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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • With the US out of NATO, USA aggression towards a NATO ally would provoke a response. Also, NATO is not involved with Ukraine. This means that all of NATO can focus on USA aggression. Considering the significant force difference between a non-NATO USA and the rest of NATO, I imagine that nuclear response as an opener is heavily weighed. Glass Washington D.C., then ask if the USA would like to retreat to US lines before they glass NYC. Primary response would be through UK nuclear submarine along the Atlantic.







  • Trucks often have to use ‘engine breaking’ or a ‘Jake brake’ to slow down. Basically, they cut fuel in the intake stroke, changing the engine into a ‘compressor’ to exchange forward momentum into useless compressed air that gets thrown away in the exhaust. The result is a lot of ‘noise’ from the truck as it slows down. It’s not intimidation, it’s a valid way to slow down without excessive wear on wheel brakes. Or, it shouldn’t be intimidation. In some municipalities, engine braking or Jake braking isn’t permitted.






  • That’s why there’s a difference in riding sizes… 1 vote per person shouldn’t mean that Windsor-Québec should decide fishery issues for Newfoundland… So a riding on the rock has less people, because it has unique needs based on its location and geography that might be better served by giving them more of a say than ridings in London Ontario, which might have very similar needs across the city. In essence, more people don’t necessarily mean more unique issues. There’s a limit to that of course - but the general ‘needs’ are outlined by law and adjusted without gerrymandering - which is not terrible, but maybe could be improved with more representation in the dense ridings - after all, there’s increase concerns within the cities these days.


  • Well, MMP breaks down when you realize you need to define geographic areas of ridings that you need to lump together so that you can get the ratios right. An example elsewhere in the post points out lumping Victoria’s 4 seats and the rest of Vancouver Island’s 3 seats. If all lumped together, you can get the ratios of actual votes to match the representations of the MPs pretty good - but ultimately someone has to sort of ‘fix it in post.’ If 80% vote for party X in all 7 ridings (which, without looking at the data, I will concede in advanced has never bloody happened) you’re going to take one of those ridings and hand it off to an MP that didn’t win to represent the collective 15-20% that voted the second place party that might be popular there. Which riding gets the MP not elected in the riding? Of course, we need to keep ridings because the population density is very skewed in Canada. If you take a look where people live, you’d realize without ridings, in a true PR setting, the Windsor-Québec City corridor would forever run the rest of Canada. Why try to get votes anywhere else? Do you really want to give Alberta another reason to say that Ottawa has no mandate in their province?

    Another option is to drastically increase MPs (that seems like a terrible idea) so that if the riding is 55% for party X and 45% for party Y, you can have 2 MPs from both parties and not add any advantage to anyone to help in forming government. It would almost be a better idea to have a run-off vote until you reach a true majority instead of a plurality in a riding.





  • SplitdiplesstoFairvote CanadaWho supports either electoral system
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    4 months ago

    People see this as a Conservative vs. ‘Left’ fight, but I think this is a mischaracterization because of the parties representing the true divide, and the real reason why the parties champion the forms that they do - it’s a rural vs. urban fight. If you looked at the GTA from satellite image at night, it’s all continuous population from Ajax to Hamilton around Burlington Bay. That area makes sense for PR, but the fact of the matter is that no-one would care about chasing votes in Newmarket if they can go down to Lake Ontario and just chase the ‘bang for the buck’ down there. Repeat across Canada and you see the parties representing rural (mostly CON) are anti-PR, and ultimately, Lib will support that too with some of the less population dense seats they have too. Break the problem with PR favoring density, and that’ll be the only way everyone agrees to it…