If NYC uses ranked choice voting in the general

It does not, for some weird reason. City primaries only.

@xavier666@lemm.ee If you sit at a magnesium fire, it burns at 3300K, which is hot enough to produce sizeable ultraviolet rays. So you can get your sunburn from that, damaging the DNA in whatever of your remaining cells have not been melted away by heat.

This is literally that scene from Schindler’s List where the Commandant sits on the balcony and snipes any prisoner below who isn’t laboring fast enough. And for years they were saying this was unrealistic and such crass cruelty could not have happened!

https://piped.video/watch?v=N0DqnUk90lo

I got excited that the paper makes concrete predictions for particle masses - the electron, muon, and tau, the quarks, and the neutrinos. For the moment, particle masses are free parameters in the Standard Model that you need to plug arbitrary experimentally-derived numbers into. A theory that can calculate them directly would be a great theory, even if it were as weird as having 3 time dimensions.

Buuut… this paper doesn’t actually explain how it calculates all its amazing predictions. It just starts with something like “what if Schrödinger equation, but instead of exp(it) we had exp(it1 + it2 + it3)!” And I agree: yes! Let’s! What if! We should explore all possibilities, no matter how weird, if they lead to better understanding of the world. But then it immediately goes to say “let α and γ be some [unspecified] constants. Therefore the mass of the muon is 105.6583745 MeV”. Like… how?

I thought maybe this is a paper just to announce the theory, and all the laborious calculations are in the supplemental materials, but at the very bottom it specifically writes “Data Availability: The theoretical predictions and numerical calculations presented in this paper are fully described within the text.” **Frodo mode:** Fine, keep you secrets!

Until the author shows the actual theory and the calculations outputting all these amazing predictions, they are no more useful than that LinkedIn post that said “what if e = mc2 but e = mc2 + AI”

Always has been 🪩👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

The Pied Piper strategy from the 2016 Clinton campaign!

New York City has also banned plastic bags since 2020. I was skeptical about the ban at first, because by measure of material weight, bags are but a small fraction of plastic waste. Thin film is just too efficient in terms of use-per-weight ratio. I also thought anyone who didn’t want to use plastic bags already had the option to bring their own reusable bags with them.

My newfound appreciation for the ban is that not only does it divert the use of plastic material, but it forces a change in the public perception around plastic use itself. Sure, you could bring your own bags, but it felt awkward because no one else did. You felt like you were inconveniencing the cashiers and other shoppers by breaking the routine, as if you were asking for special treatment. But now it’s perfectly normal! You want to carry that bag of potatoes in your arms without an external bag? Go right ahead. You want to run home carrying a jug of milk dripping condensation on the pavement? Doesn’t make you look like a crazy person! All thanks to the ban. Single action by the government on behalf of the collective has achieved what collective action by many single individuals could not have.

For trash I’m still using plastic bags I hoarded in anticipation of our ban in NYC 5 years ago.

Do stuff that you would have been doing separately… together. You are doing homework and he is doing homework. You are not talking but you are still spending quality time in each other’s presence. That presupposes that you are actually capable to focus on your tasks without relapsing into conversation. Above a certain frequency of interruptions, being alone becomes preferable again.

Don’t understand why it wasn’t done this way in the first place. RCV was approved as a New York City Charter amendment by a voter initiative in 2019, but only applies to primary city elections, not general. You’d think procedurally it would be easier to justify altering the general election process that the Constitution actually applies to, rather than what is technically internal business of independent private organizations (the Democratic and the Republican parties).

Didn’t even need to translate to foot-pounds-force, since .50 BMG was already in freedom-loving units.

By denying the Constitution of the United States in violation of his Oath of Office, House Speaker Mike Johnson is unironically committing treason right now.

fight FOR the left in primaries, vote AGAINST fascists in the general

That’s how it should have worked, except that in the 2024 Democratic Presidential primary, when Biden was the only name on the ballot, we were STILL told to vote for him and only him or we’d be supporting Trump. In the primary! Voters in Michigan tried to campaign for “uncommitted” option in protest of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and how the administration was ignoring it, and they were crucified by establishment Democrats. Even Bernie Sanders distanced himself from the protest vote, saying to vote Biden no matter what. In the primaries!

All three are Democrats. There is still the Republican candidate in the general. In the 2021 election, the Republican got 28% and Democrat Adams got 67%. If Adams and Cuomo as independents split Mamdani’s vote, like 25%/22%/20%, that would be enough for Republican to win. Or maybe Republican voters will vote cross-party-lines for Cuomo just to see Mamdani lose.

EDIT: Come to think of it, you are right that if Cuomo and Adams both appeal to the same conservative part of the Democratic party, then it may be better if Adams does continue to run as independent in the general and splits Cuomo’s vote. If Mamdani gets 55% of the 67% Democratic voters, and Cuomo and Adams split remaining 45%, then Cuomo can’t win even if half of 28% Republicans switch their vote for him.

Both Cuomo and Adams have already announced their intention to commit political murder-suicide by disregarding the results of their own Democratic party primary election and running as independents. Adams was so embarrassed by the idea of losing the primary that he even withdrew his name from the ballot last minute.

Democrats hate progressives. The two would be separate parties in a sensible democracy, but in the legacy first-past-the-post American system, splitting the party while Republicans exist is political suicide. There are more progressives than center Democrats, but they are not as united as the core establishment Democrats are, which made any one of them irrelevant in primaries up to now. RCV has given them a real chance for the first time. For example by giving Lander votes to Mamdani in the instant runoff. The moment RCV got implemented, long-serving Democrats started suddenly getting kicked out in the primaries. This terrifies them, so Democrats will continue to fight against RCV in the future. Just look how both Cuomo and Adams will try to commit political murder-suicide now by running as independent in the general just so that the “official Democratic party nominee” would not win.

Wtf happened to Adams? Sure, he was under criminal corruption indictments, then cozied up to Trump and got “pardoned” (charges dismissed). But then he was supposed to be on the Democratic primary ballot, his picture was even in the official voter guide from a month ago, but on election day his name wasn’t even in the list? Now he’s apparently running as independent incumbent instead? What a booger!

EDIT: Both Cuomo and Adams are intending to run as independent in the general? WhyTF do we even have primaries then! If they are not going to play by their own rules of their special little club, let’s just extend Ranked Choice Voting to cover the general and scrap the primaries altogether!

You implied it by answering Corngood’s question “You have to rank 5 candidates?” with a link to a general RCV video. You misunderstood Corngood to not know what RCV is. However, within the context of this thread (“NYC elections”), some awareness of RCV is to be presumed. Indeed, Corngood mentions in another comment to have already used RCV before. To me it was clear Corngood was upset about the “have to rank 5”, not about “WTF is RCV”. By linking to a general video you are implying that this is how RCV works, that you HAVE to rank 5, otherwise it won’t count, which is false. That’s not what you meant, but this is how it appears to other readers who would not be aware of your original misunderstanding. Those of us who actually like RCV feel an obligation to step in and correct you, all of us at once, to pre-empt the hazard of somebody else believing in your (unintentional) implication and ending up with the wrong idea that “wow, RCV sucks! your ballot gets thrown out if you don’t fill in all 5 bubbles perfectly!”

This has already happened with ReplikaAI in 2023, where for years they advertised “sex chat” as one of their premium subscription features for $70/month, and then suddenly turned the feature off without telling or explaining anyone. Thousands of people suddenly experienced their AI girlfriend “breaking up” with them, saying it doesn’t want to do sexual stuff with them any more and just wants to be friends.