their servers instead of the owners paying their servers a living wage. And on top of that they have suggested tip. I called bs on...
Service charge I would presume is primarily paid out to the non-wait staff at the restaurant. The kitchen in particular.
Tips go to the wait staff, and they will pay some of that out to other staff (e.g. front staff) depending on how the restaurant works.
These are going to be separate. The service charge is there so they can increase prices by a tightly controlled amount without needing to fuck up the carefully targeted price points ($8 or $7.99 is a lot better than $9.44). Which is shitty, to be clear: it’s a hidden way to increase prices while still advertising the same price. But it’s not something that replaces or complements the tip, it’s just a shitty price-adjustment.
A waiter or waitress is still going to be dependent on the actual tip.
The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.
AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as “Amazon”) gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.
I think there’s a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.
Based on Ubuntu. Interface and functionality like Windows, users will not feel much difference. BRICS countries committed to their own Linux distributions. South Africa has been the exception.
BRICS isn’t an alliance or a cohesive entity. It’s the equivalent of the G7 for major non-western economies. India and China hate each other. China and Russia only really get along in being anti-US. Brazil and South Africa have no real intersection with the geopolitical goals of the other. BRICS isn’t a geopolitical anything of any meaning.
I suspect India is doing this for the simple reason that they have zero control over Windows while they would have as much control as they want over internal-Linux use. They’re large enough that they can make it work, assuming they’re willing to dedicate the people and the money to it and put up with the non-insubstantial switching costs. Open question on what their follow through will look like, but it’s entirely within their capability.
A federal judge has blocked the state of Hawaii from enforcing a recently enacted ban on firearms on its prized beaches and in other areas including banks, bars and parks, citing last year’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling expanding gun rights.
This is a result of a SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS membership is determined by the president and control of the senate at the time of vacancies. Neither of those are influenced by gerrymandering.
At the core of it this comes down to 2016 when a larger than typical number of people on the left lied to themselves and said “eh, they’re all teh same” and tossed their vote at a third party or just didn’t vote at all. Following that, SCOTUS went from a 4-4 tie (with 1 vacancy) to 6-3 conservative advantange.
I wouldn’t blame laziness, but instead a combination of apathy and people who are more interested in ideological purity than in accepting the available-better such that they would rather complain about the unavailable-best.
RBG refusing to retire in 2012-2014 also shares blame. She could have retired then and the court would be 5-4 instead.
Not a final decision. SCOTUS (via Kagan) refused to overturn a stay on a decision while legal proceedings continue. Basically just an order to keep things as-is until the case finishes working its way through the courts.
Which as I understand it is generally how things work: if there’s no clear likely winner, go with the interim situation that most easily can be rectified if it is later ruled to have been wrong. In this case, if the ruling goes against Apple than they can be ordered to give money to Epic and other app-owners based on the revenue brought in from them to Apple during the appropriate period. The opposite case would require more complex estimates (how much revenue was shifted away from Apple incorrectly, in the case where Apple wins) and further it’d result in unnecessary consumer friction: users would go from A to B then back to A again.
I’d be surprised if USB-C was a limitation on phone technology even by 2040. The bandwidth and power delivery capacity are way beyond what are needed now. Data transfers from phones are going to increasingly move to wireless in that time frame too, I expect.
The limitation on the viability of USB-C with phones won’t be the actual technological viability of the standard with respect to phones. Instead, the problem for USB-C for phones will be if another standard comes out and starts being used by other devices that do need higher bandwidth or power delivery capability. Monitors, storage devices, laptops (etc.) will eventually need more than USB-C can provide, even with future updates to its capacity. When those switch over to something new, that will be when phones (and other devices) will need to consider a new standard too.
This is speculation based on the combination of physical constraints and changing usage.
Phone batteries today are in the 10-20 watt-hours range for capacity, or at least iphones are and that’s the data I found. Going from the typical ~20W fast charging rate to the full 240W capacity of USB-C EPR would allow a twelve times increase in battery capacity with no change to charge times. Are batteries going to increase in capacity by twelve times in the next 17 years? I’d be shocked if they did. The change from the iphone 1 to the iphone 14 pro max is 5.18Wh to 16.68Wh — a three times increase in 16 years.
Likewise, with data transfer, it’s a matter of how human-device interaction has shifted with time. People increasingly prefer (a) automated, and (b) cloud based data storage, and (c) if they do have to move data from device 1 to device 2, they would rather do it wirelessly than with a physical connection. USB4 on USB-C is meant for 80 Gbit/s = 9.6 GB/s transfers. That’s already faster than high end SSD storage can sustain today, and USB4 is a four year old standard. People on phones are going to be far more likely to be worried about their wifi transfer speeds than their physical cable transfer speeds, especially in 2040.
Then, on top of all of that… USB will continue to be updated. USB-C’s limitations in 2033 will not be USB-C’s limitations in 2023, just as USB-C’s limitations in 2023 are not the same as USB-C’s limitations at its inception in 2014. In 2014 USB’s best transfer rate was 10 Gbit/s, or 1/8 what it can do today.
It’s convenience and efficiency. At the end of the day a single cable can provide that functionality needed for 99.9% of such devices. Getting everything on a single cable format reduces waste, simplifies people’s lives, and even opens up competitive spaces. There’s no need for it to be two cables.
In theory it’s exceptionally illegal to curtail unionization efforts.
In practice, the law has been whittled away by decades of conservative judiciary decisions and weak department of labor enforcement. This isn’t helped at all by the balance of power.
Companies can afford to scare off some degree of workers, especially at the lower end of the salary range. Big businesses can survive shutting down a store or losing business at locations indefinitely. Big businesses can afford expensive lawyers and to indefinitely stay in litigation over union busting efforts.
For workers, it’s a completely different proposition. Is Walmart or Home Depot or Starbucks going to want to hire someone that is actively suing another major corporation for anything at all? It’s even worse if it’s labor rights related, but just suing them in the first place is going to make it a struggle to find employment at a lot of places. That’s even pretending they can find & afford lawyers. Or that they can handle the transition period from job A to job B even if it isn’t difficult to find job B.
These businesses hold all the cards and they know it. You see similar thinking, though different details, behind Hollywood’s decision to just try and wait out the striking writers and actors. They can survive losing billions of dollars in income a year from now with unmade projects; striking workers will struggle to get by with no salary.
Superdelegates have never decided a democratic primary.
At the end of the day the delegates are fully aware that if they take the nomination away from the candidate that won the most votes that it would utterly destroy the party and they would be surrendering that year’s election up and down the ballot. Even in an extreme scenario like e.g. credible accusations of sexual assault coming out, they’d still be reticent to do it and would basically be stuck picking how to lose the election.
And before anyone says it: superdelegate pledges do not sway primary voters in any meaningful numbers. I’d wager >90% of democratic primary voters don’t know what the fuck a superdelegate is, and likely only have superficial understanding of the overall process by which a nominee is selected. They’re not going to know the superdelegate pledge counts or any of that bullshit. The people that follow politics enough to know that stuff are also overwhelmingly the people that care enough about politics that they’re still going to vote for the same person, even if they do not outright know it’s bullshit. The audience of voters that could be swayed by those pledges is so vanishingly small as to be borderline imaginary.
Superdelegates have only mattered to give losing candidates a justification they can offer to their supporters to keep running. Clinton tried it in 2008 and Sanders tried it in 2016. Amusingly this makes both of them a bit hypocritical on the subject…
The 2020 primary came down to the not-Sanders wing of the party starting off heavily divided and then consolidating on a single candidate after enough of them were winnowed out by the early states. Biden only survived that long because he ran a frugal campaign and had a strategy on SC that he was going to stick to. Honestly, going in I thought it was a horrible strategy with no chance of success. I was clearly quite wrong.
Candidates that will the whole party will find exciting are basically a once in a generation event, if that. This generation’s such candidate was Obama. Democrats as a party are reliant on far too big of a tent to make this a viable strategy or thought process.
A candidate that I, a far left progressive, would get excited about is a candidate that a lot of center-of-left or moderate voters would find boring. Even within wings of the party there’s not going to be lockstep excitement (go back to Dec 2019 and ask Sanders supporters how “excited” they’d be for a Warren candidacy!).
This line of argument is consistently just people pining for candidates that more closely reflect our own ideological views, not a reflection of the reality available to us. There was no such candidate in 2016 or 2020 and won’t be for 2024. I’m not going to hold my breath for 2028 either. Maybe by 2032 we might see the next Obama, someone that excites the whole party.
Many creators mentioning they lost hundreds of their patrons suddenly and patrons confused as to why their payments are being declined. Patreon is such an old company that hasnt done anything to improve their service for years while the CEO makes youtube videos and seemingly nothing with the company. I hate how much of a...
Also I’m p sure Ko-Fi has a better revenue split with those who use it than Patreon does
This line made me curious so I looked. Best I can find is that Ko-fi charges either 0% or 5% on donations, dependent on the type of donation and the type of account the receiver has with them.
Patreon used to charge 5%, but now has: 5% for grandfathered pro accounts, 5% for lowest tier accounts, 8% for non-grandfathered accounts on a pro plan, and 12% for a higher premium tier.
Yup! Source I have from 2016 has it even more unbalanced than your numbers. All shipping is 1.7% vs all road transport at 11.9%. Wish I had more recent data but their claim wouldn’t be true even if those top ten ships represented the entirety of ocean emissions and was tripled afterwards.
The report gives a quick summary of what they include, but not any details or math.
The cost of underlying energy (gas, diesel, electric)
State excise taxes charged for road maintenance
The cost to operate a pump or charger
The cost to drive to a fueling station (deadhead miles)
Elsewhere it says it assumes 12k miles in a year and is focused on the midwest and Michigan in particular. As it so happens, Michigan charges for registration based on the car value. EVs cost more than ICE vehicles in the same market segment most of the time. This would fall under excise taxes that they include.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they also tacked on the cost to install a L2 charger once as “cost to operate a pump or charger” — intentionally ignoring that it’s a one-time fee to support EVs at a home. With those two data points they could easily add >$1000 to the cost to “charge” an EV for one year if that is what they wanted to do.
The people making the report clearly picked criteria that sounds reasonable but also intentionally misleads people. Not a surprise.
Minnesotans are now able to legally possess and grow their own marijuana for recreational purposes, after the Minnesota Legislature approved a 300-page bill earlier this year, and Gov. Tim Walz signed it into law shortly thereafter. It became official Tuesday.
Tuberville’s asinine blockade of military promotions presumably played a big part in this. I think it’s a smart idea even in a vacuum though. The types of people that would be interested in serving in Space Command positions are, I expect, going to be the types of people least likely to find living in Alabama to be tolerable. Locating the HQ in Colorado is going to be a lot better for their recruitment efforts.
That’s not to mention the official reasons offered, that it would be a clusterfuck to relocate the HQ. Which is a perfectly sufficient reason on its own too.
The overall state matters far more than the local area for determining what your government is going to be like. Colorado Springs cannot make abortion illegal for its residents; Colorado can. Colorado Springs cannot ignore the state’s laws on minimum wages, or LGBTQ rights, or any myriad other laws.
It’s why I, as a progressive, would have no interest in living in Austin Texas: as left-leaning as Austin is, the state of Texas plays a bigger part in that governance and would make it an undesirable place for me to live.
Incidentally, Colorado Springs has been moving left. It has a non-republican independent mayor now, and the democratic governor even won the city in his reelection campaign (still lost the county, but came close). Trump won the county by 10% in 2020, after winning it by 20% in 2016. Likewise, Romney and McCain won it by 20%; Bush Jr. won it by 30% and 34%. In 1988 Bush Sr. won it by 40%. I expect the city-only results are even closer at the presidential level but cannot find data for that quickly.
Sony’s big action games have done great on PC. It’s the lower profile games that have launched with little to modest success. Also the lack of marketing didn’t hurt the first few games as the novelty of a port at all basically created publicity. It’s becoming more and more expected now though, so they’ll need to do some marketing if they want big numbers at launch. Doesn’t need to be a big campaign but just find an excuse to generate extra discussion online.
Spider-man, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn all did amazingly. Even Days Gone did great. Uncharted and The Last of Us both had port issues at launch; Uncharted is in good shape now but TLoU still needs some work (and likely a bit of marketing to let people know that). Returnal is niche and I expect it will do well in the long run, but was never going to do gangbusters at launch. Sackboy and Ratchet & Clank aren’t generally the types of games I’d expect to do particularly well on PC.
As someone that has read the books but not watched the show…
For books 7-9, I think of them as an epilogue trilogy. The time jump, the overall ending at the end of book 9, the state of the characters… Basically all of it fills the same purpose that a traditional epilogue fills. It just tells an entire story in the process of doing so and needs 1200-1500 pages.
Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” policies have led to a serious brain drain in Florida (www.lgbtqnation.com)
higher wages for the servers... by the customers. Fnbs (lemmy.world)
Went to a restaurant in LA today and when I got the check I noticed that it was a bit higher than it should be. Then I noticed this 18% service charge. So… We, as customers, need to help pay for their servers instead of the owners paying their servers a living wage. And on top of that they have suggested tip. I called bs on...
Lina Khan: The most feared person in Silicon Valley is a 34-year-old in DC (finance.yahoo.com)
Lina Khan is a key architect of an aggressive attempt by Washington to rein in tech giants. Amazon may be next....
No More Windows! Indian Defence Services are Switching to Linux: Indian Govt offices to use Linux distribution, replacing Microsoft Windows (gadgeteer.co.za)
Based on Ubuntu. Interface and functionality like Windows, users will not feel much difference. BRICS countries committed to their own Linux distributions. South Africa has been the exception.
Hawaii cannot ban guns on beaches, US judge rules (www.reuters.com)
A federal judge has blocked the state of Hawaii from enforcing a recently enacted ban on firearms on its prized beaches and in other areas including banks, bars and parks, citing last year’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling expanding gun rights.
Supreme Court says Apple can keep its App Store payment rules for now (www.theverge.com)
Saudi Arabia mandates all electronic devices to use USB-C charging ports from 2025 (www.gsmarena.com)
Trader Joe's hires union-busting law firm, fires union supporters (sign.moveon.org)
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/2397424...
Democrats worry their most loyal voters won’t turn out for Biden in 2024 (www.washingtonpost.com)
Summary:...
Patreon having issues again causing thousands of people’s payments to be declined (i.imgur.com)
Many creators mentioning they lost hundreds of their patrons suddenly and patrons confused as to why their payments are being declined. Patreon is such an old company that hasnt done anything to improve their service for years while the CEO makes youtube videos and seemingly nothing with the company. I hate how much of a...
[meme] Simple problems require simple solutions (imgur.com)
Research Firm Claims Most cars still cost more to charge than to fill up with gas (www.businessinsider.com)
Recreational weed is now legal in Minnesota: What to know (www.cbsnews.com)
Minnesotans are now able to legally possess and grow their own marijuana for recreational purposes, after the Minnesota Legislature approved a 300-page bill earlier this year, and Gov. Tim Walz signed it into law shortly thereafter. It became official Tuesday.
Biden has decided to keep Space Command in Colorado, rejecting move to Alabama, officials tell AP (apnews.com)
Critically Acclaimed PlayStation Exclusive Struggling on PC (web.archive.org)
Top GOP Senators Back Romney’s Call For One Anti-Trump Candidate to Emerge Quickly to Stop Former President (www.mediaite.com)
Caves of Qud 1.0 - Official Announcement Trailer, with Kitfox Games (www.youtube.com)
The Expanse: A Telltale Series Redband Trailer (youtu.be)