Some of it is, especially the peanut butter.

Spouses can move to the village, it’s just that the children never leave.

At least one parent was born in the village.

Luigi was never the prototypical right-winger.

He was more of a tech bro libertarian.and even that seems to have been blunted by his pain and experience with US health insurance.

Kraft singles are still cheese. They’ve just been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate.

That actually makes them super useful in making a cheese sauce.

Add a few slices to a queso and it will not break.

You fat. Smooth cheesey sauce that comes out perfect every time.

You can make sodium citrate with lemon juice and baking soda. Lime juice also works. Really any citric acid.

Anyway, you don’t need much to make cheese melt smoothly.

The thing is, Left vs Right is already a measure of authoritarian vs Democratic.

The original use of the terms comes from the French Revolution. There was a vote on if the King should have an absolute veto over laws passed by the assembly. Those who said no sat to the left of the Speakers podium. Those who said yes sat on the right.

The reason why left and right were applied to economic policy was because Marx described Communism as a form of extreme Democracy. Whereas Capitalism concentrates power into the hands of a select few.

It’s still a measure of where the power rests. In the hands of the people or the hands of the state/leader.

You can break it down to dozens of categories, but it’s all authoritarian vs Democratic in the end.

As a note, Lenin style single party “communism” is about as far from Marx’s ideal as you can get.

Dictators and Kings are all the enemies of the people.

Ah yes, the Noem Chomsky. Famously when he was defending Pol Pot’s regime.

Ah, Cato the Elder. He had a good cheesecake recipe, but was otherwise a complete jackass.

It’s quite a bit less functional. There have been dozens of high profile outages and service interruptions.

The first article is from someone who wants to save RCV, despite that one flaw that they’ve drilled into.

The problem is that it’s a known attack vector, the Wikipedia article talks about how it was used intentionally by a political party in 2005 in Germany to effectively steal an additional seat in their parliament.

My second link is a deeper dive into more of RCV’s many flaws. Because why stop at monotonicity? Seriously, the fact that increasing support can cause a candidate to lose, and not just lose but elect the worst choice, is insane.

That fact that there are more flaws, just as game breaking, means we should all follow the example of the Marquis de Condorcet, the guy who invented RCV, abandoned it because he saw how broken it was.

Then you have the lying liars at FairVote saying that the Condorcet criterion doesn’t matter in elections.

The Condorcet criterion is that if you were to hold a series of one on one elections between all candidates, the winner of those should be the same winner of your election system. RCV fails this in most elections, which is why Condorcet abandoned it.

It wasn’t until about 30 years after Condorcet’s death that an Englishman revived the voting method, but added a proportional twist. It still had all the flaws that Condorcet wrote about, but Condorcet was French, and lost the political games of the French Revolution, so he was mostly ignored.

As a side note, the political writings of Condorcet should be required reading. The guy wrote this in 1790

‘The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.’

https://medium.com/@Gbgrow/understanding-non-monotonicity-in-ranked-choice-voting-and-how-to-prevent-it-55ad54fdad06

https://electionscience.org/research-hub/the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_responsiveness_paradox#Specific_examples

We’ve seen it happen in actual elections, as shown in the Wikipedia link.

RCV is just a flawed system, which is expected for something created by a couple of guys 150+ years ago.

IRV, or RCV as it’s being sold here, has a lot of problems.

It’s the only voting system in existence where ranking someone higher on the ballot can cause them to lose the election.

Australia gets around most of the problems of IRV by just not telling people any information about the vote except the winners.

Also you only use straight IRV for a single part of your government.

The US would use it for every part of our government. It would be a shit show.

Which is why RCV has been banned in half a dozen states.

Now, there are better voting systems. Systems that live up to the hype.

STAR is the single best voting system designed to date.

As a cardinal voting system, it’s actually immune to the Spoiler Effect.

Ethanol is incredibly inefficient as a fuel source.

If not for the massive subsidies it would not exist.

Still, ethanol is a better fuel additive than lead. (Both reduce knocking)

Still, the far better use is to grow food.

Mindustry is much closer to the tower defense side of it.

Or maybe the RTS side.

There are even attack modes, where you build up an army to take on a fixed emplacement of enemy units.

Harris was the path of things slowly getting better. Wages finally overtaking inflation.

Given a couple years, we would all be in a better place.

Trump’s tariffs will drive up the price of everything. The last few years of inflation and greed will pale in comparison.

And egg prices will still go up.

Catastrophicly so.

Countless was a little under 2000 people (at least as far as Harris is concerned) That’s about half of what her predecessor in the same office did over roughly the same time period.

Now, that conviction is for “possession, sale, or cultivation”. Most paid a fine rather than serve jail time. We also don’t know the exact breakdown of possession vs sale vs cultivation.

We also know that Harris pushed for decriminalization and legalization in California, and has pushed some of the same as vice president. I think Joe is the roadblock there, even if he was convinced to pardon a bunch of people for simple possession.

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The difference between red and blue is often about 5-10 percentage points. But if you’re up 5, that means your opponent is down 5. Because it still has to add up to 100.

To turn a state green, that party would have to be up at least 50%.

You see how that’s a problem, right?

But while Green is pushing ahead, where do you think those votes are coming from?

If the Greens pick up 5% of the vote, they need to take those votes from someone, and that’s most likely the Dems. Now they have 45% of the vote, because percentages still have to add up to 100, the Republicans have 50%, and handily win the election.

For greens to replace, most likely the democrats, would involve the left loosing every election for about a decade or two. Just completely having no voice in government.

You see what parties don’t switch like that right? No, the party has to collapse, and then a replacement has to step in.

And in order for a party to collapse, it needs to be a coalition party. Like the Whigs. https://www.history.com/news/whig-party-collapse

Something that is unlikely to happen to a modern party.

Thus the only way for the greens to gain power is to change the voting system. Real voting reform needs either Approval or STAR as the voting system. (there are a few more, like Ranked Robin, but the main point is that it needs to be a cardinal voting system.)

The Green party under Jill Stein mildly supports RCV, a system that deeply flawed and will not actually fix things.

I will say, the voting system that we advocate for is important.

There are three common choices. RCV, Approval, and STAR.

RCV has some momentum, but is just a bad voting system. It’s arguably worse than Fist Past the Post, because in a way, it is FPtP. Or rather, it’s several FPtP elections in a row, dropping the lowest each time.

Which is where a problem creeps in. See, it’s drop lowest, and then never hear from that person again. So if they are the literal second choice of 99% of voters, they’re dropped in the first round and never seen again.

This leads to ballots that look like this;

1 - dropped in 4th round 2- dropped in 1st round 3- dropped in 2nd round 4- dropped in 3rd round 5- Guy you kind of hate and only listed because the rules said you had to list 5. He’s the one who got your vote.

If you had dropped your first choice, Your second through third might have won.

There’s also a version of the above ballot that doesn’t have a number 5, in that case your ballot is just thrown out as exhausted. Up to 18% of ballots get thrown out as exhausted. At least that’s what the data from California and Maine has said.

Most countries that use IRV (RCV’s real name) don’t publish any election data, so we use what we’ve got.

Anyway, Approval and STAR are both immune to shit like the above, because how you rate one candidate has zero bearing on how you rate another. Woo for cardinal voting systems.

You just completely missed the point.

You literally cannot “values vote” your way to a functional First Past the Post voting system.

And trying to get others to join in your misunderstanding of basic reality is actively harmful to your, and their interests.

Maybe that’s the problem. You don’t want to admit that you’re the bad guy…