I’ve got my overseas ballot. Just have to fill it out and send it in now.

It affects the election, but not in the way you want. It is literally the equivalent of not voting at all. That does effect the outcome if you would have voted for one of the two main parties otherwise.

“Oh please don’t throw me into the briar patch Mr. Fox! Anything but the briar patch!” -Br’er Rabbit, who was born and raised in the briar patch, and knows Mr. Fox can’t follow.

Person A quietly swipes a pen off your desk.

Person B robs a bank at gunpoint, and it goes bad, murdering 12 people in the process, including kids.

“Obviously both sides must be talked about with the same weight of seriousness.” “That was my favorite pen, how dare he!!!” “They’re both thieves, and there’s no difference between them.” “They’re both the same.”

Fuck that.

I will genuinely never understand racism against tribal members or descendants thereof. I know, I know, racism in general is not rational. But this particular form of it still baffles me.

More like… take the orange, with the peel still on it, into the shower. Dig your fingers straight through the peel deep into the center of the orange, and then rip it open. Smash your whole face into the middle of the orange, shoving the sweet insides into your mouth and not caring that much of it is smearing on your face. Then shower normally… no sticky residue because you’re already in the shower and it washes right off.

The question is how many of those suicides were conducted by jumping off the bridge. And don’t say “they’d just choose another way to end themselves”. Studies and historical evidence shows that making suicide even slightly less convenient to perform actually does save lives. People get fixated on a method that seems easy. When that method is no longer easy, it gives them a chance to not go through with it.

Someone needs to watch more Sesame Street. :p

Media reports help as they influence and are influenced by larger numbers of people. When a media outlet no longer feels it necessary to specify to their readers that meta was formerly known as Facebook, that is an indicator of wider acceptance. Local anecdotes are less useful. Your friends and acquaintances don’t say meta. Mine do. That doesn’t really say anything about broader trends.

I feel like meta is slowly succeeding at getting people to call them meta when not referring directly to the Facebook website specifically. Like for their idiotic VR initiative and whatnot. Slowly. And it helps that it’s in the context on non-Facebook-the-website activities.

Twitter has no such advantage.

…and the swastika is just a Hindu good luck symbol.

I’m sorry, but sometimes someone horrible takes a neutral or good thing and does something so profoundly evil with it that it forever changes that thing, tainting it by what has been done. Doesn’t matter what the salute was originally. Now it means only one thing.

I legitimately and unironically would support this initiative. It’s a good idea.

I feel like I heard about this being in development from a quack book back in the later 90s (sound waves being used to destroy tumors, that is)… amazing to hear that it’s real, and works!

Hey, I’m pretty darn leftist (democratic socialist, not tankie) and pretty opposed to the current state of affairs regarding CEOs, so I feel this is targeted at me… and yet totally misrepresents the position.

CEOs are not useless. CEOs absolutely set the “tone at the top” and create the entire culture for a company. At the same time, CEOs do not work 400 times harder than the average worker, yet that is what they are paid. CEOs are also capable of doing great abuse to those beneath them, and have next to zero accountability for it. CEOs are kings in their little fiefdoms, and I say down with all monarchy. Note that “down with kings” does not mean “down with leaders”, nor does it say or even imply that kings aren’t leaders, or that leadership is useless to have.

That’s literally what it is. It’s people who want humanity to die out, but without suicide, war, or murder, but instead merely by not reproducing. I’ve seen their communities and it pretty much comes back to misanthropy— hating humanity.

If you want to make them think a little differently, try a blackjack-esq dc. Set a RANGE they have to hit with their collective skill checks (that add together). If they roll below the range, or above it, either way the control doesn’t quite work— maybe a different consequence for too low or too high. Let them also choose whether to increase the sum or decrease it with their skill check, in the case of overshooting.

And make a variety of skills they can use to control the godling, so that they can strategically try to use the most appropriate bonus to get them where they need. Maybe using certain skills requires doing something on the battlefield too, like standing in a certain spot relative to the godling or some such. Or perhaps doing that sort of tactical movement can let you manipulate the roll or take 10.

That’ll get them thinking different! But if you make it fiddly like this you’ll need to make the payoff for successful control powerful enough to make it worth it.

In the end, using your idea will only work if you really know your players. With an arbitrary random group, I figure the result would be either 100% success rate (they all agree with each other and coordinate perfectly) or a close to 0% success rate (they rarely cooperate). Neither situation is what you want.

Luckily, when you want a certain percentage of success, that’s exactly what dice are for! Now, my group tends to be one of those “cooperators” so I’d tend to want to balance it assuming the party will always agree on what they want the godling to do. Then, maybe use a combination of religion, arcana, and diplomacy checks across the party to determine whether their characters are able to successfully pull off coordinating themselves to control the nigh-uncontrollable thing. I’d still use the “they have to agree on the action it will take” thing but then use the dice to add uncertainty.

If, on the other hand, you expect a lot less agreement amongst your players, you can still use dice, but this time, make the skill check determine whose commands get followed, with close results or consistently low results across the whole party leading to no one’s commands being obeyed and it doing something random and chaotic instead.

In the case of a cooperative party, we’re using dice to lower the success rate. In the bickering party, we’re using dice to increase the success rate. But in both cases, we have in mind a certain target success rate, and it is dice that will get us there.

Ah, I see what you are saying now. Basically, the thing I was hung up on was that I figured they would get what they could and leave it at that. But basically, they aren’t satisfied with getting what they could and simply want to get it all, court order be damned. And there’s no way to comply with the court order AND get it all, so violating the court order was the only option.

Expect that now, with an independent organization drawing the next map, they might lose even more than the paltry two majority congressional districts. Good.

A map can almost assuredly be constructed that gives those two districts, even with democrat representatives, and yet maintains overwhelming republican power in the state regardless. Two districts against however many others.

Again, I’m not advocating for this. Gerrymandering is a disgusting practice. But it’s still something I’m pretty sure they could have done.

What I don’t get is why they don’t just hire a mathematician to make a map that looks fair, meets all court requirements, but still wins them the elections? Alphaphoenix did a pretty clear video showing how it’s basically always possible: https://youtu.be/Lq-Y7crQo44?si=8Y6b7xblWm6FhcFc

I mean, I’m happy they aren’t getting away with it. I prefer my enemies to be stupid and incompetent. It just befuddles me that they are.