Yup, in order to make Discovery and Picard work, the writers had to give everyone the idiot ball.

Trek is at its best when it’s competence porn.

As a note, to be in star fleet requires 4 years at the start fleet academy. You need to be somewhat good at your job and somewhat disciplined to even be considered for a slot on a ship.

The first article is from someone who wants to save RCV, despite that one flaw that they’ve drilled into.

The problem is that it’s a known attack vector, the Wikipedia article talks about how it was used intentionally by a political party in 2005 in Germany to effectively steal an additional seat in their parliament.

My second link is a deeper dive into more of RCV’s many flaws. Because why stop at monotonicity? Seriously, the fact that increasing support can cause a candidate to lose, and not just lose but elect the worst choice, is insane.

That fact that there are more flaws, just as game breaking, means we should all follow the example of the Marquis de Condorcet, the guy who invented RCV, abandoned it because he saw how broken it was.

Then you have the lying liars at FairVote saying that the Condorcet criterion doesn’t matter in elections.

The Condorcet criterion is that if you were to hold a series of one on one elections between all candidates, the winner of those should be the same winner of your election system. RCV fails this in most elections, which is why Condorcet abandoned it.

It wasn’t until about 30 years after Condorcet’s death that an Englishman revived the voting method, but added a proportional twist. It still had all the flaws that Condorcet wrote about, but Condorcet was French, and lost the political games of the French Revolution, so he was mostly ignored.

As a side note, the political writings of Condorcet should be required reading. The guy wrote this in 1790

‘The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.’

https://medium.com/@Gbgrow/understanding-non-monotonicity-in-ranked-choice-voting-and-how-to-prevent-it-55ad54fdad06

https://electionscience.org/research-hub/the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_responsiveness_paradox#Specific_examples

We’ve seen it happen in actual elections, as shown in the Wikipedia link.

RCV is just a flawed system, which is expected for something created by a couple of guys 150+ years ago.

IRV, or RCV as it’s being sold here, has a lot of problems.

It’s the only voting system in existence where ranking someone higher on the ballot can cause them to lose the election.

Australia gets around most of the problems of IRV by just not telling people any information about the vote except the winners.

Also you only use straight IRV for a single part of your government.

The US would use it for every part of our government. It would be a shit show.

Which is why RCV has been banned in half a dozen states.

Now, there are better voting systems. Systems that live up to the hype.

STAR is the single best voting system designed to date.

As a cardinal voting system, it’s actually immune to the Spoiler Effect.

These folks have a good breakdown of RCV’s flaws. https://www.equal.vote/rcv_v_star

A lot of it boils down to how RCV is just a series of First Past the Post elections on the same ballot. This means that it can never really rise above FPtP.

Fun fact that the site I provided gets wrong, RCV isn’t actually 150 years old, it’s actually a bit older. The Marquis de Condorcet actually came up with the idea in the 1790s, but abandoned it because of its flaws.

If you want some unrelated reading, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Condorcet The guy was based as fuck.

Here’s a direct quote from one of his more influential works, “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship”

The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.

That was 1790.

Sadly, the political party that was backing him fell out of power and the replacements had him arrested, and possibly killed.

This was his final work http://files.libertyfund.org/files/1669/Condorcet_0878_EBk_v6.0.pdf

That is the fastest way to turn a blue state red.

Split the vote so that the minority Republican vote can win. Because there are more registered Republicans in California than in Texas.

No, the actual answer is to change the voting system to a Cardinal system, so that there are no such things as Spoiler party’s or split votes.

Approval or STAR are the answer. Either would enable third parties to exist and thrive.

As a note RCV is not a Cardinal system, and still has the Spoiler Effect. People lie about it saying it’s the fix for all problems, but it’s actually worse than what we have (there are parts that are better, but more parts that are far worse)

More of a global depression after these yahoos purposefully crash the economy.

The plan is to repeal it first, and then figure out what to do from there.

Probably whatever makes the most money for insurance companies.

Except, even then, an average coal plant will release more radioactive material over its lifetime than Fukushima did.

It’s just Chernobyl that you have to top. And even then there are coal plants that come close.

Now, it’s not apples to apples. Coal plants release uranium and thorium. Not ceasium and strontium.

But yeah, never go swimming in a coal plant ash pit. For more than the obvious reasons.

Adding more radiation to tobacco. Sure.

But slightly serious here. The actual mechanism of about 75% of tobacco related cancer, is the fact that tobacco leaves bioaccumulate natural radioactive elements from the soil.

If you smoke, you have radioactive lead and polonium in your lungs.

Molten salt?

We can then use compressed CO2 in the place of steam to drive the turbine.

Is blue sky federated? I thought it was another closed garden. If slightly more open than Twitter.

Ethanol is incredibly inefficient as a fuel source.

If not for the massive subsidies it would not exist.

Still, ethanol is a better fuel additive than lead. (Both reduce knocking)

Still, the far better use is to grow food.

Mindustry is much closer to the tower defense side of it.

Or maybe the RTS side.

There are even attack modes, where you build up an army to take on a fixed emplacement of enemy units.

Harris was the path of things slowly getting better. Wages finally overtaking inflation.

Given a couple years, we would all be in a better place.

Trump’s tariffs will drive up the price of everything. The last few years of inflation and greed will pale in comparison.

And egg prices will still go up.

Catastrophicly so.

I support that guy’s Hitler killing policy. Just wish he implemented it in 1920 rather than in 1945.

If you think Hitler was loyal to Eva Braun, we’ve been reading vastly different books.

No, Hitler was just as much a sex pest as any other dictator, and was pretty bad before gaining power. Like targeting 14 year olds, and his 14 year old niece.

But he also had uncontrollable flatulence that could clear a ballroom. Which goes to show that while time travelers couldn’t kill him, they certainly could fuck with him.

The true captains of industry do want this. chaos is how they transfer wealth from the poor to themselves.

In a depression, the money doesn’t vanish, it goes into the pockets of the super rich.

That’s actually the plan.

Bankrupt the government and sell it off for parts.