I love the way you weave in the cultural context, including the culture war parts of modern political and policy debates, the business/corporate trends in entertainment, in your telling of this history. It’s clear you know your stuff, and you’ve helped me understand something new (the influences these slasher films drew from, from Agatha Christie), grounded in stuff I might have already known (the actual movies themselves and the cultural context they were released into, including how people looked at boobs before the internet).

So thank you. This comment is awesome, and you make this place better.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too

especially the historical ones

Tycho and Kepler always cracks me up.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

Typing of the dead

Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.

For the U.S. at least:

With condos, there’s a condo association that owns all the common areas. Then the association itself is owned by the owners of the units, and the management is elected by the owners.

With co-ops, the unit owners directly own the common areas in common, and the management is also elected by the owners.

Functionally speaking they’re very similar, and co-ops tend to exist in places where this legal structure predates the invention of homeowner associations (basically New York).

if it’s immediately rewarding

Hell of a caveat there.

If you you blow the guts out and faces off Russian soldiers by more traditional means they are just as dead

I (and all the people and organizations that have worked throughout the last century to get incendiary weapons banned as anti-personnel weapons) generally feel that the method of killing matters, and that some methods are excessively cruel or represent excessive risk of long term suffering.

The existing protocol on incendiary weapons recognizes the difference, by requiring signatory nations to go out of their way to avoid using incendiary weapons in places where civilian harm might occur. Even in contexts where a barrage of artillery near civilians might not violate the law, airborne flame throwers are forbidden. Because incendiary weapons are different, and a line is drawn there, knowing that there actually is a difference between negligently killing civilians with shrapnel versus negligently killing civilians with burning.

There are degrees of morality and ethics, even in war, and incendiary weapons intentionally targeting personnel crosses a line that I would draw.

The moral high ground is absolutely critical in war. War is politics by other means, and being able to build consensus, marshal resources, recruit personnel, persuade allies to help, persuade adversaries to surrender or lay down their arms, persuade the allies of your adversaries not to get involved, and keep the peace after a war is over, all depend on one’s public image. There are ways to wage war without it, but most militaries that blatantly disregard morals find it difficult to actually win.

In this case? The entire military strategy of Ukraine in this war is highly dependent on preserving the moral high ground.

The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.

This is an area where it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.

So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn’t enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it’s morally reprehensible, and I’d prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.

Wait is there a way to invent awful things and then patent troll so that nobody can actually bring them to market?

Twitter has accounts that Brazil says violates Brazilian law.

Brazil took steps to shut down those accounts in Brazil.

Twitter refused to cooperate, going as far as to fire all of its Brazilian staff, so that it can’t be reached by the Brazilian courts.

The Brazilian courts ordered all of Twitter be blocked until they comply with local law that they designate a corporate representative who can be served by court processes.

Brazilian ISPs complied with the court order to block Twitter.

Starlink did not comply, and Brazilian courts froze SpaceX’s Brazilian assets, including bank accounts, and started making moves towards de-licensing Starlink, including its 23 ground stations located in Brazil.

The issue escalated to the full Brazilian Supreme Court, who ruled that the assets should remain frozen until Starlink starts complying with court orders.

Now Starlink says it will comply with the court order.

There’s that one game that censored “Nasser” to “N***er” which made it much worse.

This is exactly backwards. People in cities consume fewer resources per capital than people in rural areas, who can’t take advantage of the same economies of scale when it comes to transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, public utilities, physical supply chains, and all sorts of services in modern life, from seeing a doctor to repairing a broken window to borrowing a library book to getting a babysitter.

It’s rural areas that destroy more land, consume more water, generate more pollution, and emit more greenhouse gases, on a per capita basis, than dense areas.

I don’t see why the distance between them isn’t growing at a constant speed.

At any given time t seconds after separation, the boy is 5t north, and the girl is 1t east. The distance between them is defined by the square root of ((5t)^2 + (t)^2 ), or about 5.099t.

In other words, the distance between them is simply a function defined as 5.099t, whose first derivative with respect to time is just 5.099.

I think you’re right. The line blurring between corporate sponsorship and community support is pretty difficult to determine. If someone wants to build a community around a particular video game or movie or television show, of course the corporation that publishes it benefits from a bunch of positive discussion about it. But at the same time, that corporate-owned product is part of our shared culture, and a legitimate topic to discuss in a forum like this.

And it’s not even necessarily pure corporate stuff, either. There are nonprofit and trade and governmental organizations that rely on advertising for public messaging: a tourism board promoting their location as a good vacation spot, an agricultural trade group promoting recipes using their specific product, a government health department drive encouraging vaccinations, etc. They pay for ads through conventional outlets while also promoting their interests on social media.

It’s just an ecosystem. We should be aware that there are those who would seek to influence us here, whether for money or politics or other motivation, and navigate these spaces with that in mind.

Sears kinda used to be like that in the U.S.

Craftsman, the tool brand, was an in-house brand for Sears, along with Kenmore appliances, Die Hard batteries, Land’s End clothing, etc.

But the whole reason why there is a style of house called Craftsman homes is because Sears used to sell house kits as huge Ikea-style pre-cut lumber to be assembled on site according to their instructions.

Sears also sold insurance under its Allstate insurance subsidiary, houses under its Coldwell Banker real estate brokerage, and all sorts of consumer finance through its Discover card.