Smoking is interesting. Most of the direct harm from smoking comes from the radioactive lead and polonium that the tobacco absorbs from the soil.

Not that other parts of inhaling burning hot smoke aren’t damaging, but the worst of it are those radioisotopes.

I don’t know how much of that shit is deposited vs exhaled, and would need to see studies on it. But there’s a laundry list of other harmful shit in cigarette smoke.

Do people in glass houses shit in the woods?

I’ve heard Ireland is good. No idea of how true that is, but they do speak English, if reluctantly.

That said, the actual Irish language is rather melodic, and learning it is a fun project.

More than one test failed.

The Tesla failed the heavy rain and the heavy fog tests.

There’s zero excuse to fail either of those tests. But the Tesla killed the kid both times.

The wall test was just to show that the Tesla cannot put together optical clues.

The other two tests that the Tesla failed were more realistic. Heavy fog and heavy rain.

It failed both.

If your self driving car cannot handle weather, then it’s not self driving at all.

Actual lidar isn’t fooled by weather. Shitty optical only cameras are.

I do know that NAFTA is gone. Trump got rid of that one during his first term

There was a replacement deal that Trump has now renegged on.

He called it a great deal at the time… I’ll let actual experts way in on the truth of that.

Cheese? only use American and only in extremely hot areas.

The real joy is using slices of bologna.

Or, if you want to go hard, get some sponges and soak them in acetone. But that’s not for Cybertrucks. They need lemon juice and salt. Just mix up a batch and fill a squirt gun.

That hinges entirely on whomever holds the loan.

If it was one person, then no way. But it’s not just 1 person, it’s more than 100.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/these-are-the-investors-who-helped-elon-musk-acquire-twitter-in-2022/ar-AA1pguJS

There are investment groups in that list, and ties to the Saudis and Russians.

The investment groups might be legally required to margin call if the stock price falls too far, but none of them will hold the full loan.

There are steps that need to be taken to get third parties.

First and foremost is the adoption of a voting system that can not only support third parties, but help them grow.

TLDR; Fight for Approval if you just want third parties to exist and occasionally win, Fight for STAR if you want third parties to grow and become powerful.

Now for the long part, talking about the problems with first past the post voting, and how that shapes the political discourse. Or you can watch this video.

Also, before anyone breaks in with Ranked Choice or IRV as it’s called, you might want to read up on the flaws section here.

And I’d write more, but the dog wants a walk, and that’s more important right now.

To be fair, every Air Force base had higher than average Reddit usage back in the day. It was one of the few websites not blocked by default. I don’t know when that changed, Because I was out before then.

But yes, there are also the propaganda teams.

Collaborative world building often falls apart. It needs a full time coordinator, or it’s like herding cats.

By a worm no less.

Two rounds of counting. It’s more of a feature. Think of it as an automatic recount.

As to knowing who wins. Well, that’s always the rub. There is no system that lets you know who wins before all the counting is done.

There is an argument for simplicity, but if we’re going to change things, we might as well try for the experimentally best option.

The thing is, Ranked Choice is broken in dozens of ways. It’s actually more broken than First Past the Post.

It gives bad results that do not match the lies that it’s advocates tell, because FairVote lies their asses off about the system.

Fuck, it fails the Monotonicity Criteria.

I’ll explain this one simply. The Monotonicity Criteria says more support for Candidate A should increase the chances that Candidate A wins. Under Ranked Choice, listing Candidate A first can cause Candidate C to win.

That and the insecurity around counting make Ranked Choice a fucking stupid idea. It was a bad system when invented and it’s not gotten any better.

RCV is a bad option that’s presented as if it could fix anything.

RCV was first invented in the 1780s, and the inventor wrote about it as the bad idea that it was, but because he was a mathematician, he wrote about the dead ends in the search for something better than the simple First Past the Post system that was in use in America.

The inventor, by the way, was Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet. His life was fascinating, and his death tragic, but for the moment we’ll focus on his efforts to find a better voting system.

He created a criteria for a better voting system, now named in his honor. The Condorcet Winner is the candidate who can win against any other candidate in a one on one race. They’re sometimes called the pairwise winner.

The point being, RCV, or it’s older name of Instant Runoff, cannot reliably elect the Condorcet Winner.

This was why Condorcet abandoned the system.

It was revived by some guys a few decades after Condorcet’s death. They didn’t care that it was a flawed system, just that it was slightly better than the only other option available at the time.

But that was 200 years ago. We now have quite a few options that are not deeply flawed.

First is Approval. It’s a dead simple system that always finds the Condorcet Winner.

How Approval works is thus; you get a list of names on your ballot. Mark any and all that you approve of. You may mark more than one candidate for each position.

The candidate with the highest overall approval wins.

Then there’s STAR. It’s brand new as far as voting systems go, only created in 2014. But it’s also the best system designed to date.

Basically the voter rates each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5. Multiple candidates can have the same rating. To find the winner, you simply add up the ratings for each candidate, then you take the highest two and look at each ballot. The candidate with the higher rating on that ballot gets the vote. If neither of the top two is rated higher on a ballot, either being not rated or rated the same, then the ballot is counted as No Preference, and that number is reported as part of the final tally.

Leon might have tried Linux once. But he was famously fired from PayPal for trying to switch the codebase from Linux (which he didn’t understand) to Windows. And Windows ME or some shit. Not even the somewhat stable version that was also out at the time.

Not everything shot for a film gets used. The director might say, “let’s reshoot the scene with wardrobe B” and then you have a new take with a different outfit.

Simple scenes like that often take a few days of work to dial in just right. Or sometimes it’s done with a single take and everyone feels vaguely off about it until they see the edit.

Hardness isn’t the best thing to have in armor. In fact, extreme hardness means extreme brittleness.

Tensile strength is more desirable in armor. That’s the sort of strength that a string or rope, or Kevlar will have.

Those can stretch a bit before breaking.

Kevlar will stretch a bit when catching a bullet, this does a few things, but importantly it slows the bullet before stopping it.

So this new material will likely show extreme tensile strength rather than hardness.

Notch was primed for that shit long before Minecraft took off. He posted early builds to 4chan, and was an active shitposter there.

The money just made him stop paying attention to anything else.