Rentlar

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  • 177 Posts
  • 5.69K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 14th, 2023

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  • Right now my mind is at, “it very well could be, but time will tell”.

    Had Trump had the right people in places to make certain decisions, it could have very well ended in 2020 just as much. Well the world did change in a big way near the end of his term, with COVID, how he botched it and how he gave corporate handout after corporate handout which caused the inflation that Biden is being blamed for.

    I’ve been still grasping for ways that the US still can be saved, which there are many, but they hinge on

    1A. Trump going back on many of his worst promises and not doing them, because reneging is his thing, or

    1B. Trump and his team being too incompetent to enact his agenda, or

    1C. The backlash to Trump’s unpopular moves creates disobedience within government, military and writ large, preventing him from enacting his agenda, and

    1. Democracy not being rigged during his tenure, avoiding where elections become just as meaningful as Russia’s or China’s during the 4 years.

    A plurality of Americans gave Trump and Republican facsism basically all the dragon balls of power, so it’s up to him pretty much whether he can use them and the most Americans can do is organize and resist.



  • Yeah I would. Honestly, I would best prefer a Proportional type system, that way 10% of people voting yahoos get 10% of the power, even if I disagree with them completely. Of course I would want a fair system that is suitable for something more modern than horse and buggy information transmission. Working within an unfair system to try to undo it is understable, but why defend it only when it suits your interests? That’s the kind of thing fascists do.

    For a national government I would like to have the support of the nation behind it and the states/provinces to have the support of each state. We already give unequal power to each piece of land in a Senate, and in the US HoR now too because it hasn’t changed the number of seats in a while.






  • There’s no perfect solution, but the fact there will be more campaigning in urban centres is not an indictment of the popular vote system. Rural centers don’t have to be excluded, campaign resources can be more spread out to them than before.

    Example: Sure, maybe Trump wouldn’t have visited Butler, PA without EC but they are the few rural areas that would benefit at the expense of small towns in every other state. Instead, you would have Republican outreach to the red states that are perennially overlooked, Trump visiting Redding to get out the vote there, Harris campaign in CO and the PNW. Puerto Rico, US territories and DC would have actual importance instead of the whole discussion being around “what does insulting the entirety of Puerto Rico mean for Pennsylvania?”




  • Are you certain? I do see the possibility of a state attempting to repeal it after the popular vote going the way they didn’t want and perhaps it would only live for one election cycle. I’m just not sure that every state that could overturn it would want to do so, given that a campaign under a national popular vote would mean that there would be far more attention paid to places outside of Pennsylvania and the select handful of swing states. Both campaigns want to see all of America improve in their speeches, not just the midwest and sunbelt battlegrounds, but their campaign actions aren’t representative of that within the EC.

    E: Oh and if the 2028 and/or 2032 election has a result where popular vote and EC are aligned when the compact is first in force, there will be much less momentum to overturn it in the following election even if they differ.




  • It’s a decently effective strategy. Essentially these MPs have to shut up until Canadian voters hand them the keys, then they can do whatever they want because they promised very little.

    While they stay meek, oil money is being flooded in hyping up Poilievre and the conservatives in extremely generic terms. I’m no strategist so I have no idea how you counteract that.

    Trudeau and Singh need to work something out very, very soon, because 24% + 18% of the vote = 24% of the seats in FPTP math.

    My thoughts are we need someone like Notley or Beck, a highly respected Prairies NDP member, who are progressive but also in touch with issues that matter with rural people.



  • I wonder if NK troops would have been at all engaged were it not for Kursk

    It’s a valid thought. I’d think Russia would find whatever excuse was convenient, even if it weren’t for an incursion, something like “Western allies are supporting Ukraine”, or whatever. At the end of the day, NK needs food and Russia needs warm bodies so that calculus on the deal doesn’t change.


  • There was some misinformation like that spread about Colorado this year, where more people voted Harris but the state assigned their electors to Trump. Only would happen if the compact is in force.

    Thing is though, as it stands with the EC, neither party gives a shit about Colorado in elections as a 54/44 split is treated as a “given” for the Dems. With a national popular vote, every blue vote in Colorado or Washington, would matter just as much as a red vote in California, same as a blue vote in Oklahoma or a red vote in Montana.

    Sure, people will try to call their reps and sue if they think their state could flip the result when EC doesn’t match the popular vote result. Those processes tend to take a long time that the chances of reversing it before January are slim. This election, it would have gone to Trump either way since he had a plurality of votes. Is it really fair that only 7 or 8 states of 50 had over 90% of the campaign visits, and nearly half had none?


  • That’s because Russia took fuck all in 2023 when they were stuck at Avdiivka for months and months, way longer than expected by all sides. Once it fell, there were fewer natural choke points for Ukraine until Pokrovsk, and defense lines were not well prepared enough. So comparing taking a lot of fields to sending troops to capture a static point for a year is not really apples to apples imo.

    Kursk is and always was a gambit. My view is that losses and disorganization on the frontline from Ukrainian’s part on the Donetsk side, is independent from the results of the Kursk incursion, not because of it. As such, whether it was a overall good idea or not in hindsight, it appears that the primary objective of the incursion was met, as every troop, NK or Russian, stationed to recapture Kursk is one fewer re-inforcing the offensive in other areas.


  • Calc was actually quite comparable for 90% of Excel features I have ever actually used.

    Writer is petty good on its own, but the fact that .docx documents don’t quite matchup vs. When making and opening with Word makes it difficult for me to use officially.

    Impress is just plain disappointing compared to PowerPoint.

    Base might be okay, better than nothing I guess.

    The rest of the suite I don’t know.