You’re just being a reminder that we shouldn’t want those things and give up.

No, I’m being a reminder that you should be strategic in how you go about it. Don’t just dream – work towards it. Gather support, particularly in smaller, local elections, where the consequences for spoiling aren’t quite as bad. Talk to people. Get people on board. Once you have enough backing, try to swing bigger elections around.

I’m not a centrist, nor a neoliberal, nor whatever else you may associate with the Democrats. I don’t even live in the US, and where I do live, I vote left. But that only works because we have a representative democracy, where my vote counts even if it’s not a plurality vote.

So please spare me your moral grandstanding and deflection and consider what I’m actually talking about instead.

Aye, if you can rally enough voters behind a united, third option, that would be the way to break out. I’m cautioning that you need to be sure you can knock out the hammers, otherwise you risk the Spoiler Effect fucking things up. If you take the shot and miss, you might just hit your own foot instead.

Don’t ignore the ugly realities of strategic voting just because they don’t fit your dream. If you’re confident you can break the cycle, by all means, go for it.

That’s not what I was asking. Would Cool Water prefer Warm Pepsi or Hammers to have the plurality?

Because the whole point of my explanation of the Spoiler Effect is this: If the Cool Water party wins over more Warm Pepsi voters than Hammer voters (which it probably would), it may end up splitting the Pepsi vote to the point that the Hammers win.

Unless you can be sure that Cool Water would take the plurality, you’d risk smashing your own face to spite Pepsi.

By all means, do the work to make Cool Water popular and gain support, but don’t ignore the reality of strategic voting. It’s fucked up, it’s ideologically unpalatable, but it’s pragmatic.

And as far as Cool Water is concerned?

No, it’s predicated on the belief that Warm Pepsi is still preferable to Hammers and that attempting to supplant either of them with Cool Water in one fell swoop isn’t realistic. Under those premises, Cool Water may act as a spoiler party to undermine Warm Pepsi.

Nobody wins by voting third party in a plurality system, unless that third party can overtake one of the two first parties.

Like I said, I get being fed up with compromise. I’m fed up too. But plurality voting sucks, so let’s do some math:

Hammer Party has 45% of the votes. Pepsi Party has 50%. 5% go to some other, minor parties.

Now suppose a Cool Water party appears, clearly better than Warm Pepsi. They start drawing voters, some from the Pepsi, some maybe from non-voters, but the Hammer Party adherents don’t relent. They make it to 10%, with the Pepsi Party now standing at, say, 45%. Hammer are down to 43% thanks to higher turnout. Other parties down to 2%.

Next election, more Pepsi compromise voters are encouraged to vote Water. Water is up to 25%! Hammer is at 38% now – we’re making progress! Except that the Pepsi party now has a maximum of 37%, if there are no non-voters. Hammer party now has the most votes. That’s called the spoiler effect.

Obviously, the Pepsi fraction might see that shift coming and try to avoid it. For that, they’d either have to pull some of the Hammer voters, or accede to the Water voters in hopes of retaining them. Do you think they’ll compromise with Water? And do you think the Water voters are willing to trust that compromise?

Unless you somehow manage to rapidly turn a party up to 50% or win a significant amount of voters from both camps, odds are you’re going to make things worse. Hopefully, they’ll get better after that, unless Hammer Party manages to rig the system in their favour or even get rid of it. Is that a risk worth taking?

For a different example, suppose Water and Pepsi teamed up. Let’s take the initial 5% other voters, manage to push Hammer down to 31% and put the Pepsi party at a solid 64%.

For the next election, hammer and other voters remain the same, but the Water party has split off and immediately pulled a solid 25% of voters. Pepsi is still at 39%, still wins. Not ideal, but better than Hammer, right?

The following election sees even more Water voters, maybe higher turnout too. Hammer down to 30%, other voters 2%. Water and Pepsi are a close race, but turn out 33% to 35% in favour of Water.

That’s what I mean with compromise: strategically creating a statistical base on which change can be built without risking shooting your own foot.

Of course, the best option would be an actually fair voting system, like Ranked Choice (which is probably easiest to explain), but with how things are now, it’d take a lot of prep work and publicity work to get enough people on board so it doesn’t go sideways.

For the most realistic path to that end, the hammer would become so unpopular that an actually decent choice would stand a chance of being more than a spoiler to the Pepsi. For that to work, the Pepsi would need at least twice the approval of the hammer, which would require compromise for the sake of common purpose. Then, the decent alternative would need to be united enough to start pulling the balance, which would also require compromise on lesser points.

But that level of unity seems impossible for many of the progressive factions I see. They’re fed up with compromise, and I get it. I just don’t think a lasting improvement will happen without it.

Edit: This whole comment thread proves my point. We can’t even agree whether we hate the Hammers more than we hate Warm Pepsi.

Plus there’s this.

What the fuck? I was expecting that link to be one singular failing, not ten. Holy shit.

Wait, people have religious objections to vaccines? Do they worship St. Influenza or what? Is this the Church of Virus Christus? Latter Day Plagues? Cough-olic? Je-fever’s Witnesses?

Shai-Hulud actually does some good though. Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.

Adding on to the other comment, Nobara is maintained by Glorious Egroll, the same guy that also develops the popular Proton-GE compatibility tool which adds some extra fixes on top of Valve’s Proton.

(Proton is the compatibility tool Steam uses to make Windows games run on Linux, in case you’re unfamiliar)

I think that’s where the world of art appreciation is now quite visibly breaking along a divide that has existed for a while. Some have always just valued the product: means be damned, if the end is enjoyable enough. For others, the process matters; for some even more than the result.

The latter group seems larger, though they may just be more passionate about their views and accordingly vocal (personally, I suspect both are the case, but I don’t know of any solid evidence).

Such is the way of new technology: it challenges traditional values. That doesn’t mean those values are without merit or have to be overturned, but I think it’s valuable that they’re challenged at least.

Here’s to hoping they stand the test.

Some time ago, I read an analysis on why left-wing parties were allegedly more successful in Scandinavia than other parts of Europe. It claimed that, for all their pro-social domestic policy, they weren’t as immigrant-friendly as many other left-wing parties. Supposedly, that approach helped undermined the narrative that “I have nothing, yet these immigrants come here to get stuff for free at my expense.” By putting their own country’s needs first, they won over voters that worried they were being screwed over.

I have no way to verify how accurate that analysis was, nor do I have any sense of how dated it might be, so I’ll be sceptical, but the idea stuck with me. I can’t really blame people for putting their own needs first, and I wonder how much that influences the popularity of right-wing parties all around.

Of course, health care should be a universal good anyway and the US system definitely needs fixing, but I can understand how the “freeloader immigrant” propaganda would work on people suffering from that system – misery breeds bigotry and all.

Probably did -6 instead of +6

Donors get honors

Solid vitamin C is relatively stable, but it decomposes rather quickly when dissolved in water. Factors such as pH, temperature, oxygen, and the presence of catalysts (iron, copper) influence the decomposition process. The lowest rate of oxidation is observed at pH 3, where vitamin C solutions are the most stable. Raising the pH to 5 increases the oxidation rate by a factor of 2.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3510389/

The study uses particularly clean water (clean enough to be suitable for medical injections) with a pH of ~7.4. At that acidity and a temperature of 20°C (≈70°F), it takes about 95 days for the vitamin C to decay to 10% of its original concentration, or 28 days to reach 50%.

Normal drinking water has a pH of 6.5-8.5, but also contains a lot of other substances, which might increase the rate of oxidation. Given the potential time between treatment and consumption as well as the fact that people might boil it and increase the rate of decay that way, it’s just not as economical to add ascorbic acid to the water supply if only a small percentage of it will ever reach the consumers.

Additionally, the exact dosage will be hard to control, leading to a risk of excessive side effects such as kidney stones. People with a specific enzyme deficiency may also suffer anemia as excessive doses.

Compare that to, say, lemons, whose juice has a pH of ~ 2.4 and renders the vitamin a lot more stable. If you want people to get a good intake of vitamin C, tell them to eat fruits and vegetables, preferably uncooked. The vitamin C dosage you’ll get from that will hardly lead to megadoses, unless you eat such vast amounts that you’d probably get other problems anyway.

The reason fluoride is added is that it’s quite stable, safe and effective, while also being fairly cheap.

Also, to make sure there are no linguistic roots left over on your system that it might grow from again, add --no-preserve-root.

You mean brainunalive?