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Does this plan make sense? v3
  • Schulze is great, but good luck explaining how it works to my mother.

    Schulze is good for elections at STEM organizations. For the general public, something like approval voting or STAR are better.

  • Italy is a social construct
  • Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

    But if you went from Castile to Paris, you'd go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It's just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It's not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

    A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.

  • Italy is a social construct
  • This is also why the stereotypical NJ Italian-American pronunciation of things sounds so unlike Italian.

    It's not that Americans somehow turned "pasta e fagioli" into "pasta fazool". They turned "pasta e fasule" into "pasta fazool", which is a much smaller leap.

  • Plant Natives
  • Grass really, really depends on location and climate. I literally never water or fertilize my lawn; it looks fine.

    The worse thing here is ecological. I keep my mower set to 4", and keep my lawn a bit longer than my neighbors. I see a ton of fire flies in my yard in the summer, and see a fraction as many in my neighbors yard.

    Short lawns are terrible habitat, which makes them good for sports or a children's play area. But 80% of my neighbor's lawn is just aesthetic, which is something I really don't get. Lawns are about as visually exciting as a beige wall. They're a waste of space.

  • I'm convinced they're all passively suicidal.
  • Ivermectin is a general antiparasitic drug used in dogs, horses, sheep, cows, reptiles, and humans. It's on the WHO's list of essential medicines, and it was the 341th most commonly prescribed medication in the US. We use it for lice, scabies, whipworm, etc.

    These people use horse paste because it's available off the shelf at Tractor Supply, whereas to get ivermectin for humans requires a prescription from a doctor. Which they're not gonna get, because it doesn't work for covid.

    And they shouldn't get it, because we don't want to overuse it and end up with ivermectin resistant parasites. Hell, I wouldn't be opposed to ivermectin for horses requiring a vet prescription and doing fecal egg counts so we don't end up with resistant strongloides.

  • Israeli rabbi says ‘kill everyone in Gaza, including babies’
  • There's a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

    There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

  • Israeli rabbi says ‘kill everyone in Gaza, including babies’
  • I mean, it's kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

    Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn't mean that Americans in general are awful people.

  • US Supreme Court sets April 25 Trump criminal immunity argument
  • The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

    The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

    Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

    The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn't like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

    Voting third party basically doesn't work. Any time its been significant, it's just caused a spoiler effect.

  • Stupid German Dinosaurs
  • Dinosaurs are currently defined as anything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of triceratops and the pigeon.

    Which, as others pointed out is mostly due to dinosaurs being originally defined before we found the first pterodactyl.

    If you want to refer to dinosaurs and pterodactyls, you could use avemetatarsalians (anything more closely related to birds than crocs) or ornithodirans (dinosaurs + pterosauromorphs).

    Also fun is that there's a number of crocodillians that look suspiciously dinosaur- like, like Shuvosaurus. Convergent evolution is wild.

  • E-bike riders aren’t wearing helmets — and head trauma cases are through the roof
  • I see e.g. https://nltimes.nl/2023/08/01/trauma-surgeons-express-concern-e-bike-accidents-among-elderly

    Dutch trauma surgeons have raised concerns over the rising number of elderly people suffering severe injuries from electric bicycle accidents, AD reported on Tuesday.

    While some injuries result from collisions, most accidents are unilateral, caused by incidents like falling from a stationary position or losing control due to high speed,

    It sounds like it's particularly impacting 65+ year old men - the same types who die from breaking a hip slipping and falling while walking.

    I'm not sure to what degree this is caused by ebikes encouraging them to keep biking when they should have stopped, or ebikes just being more dangerous when they fall over.

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