Brussels sprouts used to taste different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_sprout#Contemporary_Brussels_sprouts

Why do you think that STAR is a better system than Ranked Choice Voting?

If you just need a more general term to describe your desired electoral reform(s), “proportional representation” is probably suitable:

Under the amended 1976 Electoral Act, European elections must be based on proportional representation and use either the list system or the single transferable vote system. Member States may also authorise voting based on a preferential list system.

A ballot that contains 1 skipped ranking before its highest continuing ranking is interesting. I suppose that means a voter is expressing “I only want to participate in an election for an office elected by ranked-choice voting: if there aren’t 3 or more candidates I don’t want to participate”. Such a ballot is not necessarily an “Exhausted ballot”:

“Exhausted ballot” means a ballot that does not rank any continuing candidate, contains an overvote at the highest continuing ranking or contains 2 or more sequential skipped rankings before its highest continuing ranking.

Note that there are more resources I found at https://www.legislature.maine.gov/lawlibrary/ranked-choice-voting-in-maine/9509

It’s interesting that the text of Washington, D.C., Initiative 83, Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative (November 2024) is similar to the Maine statutes, but specifically says that voters should be informed that they should not skip a ranking:

“Inactive ballot” means a ballot on which no active candidate is ranked, contains an overvote at the highest ranking of active candidates, or contains 2 or more sequential skipped rankings before its highest-ranked active candidate.

Each ballot shall contain instructions informing the voter of the following, […] That the voter should not give more than one candidate the same ranking, rank a candidate more than once, or skip a ranking.

I think this is not among the most important things to be talking about.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/fluoridated-drinking-water/

https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/fluoride/

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=fluoride+site%3A.edu&ia=web

I’ve used reddit.com before but I never made many posts or comments and I haven’t used it in years. I’m pretty sure there was a period where I visited it regularly though.

I don’t think I’ve ever posted anything with facebook.com or twitter.com either. I never browsed them for fun, and if I want to coordinate with someone in my family I just contact them directly. I do use youtube.com a lot though.

I tried using pleroma but I haven’t used that in a while either. I prefer lemmy much more (probably because posts being different from comments provides more structure).

https://www.privacyguides.org/fr/real-time-communication/

Programs that do multiple things are not simple, so successfully using or understanding what they do is less likely to be possible for you. I expect that wanting to avoid interacting with many programs will lead a person to use programs that are nonfree more often than they otherwise would, so it would be more likely that a program controls the users.

I can list some alternatives to Discord that you probably don’t know, and requirements for an alternative to Discord: https://degooglisons-internet.org/ https://framasoft.org/en/manifest https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/#criteria

Also consider https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/ !privacy@lemmy.ml

Typo: s/FOUR\/FOR\/s/s\/FOUR\/FOR\//

To “substitute”, the editing command is s/RE/replacement/ which has a s character before any <slash> (/) character: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/sed.html#tag_20_109_13_03

It doesn’t matter if anything is behind you or not: any other road users would also be obligated to give up their right of way (by stopping) if you chose to stop, if doing so would help prevent collisions.

I care about many things related to encrypted real-time communication, including what security engineers recommend (since their judgements probably incorporate things I probably don’t even know about or understand), so I don’t think XMPP is the best option for me.

https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/

It’s probably best if a driver yields to a flying saucer.

Give up your right-of-way when it will help prevent collisions.

When entering traffic, you must proceed with caution and yield to the traffic already occupying the lanes.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-handbook/laws-and-rules-of-the-road/

I didn’t know there was a way to get a subscription that lasts 2 years! I see I can access that by clicking “Edit billing cycle” at https://account.proton.me/u/0/mail/dashboard

I’ll definitely check that out when there aren’t many remaining days for my current subscription.

I got a subscription last year and I don’t have a memory of seeing an advertisement at https://mail.proton.me/u/0/inbox after that, and I didn’t see one just now when I checked.

If you want to use an email service without seeing advertisements, maybe you should pay for a subscription starting from https://proton.me/pricing or https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/ or maybe instead you should consider something like https://www.lifewire.com/best-free-email-accounts-1356641

Did something supercede Socialism in Russia around the years 1988 to 1991?

This might be relevant:

https://youtu.be/J_fZ9o6P0-A?si=-fl7rLryYZBDVgTN&t=194

Conditions here were deplorable by any objective measure. And if you’ll recall, one of the hallmarks of early Russian industrialization was: the workforce was often transient. People moved back and forth between their home villages and jobs in the cities, and this flux meant that the places people lived and where they ate and bathed and got medical attention were only ever temporary expedients. It was a bit like you were going off to some particularly crappy summer camp. It was only meant to be temporarily endured, not lived in full time, and so conditions just never got better. People were not just renting rooms; they were renting corners of rooms. You could rent not just a bed, but part of a bed. Sanitation was, of course, practically non-existent, and the food was disgusting. The work itself, meanwhile, was long and grueling. There were no safety standards in the factories. There were hardly any rights for anybody at all. And pay was literally inadequate. The ministry of finance itself surveyed conditions and concluded that a family of four needed about fifty rubles a month to purchase basic necessities (that is, food and shelter and heat) and then they found that 75% of the workers were making less than 30 rubles a month. The economic and moral math was just not adding up.

https://youtu.be/J_fZ9o6P0-A?si=FtaiY47HVyXXBeAP&t=340

The lower skilled, less educated, and still mentally “peasant” workers tended to remain culturally conservative. They were orthodox christian and believed strongly in the divine benevolence of the czar. And indeed one of the things reported by both social democrats and SRs back to their respective central committees was that they struggled to recruit among these workers because they were out there pitching “overthrowing the czar” and everyone was like “What? We… we love the czar, and he loves us too!”

To them, the czar was not a villain, but a hero. Not the devil, but their savior. It understandably made recruiting for a political revolution to overthrow their “hero and savior” very difficult.

https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/2020/02/1033-bloody-sunday.html

(YOU ARE AN ANCIENT TRADITION!) (YOU ARE AN ANCIENT GOD!)

@theminutehour

How do things work? I provided my perspective, partly so that I could refer to it later, so it would be enlightening to learn about yours.

I think the tax system in the USA is designed to reward people who form corporations and then get people employed. People who are employed don’t have as much time to work on reforming institutions, so giving a tax break for employing people makes powerful people’s lives easier. In order to keep this process revenue neutral, earned income is taxed instead of taxing business as much. After extracting money from people’s labor (since labor is clearly necessary in order to create wealth), the remainder of budget needs is made up from whatever resources are easily available (which is currently the assets of rich people, since they have been given a lot of money to get people employed).

I’ve been told Hungary does, though I haven’t heard much about it until recently: https://www.uscisguide.com/dual-citizenship/u-s-dual-citizenship-and-taxes-with-hungary/

I’ve also been told South Africa and Eritrea do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if places like North Korea and Turkmenistan do too.

Somehow Hungary gets a score of 30/50 for taxation for 2024 from https://nomadcapitalist.com/nomad-passport-index/ (United States and South Africa and Eritrea get 10, North Korea and Turkmenistan get 20) but I’d be suspicious of anywhere with a lower rating than 30.