I know this is a joke, but a bad dog is so much more of a problem than a bad cat. (Not counting feral animals)
Bad cat: angry, wants you to leave them the fuck alone, scratches you at the slightest provocation
Bad dog: hyperactive or jumps all over you or barks at you, can seriously injure or kill you.
Our society takes for granted that you can take your dog anywhere (in Australia at least), and I don’t think enough emphasis is placed on the fact if you can’t 100% control your dog, don’t bring it anywhere near people.
The number of people saying “oh he’s friendly” as their dog scares someone afraid of dogs because they’re jumping up on them is stupid.
This society values dogs more, and I just don’t get it.
Y’all need to just stop it with voting machines USA. Pencil and paper is far more secure.
I’m not doubting that trump wasn’t elected, reality has a left-wing bias, but damn, what if voting machines are hacked, or have a backdoor built-in in the future.
This is a problem I’d very much like governments to sink a bit of money into. Sure, we don’t have 100% efficient energy storage, but we certainly have technology that does the job. Liquid air energy storage, fly wheels, thermal sand batteries etc, can be installed anywhere and are available right now. Not to mention pumped hydro if you have suitable terrain.
There’s a lot of stuff that we could build, and honestly, we just need to build it, now, even if it’s not profitable, or super efficient. There’s a bunch of solar and wind around the world not being built, or curtailed because prices go negative when there’s no one to store it.
The free market sucks. We need government intervention to do the things the profit motive won’t.
I’m not saying we need more data though, we have the data, plurality voting overwhelming results in two party systems. This is disprovable and I’m totally happy to change my mind based on the evidence and data.
I’m not straw-manning, you said before with regards to looking up the spoiler effect “I have. it’s not a natural phenomenon, it’s a story that the media tells.”
Apologies if I misunderstood what you were saying there.
Well I suppose for voters like you, then yeah, go vote for your candidate. Just seems odd that you’re saying you don’t think their equally bad, but instead of then making a difference to ensure the less bad option wins, you’d rather make yourself feel good for voting for someone you like best.
May the gods have mercy on us mere vassals who are watching from the sidelines.
Stay safe in these troubled times friend, and thanks for engaging, even if at times it got a bit heated and apologies for offence caused.
I’m not explaining away exceptions, they’re called outliers. In any set of data there will be deviations. When I want to plot some viscosity data and get a few random points on my chart that don’t line up with the rest of the curve, I’m still very confident that my curve is close to being accurate, as long as I have enough data points.
We have enough data points on first past the post elections.
For it to be disproven you would show first past the post elections don’t have to two party systems in the vast majority of cases (which isn’t the reality).
Now, you can try and handwave this away by saying, “oh but that’s what people were TOLD TO BELIEVE, so you can’t prove it”. That’s why we have not just the correlation to rely on, we have maths.
And you can’t (I hope you don’t) really disagree that you either have many candidates, who then win with less than a majority, or two parties, which then necessarily means the third smaller candidates can’t win, and so people then vote for one of the larger parties so their vote counts. That’s the binary state of affairs, there are no other options, the reality of maths doesn’t allow for anything else, the votes add up to 100% ¯_(ツ)_/¯
For sure, I wouldn’t like voting for either, also.
Just that if they’re not equal, then that means you have a preference. And I hope you will act on that preference and make a difference, instead or just making yourself feel good that you’ve voted for the candidate you liked best.
You’ve been robbed of that choice by your voting system.
Okay, the test would be that we have first past the post (single winner elections, like for president, or local electorates with single candidates elected, not proportional voting, which is better), produce elections with a spread of votes across many candidates, and don’t consistently trend towards two.
This is definitely testable and disprovable, it’s just that the outcome is overwhelmingly the case I have described, the spoiler effect leading to two dominant parties. There may be outliers and times where a third candidate does win, but these are the overwhelmingly rare exceptions.