Schadrach

Qrpff says hello. Or, rather, decrypts DVD movies in 472 bytes of code, 531 if you want the fast version that can do it in real time. The Wikipedia article on it includes the full source code of both.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Qrpff

You say that like 3rd parties being created and taking federal offices happens all the time.

They aren’t, and that’s kinda the point. People grossly underestimate how hard it is to do this (pretending it’s some great unknown and not something that’s been tried and failed literally dozens of times), and what game theory regarding FPTP elections means for the rise of one.

We haven’t had a serious 3rd party, let alone one that takes federal office, for well over 100 years.

We had a few elected to Congress in the last hundred years, even if you don’t count ones who changed party at some point. Mostly Farmer-Labor Party between the late 20s and end of WW2. We also had a Conservative Party of New York candidate in Congress in the 70s. And a Libertarian if you do count people who convert while in office. Hell, Trump once tried to run for POTUS as a third party candidate in 2000 for the Reform Party, but failed miserably and didn’t win a single state during the primaries.

Don’t pretend you know what it takes, because we haven’t even fucking tried. It’s uncharted water!

How many parties do you think we have that are large enough they operate in multiple states and have ballot access right now? The answer is a dozen. All of which have hopes of eventually getting someone in federal office, you know aside from the Dems and GOP who already do that. Of those twelve, 9 ran a presidential candidate in 2024. You’ve probably only even heard of 4 of those at most (Harris, Trump, Stein and maybe Chase Oliver [Libertarian]).

What it takes at a minimum is getting a majority of a state or House district on board with you and willing to vote for you rather than a major party, knowing that if enough other people don’t buy in it’s going to let the candidate farthest from them win instead. If you’re pushing for POTUS, then it means getting about 78M people on board in the same way, distributed across most of the country.

Third parties running for federal office isn’t untested water, it’s just extremely difficult to succeed at. Again, that’s why the Tea Party operated as a reform movement within the GOP rather than being an actual third party - it let them hijack the political machinery of the party from within, instead of having to fight against it in a battle that would at most likely cause both to lose if it did anything at all. Literally, had the Tea Party been an actual third party then instead of gaining massive influence they would have at their most powerful caused Democrats to win by splitting the GOP vote.

Did you literally wake up from a coma the day Biden’s cancer diagnosis was announced or something? Or are you the rare person who isn’t part of Trump’s cult but also only watches right wing news sources?

“President Trump shits on Constitution in novel way!” could paraphrase a headline from literally any week this year after 1/20. And only after 1/20 because before then he was merely President-Elect Trump.

Beyond that, the news cycle is pretty short - for example, unless we have revelations about Trump sexually assaulting a woman we didn’t already know about or some movement in an existing court case, it’s not going to continue to be litigated in the news media because there’s nothing new to say.

That’s why I never believed in the rhetoric of “it’s too late to consider 3rd party!” before the elections. Here it is just 6 months later and “we don’t have time for that”. Is it disingenuous then to just say there will never be time for that, like it is being implied here?

It takes years to get a new party off the ground and in a meaningful position to take federal offices at any significant rate. During that time, you are mostly helping your farthest opposition of the main parties win by splitting the vote.

This is literally why the Tea Party operated by internal change of the GOP and not by starting a third party. And love them or hate them, they were effective at shifting the GOP.

It usually requires a competent and well-known politician storming out of their party for ideological differences, but being locally popular enough to win their seat as an independent or new party.

It also usually causes the party they broke off from to lose higher offices a few times because the two sides of the schism don’t have enough power individually to win the bigger contests. Until one of them swallows the other.

The right avoided this by doing their “reform” from within, aka the Tea Party.

Fuck it, align=‘center’. That’ll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that’s not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.

You’re not wrong. There’s nothing that requires the two parties be Dems and GOP. But you’re not going to overturn one or the other in a single election, and that means losing to the farthest big party from you, likely a few in a row, while that gets resolved. Especially if you try to do it top down instead of building support from local/county offices up.

Basically, if you could get enough third party support, you could either supplant one of the existing parties or force them to shift to stay competitive. The argument is that trying to do so with the office of president when doing so promotes a fast track to outright fascism is a painfully bad tactic.

What exactly does “should” mean in this context?

I think the implication is that it’s essentially being prevented from collapse because it’s so ingrained in international trade that if it were to collapse it would hurt you and your allies too much, so you don’t allow it to collapse when it otherwise might.

Another reminder that blueMAGA don’t see Palestinians as human.

Every option with any real chance of being elected supported Israel. Unfortunately your choices are essentially Dem, GOP, or one of several people who is definitely going to lose unless you can round up another 60 million or so voters to back them.

You’re right, it’s currently still hung up in procedure. Even then, he could have ordered his DEA to deschedule it, and instead had them do what they’ve done. He also waited long enough that when it happens, Trump will get the credit despite having had nothing to do with the process.

… because they didn’t.

…and when they do, it becomes because they don’t have a large enough majority. If they had a filibuster -peoof majority, it would be because they don’t have a veto-proof majority even if they also held the executive.

To put it another way, Biden had the power to fully legalize marijuana at any time because drug scheduled can be changed by process from either the legislative or executive branches. Instead he had it rescheduled. Because Dems only operate in half measures federally, because they are controlled opposition.

After having given a speech to it’s creators about it, calling it a “plan for our movement”, yes. There is video available.

How can a car like this be SO vulnerable?

I’d be tempted to see how they respond to a salt and acid mixture. Maybe even just something as mild as heavily salted lemon juice as an experiment. Depending on how those stainless panels are treated it could be effective. Acids and chlorides are hard on the passive layer of regular stainless, which is what protects the underlying metal. Maybe a different acid+salt mixture that won’t have as obvious a smell after it evaporates? Would make for some “fun” “water” balloons or “water” guns, especially to play with at night. Without your phone on hand. While wearing a mask and plain black hoodie as PPE, of course.

Haha, Leviathan was certainly the “big bad” in Job.

To quote a work of fiction I particularly enjoyed, during a discussion between the characters on the Book of Job:

“You know,” said Bill Dodd, “what is Leviathan, anyway? Like a giant whale or something, right? So God is saying we need to be able to make whales submit to us and serve us and dance for us and stuff? Cause, I’ve been to Sea World. We have totally done that.”

“Leviathan is a giant sea dinosaur thing,” said Zoe Farr. “Like a plesiosaur. Look, it’s in the next chapter. It says he has scales and a strong neck.”

“And you don’t think if he really existed, we’d Jurassic Park the sucker?” asked Bill Dodd.

“It also says he breathes fire,” said Eli Foss.

“So,” proposed Erica, “if we can find a fire-breathing whale with scales and a neck, and we bring it to Sea World, then we win the Bible?”

https://unsongbook.com/

And if you have the opportunity to question Him directly, you’ll say the same thing Job said.

That would be what, “Why are you so weirdly obsessed with Leviathan?” after Job 41?

I don’t think this is the kind of neuroplasticity we’re supposed to be aiming for.

but they come after watching Trump receive 34 felony convictions with no actual punishment for those convictions

Yeah, well, blame the courts for sentencing him to “Never mind, we cool bro.”

any consequences to him for Jan 06.

That gets tricky. The core argument would be that Trump’s speech before the attack is firmly within his 1A rights (and it almost certainly is, 1A speech rights are extremely broad and anything short of a direct call to immediate lawless action is usually protected) and that his not doing anything to stop it once it started is him doing a shit job, but not technically illegal (but hypothetically impeachable, if both houses would agree to it which was never going to happen).

You’d have to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he planned for J6 to happen the way it did in a fashion that is definitely not attached to his duties as president in any even vaguely reasonable way to have anything to hang on him at all without an impeachment. Something like hard evidence of him coordinating specifically the attack on the capitol (as opposed to the rally or march to the capitol steps) with the people entering the capitol or their leadership and not merely an otherwise legal protest/rally. Which is a high bar to reach.

If your state isn’t green, call your state representative (bonus: the one more likely to give a shit)

It’s not likely to happen, in no small part because Florida and Texas are a majority of the “pending” votes and it’s unlikely to pass in either. Most of the states where it isn’t pending are smaller states who benefit or at least aren’t meaningfully hurt by the EC.

House apportionment hurts states with 1 Rep who are just shy of getting a second the most, and after them hurts California essentially because it blows the curve on population. At the same time, it’s the best you can manage with a fixed size House - any other apportionment with the same number of House members will on average have a worse disparity in representation. You’d have to uncap the House or at least significantly increase the size of the House to get a better result.

Of course there’s nothing these days that prevents Congressional business from being conducted by teleconference, which would reduce one of the core issues with an uncapped House - the physical and practical difficulties in actually running it. For example, if you were to decide that Wyoming as the smallest state got one rep and every other state got a rep per population of Wyoming then we’d have something like 5780 Representatives.

But the popular vote hasn’t mattered for many, many years.

It never has.

They align more often than not so it might seem like it does, with the exceptions typically being cases where the Republican does really well everywhere but the Dem strongholds, while turnout for the Dems is much higher than usual in the highest population Dem strongholds. For example, Hillary Clinton won the state of California by more votes than she won the national popular vote - literally had California seceded or something Trump would have won the popular vote as well in 2016.

starlink

I remain confused why 1) voting machines would have anything to do with Starlink and 2) why voting machines would be networked at all. Like, at all. It just seems like such an obvious and massive security issue. I could design a dramatically more secure way of doing electronic voting machines off the cuff that would keep most of the main advantages while eliminating most/all of the main issues.