u/flatfinger

Democrats and MAGA both want to push the narrative that everyone who opposes the Democrats supports MAGA, and everyone who opposes MAGA supports the Democrats. This allows both groups to claim majority support, even though neither is even close to having a positive net approval rating.

If this country had a legitimate party that opposed the Democrats, many people who support MAGA because it's the only party that opposes the Democrats, or support the Democrats because they're the only party that opposes MAGA, would leave their parties for the new second party. Both Democrats and MAGA, however, would view such a party as a common enemy.

The reason this country's politics are so divisive is that the political establishment pits those who hate both parties' leaders but view Schumer as worse, against those who hate both parties' leaders but view Trump as worse. If all the people who hate both could join together and boot both into the dustbin of history, a lot of ordinary people would find that they have a lot more in common with ordinary people from the other side of the aisle than with their supposed "leaders".

I don't think his betrayals stem from cowardice, but rather from covert motives. Trump's corruption is limited by his stupidity. I don't think Schumer's is.

Many election jurisdictions don't bother tabulating write-in votes unless the number of write-in votes would be sufficient to allow victory if they all name the same person. Some election jurisdictions don't even allow write-in votes at all unless someone registers as a write-in candidate prior to the election (the normal requirements for appearing on the ballot wouldn't apply to a write-in candidate, but write-in candidates would be responsible for making any prospective voters aware of their candidacy, and many voters may not know of any write-in candidates whose views they would support.

Rather than suggesting that voters mark their ballot for a random candidate they might know nothing about, a better remedy would be for ballots to allow voters to indicate that they do not want their vote to be interpreted as any kind of endorsement for a candidate or the positions thereof.

Every once in awhile, older monitors will fail in a manner that cannot be readily repaired. If that happens to someone who has a couple of devices they use and a couple spares, they can with relatively little bother switch to using one of their spares to replace the broken unit. If the person gives away or sells their spares before their daily driver fails, acquiring a replacement would by comparison be much more of a bother.

A lot of people would have no objection to letting others use their equipment, if they knew they could easily get it back should the need arise. Monitors are a sufficient nuisance to transport, however, that the logistics would often be difficult.

I registered as Republican so that if there were any Republican primary candidates who wanted to go on the record as opposing Trump, I could vote for them. As it was, there were none, and my state allows one to select which primary to vote in on election day, so I voted in the Democratic primary for the candidate whose campaign was most anti-Trump.

Many people, myself included, would rank hypothetical candidates in the following order of desirability:

1. Seriously anti-Trump and anti-lawlessness, but opposes Democrats on most other issues.

2. Seriously anti-Trump and anti-lawlessness, but supports Democrats on most other issues.

3. Somewhat anti-Trump, but not seriously so; opposes Democrats on most other issues.

4. Somewhat anti-Trump, but not seriously so; supports Democrats on most other issues.

5. Pro-Trump, but not seriously; opposes Democrats on most other issues.

6. Pro-Trump, but not seriously; supports Democrats on most other issues.

My prediction is that Democrats will claim the 2026 election as a mandate that they should push the issues where they are actually opposed by a majority of the population, while ignoring what for many people is the most important factor: a willingness to prioritize opposition to Trump's lawlessness over other controversial issues.

Voting has two effects: 1. It influences the outcome of the election, and 2. It allows the winner to claim the support of whatever fraction of the public voted for him/her.

If it were possible to mark a ballot in a manner that would have the first effect but not the second, then one might be able to argue that people had an obligation to indicate that even a horribly rotten candidate who would be totally intolerable under any circumstances was less bad than someone who managed to be even worse. Nobody, however, should be obligated to allow any candidate to claim their support if they do not, in fact, support any candidate.

I have to find out what voting systems they are using because in Florida where I have moved, there is only one machine that you electronically put your vote into and that is assisted voter machine and there’s only one of those per voting location usually.

My preferred from of voting is mark-sense paper ballots; if I were designing a system, I would design it to scan a region of the ballot and determine whether it is blank or contains a barcode and, if so, use a silent mechanism to print a barcode that would combine the ballot selections with an error correcting code, and then reject any ballot which did not have a barcode that correctly matched the selections. This would ensure that once a ballot was accepted, any attempts to alter the ballot to add votes would be detectable.

Ballot assistance devices could accept input via any convenient means and produce a marked and coded ballot.

I don't know of any systems that behave as described, but it would allow the behavior of disability assistance machines to be audited by having sighted people use them to mark a ballot and then inspect the ballot for correctness.

If a ballot box will not accept any ballots that don't have a proper validation code marked on them, except with the approval of representative from both/all parties, that would limit the amount of mischief that could be done by someone who snuck a marking device into a counting facility, either for the purpose of casting extra votes for offices that voters had left blank, or spoiling ballots that had been legitimately cast.

Object interning either requires using a global collection, or else having code that creates an object somehow identify the collection that should be used to intern things. While one could have an interning collection use weak references and automatically clean up entries that die, I'm unaware of any kind of standard hash table that would do such a thing.

If there had been 34 Republicans who were willing to go on the record as opposing the EFTA, it would have died to a Trump veto.

Trump has power because rather than make the election be solely about the fact that one of the candidates had tried to bypass the results of the 2020 election and the other one hadn't, the Democrats wanted to make the election be about "politics as usual" issues where they are opposed by both MAGA and Republicans in Exile.

Republicans in Exile wanted the Democrats to face in November a Republican opponent who had not tried to bypass the 2020 election results. I would argue that all freedom-loving Americans should have wanted that. If Democrats had pushed that narrative, then even if MAGA controlled a majority of the GOP, it would have been exposed as a freedom-hating minority of the overall population, and someone like Nikki Haley would probably be President right now.

Can you point me to any evidence suggesting that the Democrats' leadership or anyone in control of any major media wanted the Democrats to face in November someone who hadn't tried to bypass the 2020 election results?

Telescoping would only be appropriate for certain kinds of immutable objects.

Interning requires that objects be compared against an explicit collection of interned objects; typically, when an object is interned, the interned object will continue to exist within the collection of interned objects, without regard for whether any references exist outside that. Further, even if code that receives a reference to an object discovers that it's equal to an interned object, there would typically be no mechanism for notifying code that holds references to the object of that fact.

Since turntables are driven by drives that use wheels rather than gears, there's no requirement that the ratio between motor speed and turntable speed be a rational number. Even if turntable speed had to divide evenly into both 3600rpm and 3000rpm, any factor of 600rpm would work, and I see no particular reason to view 600/18 RPM as superior to 600/15 (40rpm), 600/16 (37.5rpm) or 600/20 (30 rpm).

They didn't overtly form one, of course. On the other hand, they continually undermine the messaging of anyone who would try to treat Trump's crimes and the damage his lawlessness is doing to this country every day that he remains in power as being qualitatively more important than anything else on the Democrats' agenda.

If someone on a ship tries to call people to action by saying "We need to mutiny, because the captain is trying to scuttle the ship, and he also wants to remove hamburgers from tomorrow's menu", people hearing that message would likely recognize that if the speaker were really concerned about the captain's effort to scuttle the ship, the menu should be a total non-issue by comparison. They would thus suspect that the person really wants a mutiny so that hamburgers can stay on the menu, and any notions of the captain trying to scuttle the ship are just a pretense.

Even if some of the people calling for a mutiny focus on nothing but the captain's efforts to scuttle the ship, such calls may be rendered ineffective by questions about whether those calling for mutiny might be hoping to keep hamburgers on the next day's menu.

Enacting a piece of legislation that the President doesn't want requires a 2/3 vote in the House and Senate. I think it's pretty clear that Trump did not want the Epstein Files Transparency Act. If 34 Republicans in the Senate had been willing to go on the record opposing it, Trump could and would have vetoed it. That didn't happen.

If Republicans are allowed to "passively" protect the indefensible without having to go on the record, they do so. If they're put in a position where the only way they can protect the indefensible would be to go on the record as being willing to protect evil, however, they buckle. Trump has power because the Democrats' leadership has no interest in putting Republicans into such a position.

As a more concrete example, suppose a program will works with many objects imported from JSON, and many objects are expected to have large portions that are identical to those in other objects. If an object is read from a JSON file and compared with a previous version of that object, many comparisons will find that sub-trees are equal. If a program has two references to sub-trees and needs to determine whether they're equal, each sub-tree knows of a sub-tree object to which it is equal, and both sub-trees report that they're equal to the same sub-tree object, then there would be no need to examine the objects in any detail.

If objects tried to keep references to objects to which they were known to be equal, without any GC support for "telescoping", one might end up with a long chain of objects that are known to be equal, all but the first of which would have been eligible for collection except for a reference held by the previous object in the chain. Even if any attempt to use the object at the head of the chain would have resulted in software following the chain to the end and then replacing all references to any object within the chain with a reference to the object at the end of it, there would be no limit to how long all the objects in the chain might need to stick around before that happens.

If the GC had logic that said that whenever it follows a reference to an object X whose "superior object" reference doesn't identify itself, it will follow that link and then replace what had been a reference to X with a reference to the object at the end of the trail, then a sequence of comparisons might build a chain of objects as described in the above "bad" case, but as soon as a GC occurred that chain would collapse. If one drew an object graph with an edge between every pair of objects which had been compared and found to be equal, all references to objects anywhere within a clique would be turned into references to one common object.

Many individual members of the GOP do care about it, even if they didn't agree what should be done about it. One common problem in organizational politics is that it is possible for different majorities of an organization to support proposals which end up contradicting each other even if do individual does so. As a simple example, it would be possible for 2/3 of an organization's members to prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, and 2/3 to prefer strawberry to chocolate, and yet for 2/3 to favor vanilla to strawberry, even if every individual member would be able to rank the flavors in a consistent order.

Unfortunately, the processes that choose leaders tend to favor those who are the most skilled at manipulating things for their own personal advantage, over those who would seek to benefit the country as a whole. Even if most of the people in a party would be willing to put the country's interest ahead of their own personal interest, any disagreements about how to do that will be exploited by manipulators who would prioritize their own personal interests first.

Trump is likely to be removed by One Too Many Cheeseburgers if the Senate doesn't remove him first. If the Senate removes Trump, Vance would have a Sword of Damocles hanging over him. I'd view a Vance who ascends under those circumstances as less dangerous than one who ascends after One Too Many Cheeseburgers. Is there any reason to believe the One Too Many Cheeseburgers route is safer?

The first impeachment happened before the GOP split. The second had three factors working against it that would not be applicable to any subsequent impeachments:

1. Trump was unlikely to do anything of significance before the end of his term, whether or not the Senate removed him.

2. There was no reason to believe that Senate hearings would do anything to assist criminal prosecution, but there was a possibility that they might undermine it.

3. It was thought that the proceedings would be moot by the time evidence was gathered and everything was prepared.

A coalition between Democrats and Republicans in Exile would stomp MAGA, but after that was done it would leave Republicans in Exile as the opposition party for the Democrats. Democrats preferred to form a coalition with MAGA to marginalize Republicans in Exile, so that way each could point to the fact that a majority of people hated their opponent and pretend that their policies had the support of all those people.

If Democrats had responded to the Venezuelan murders by promising to ensure that history would remember everyone who opposed Trump's ouster as accessories before the fact to all of the murders that every reasonable person knew Trump was going to commit, Trump would have had to spend a lot more political capital trying to remain afloat than the Democrats would need to spend pushing for his ouster. As it was, however, the Democrats' leadership had no interest in that, as evidenced by the fact that seventy House Democrats went on the record as refusing to support Trump's impeachment.

IMHO, copyright law should have allowed an automatic short-term protection, but required either a notice or registration to receive a longer term (providing a notice would be cheaper than registration, but publication without a notice could be remedied via registration). If someone produces a slightly modified version of a public domain work without any copyright notice, it may be impossible to know whether the person who made the changes views them as original and intends to claim a copyright interest, or would view them as perfunctory and thus have no copyright interest that could be claimed.

Some elevators do that with their floor counters. People's perception of an elevator's speed is based upon how fast the numbers change during the middle of the journey. Some elevators, when going up a large number of floors, won't start changing the display until after the elevator has moved up by significantly more than a floor, and have the display reach the destination floor while the elevator is more than a floor away from reaching its definition.

I have seen claims that the Laffer curve is discredited made by people that I think might be taken seriously by other people.

I'm not trying to be bothersome and pedantic, but a lot of misinformation is allowed to fester and spread because "nobody believes it", despite the fact that people who receive the misinformation will , in fact, believe it if it is allowed to go unchallenged.

Objects should have some form of relatively stable transitive ranking, such that if X is superior to Y and Y is superior to Z, X would rank superior to Y. Depending upon how objects might move in memory throughout their lifetime, one could use address comparisons. Ideally older objects would be "superior" to younger ones, but this need not be 100% precise.

A comparison between two objects should first identify the highest-ranking object to which each is known to be equivalent. If they are known to be equivalent to the same object, then they are equal and no further comparison is needed.

If the most senior object that's known to be equal to U is X, and the most senior object that's known to be equal to V is Y, and a comparison between X and Y finds them to be equal, then if Y is superior to X, the "superior known equivalent" of W and X should be set to Y.

The net effect would be that if multiple objects are compared and found to be equal, the "superior equivalent" of all of them would be set equal to the same object, and the GC could replace references to all of them with references to that object.

If the ranking is immutable, then actions which modify the senior equivalents of objects would eventually converge to all identify the same object even in the presence of data races, provided that a data race between two writes to a reference will leave storage holding one of the references that was written to it, and a data race between a read and a write will result in the read yielding a reference that the storage has held. If no object's "superior equivalent" link can ever identify a different object that doesn't rank above it, then there's no way a data race could cause a trail of such links to contain a cycle.

One thing I'd like to see in a GC framework would be a category of semantically immutable objects that have a telescoping "superior equivalent" pointer, which for each object would be initially set to itself, and may at any arbitrary time have references to an object become references to the superior equivalent. If two semantically immutable objects are compared and found to be transitively equivalent, and there exists a way of ranking references, then the "superior equivalent" for both objects could be set to whichever of the object's superior equivalent ranked above the other. The net effect would be that comparisons would build cliques of objects that were known to be equivalent, and the GC would tend to change references to all such objects into references to one common superior object.

Even if you meant "nobody whom anyone would take seriously", I would question that. Even if nobody whom anybody should take seriously would claim the Laffer curve was discredited, there's a huge gap between the subset of people who should be taken seriously and the subset who are.

Additionally, some people such as myself view the performance of code that needs to actually exist is far more important than the "performance" of code that doesn't need to exist, and that the programmer could have simply omitted if executing it would have unacceptably affected performance.

From a circuitry-minimization perspective, most Turbo buttons on cases like the one pictured had two contacts. One of them would go to the motherboard, and the other contact would feed power to one of two sets of holes on a board full of posts. Each segment on the display could be jumpered to either the normally-open contact of the switch, the normally-closed contact, or an always-on supply. The only components needed to make the digits change in response to the switch were the current-limiting resistors for the segments.

Depends how the statement is worded.

Besides, what matters is that there is a simple counter that would render such attacks sufficiently counter-productive that there would be no point in making them at all if the Democrat was going to respond. If the Democrat could discourage MAGA from making attacks in the first place, the truthfulness or lack thereof would be moot.

I wanted Harris to win. If Harris had made any effort to ascertain what things were making Republicans in Exile uncomfortable with voting for her, she could have picked up a significant number of votes completely painlessly. Whether or not you think she should have needed to do so, the fact that she lost shows that she did.