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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • You don’t need control of the House to work on bills that you don’t even intend to pass until the next session of congress, though. There’s nothing stopping the Republicans, Democrats, or even average citizens from writing bills right now that are intended to be voted on by future sessions of congress.

    And the House of Reps voting on the bill next week is also meaningless, because the bill has a 0% chance of passing this session with the democrats in control of the senate - and the House of Reps would then have to pass it again once a new session starts. Which, they probably will - but that doesn’t make the vote next week somehow less meaningless. So the headline is pure clickbait: Congress isn’t about to “gift” Trump anything. The gifts will come next year.


  • That’s it, yes - each state gets as many electoral votes as it has congressmen, including senators. Most states award all of their electoral votes to whoever wins the state, with no proportionality to it at all - only two states (Nebraska and Maine, neither one large) do anything proportional with their votes.

    With a system like that it’s easier to see how things can end up with the less popular candidate winning - they can, for example, sneak by with 50.1% of the vote in just enough states to win, but bomb it out with 20% of the vote in all the other states. That’s an extreme example specifically for the purpose of illustration, but less extreme versions of that are usually what happens.

    The electoral votes also aren’t distributed entirely fairly - the number of electoral votes per person tends to be larger for less populated states. The less populated states also tend to be Republican states. So in a very real sense, each person’s vote counts for “more” in those states, and “less” in states with high populations. I don’t believe it’s really possible to fix this problem without vastly increasing the number of electoral votes, but congress currently has its size capped at 535 members for what I consider not very good reasons.

    Yes, the whole system is trash from the ground up. But much of its structure is defined in the constitution itself, which is very difficult to change.



  • This is not correct. The electoral college is exactly as susceptible to giving the win to the person with fewer votes as it was in 2000 and 2016. It’s also not an issue that’s due to any state in particular and is not an issue that can be solved by individual state action. The NPVIC would fix it but requires the cooperation of many states and is not in effect, and has stalled pretty hard in recent years.





  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlUsing a Firefox fork makes any difference?
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    2 months ago

    Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.

    There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.







  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldIndicating marker
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    2 months ago

    I’ve got the same one, $38.55 from amazon right now. My dad’s got one of the fancy expensive ones. I actually prefer the cheaper ones - this probably varies by area and brand, but because mine runs on the home’s water pressure and his is powered, mine ends up being able to deliver significantly more force. They have a self-cleaning mode too.

    Bidets aren’t a luxury item for rich people. Everyone reading should get one. You can blame me if you end up not liking it.