Instigate

Uhhh, no. That’s not how RCV works at all.

Let’s say there are five candidates - A, B , C, D, and E.

Let’s assume candidates A & B are the most popular.

Personally I choose to rank them as C, E, D, B and then A.

Out of all of them, no one gets over 50% of the #1 vote. Whoever gets the lowest #1 vote is knocked out first. Let’s suggest that this is C. All of their #1 votes and therefore my vote is then transferred to E.

Let’s suggest that after this there’s still no one who has over 50% of the vote between the other four candidates. Let’s further assume that candidate E has the lowest resulting vote after the first round of knockout. My vote is then transferred to candidate D.

Out of A, B, and D, let’s assume none of them still have over 50% of the vote after this redistribution. Let’s further assume that D has the lowest vote of the three. My vote is then transferred to B.

Given there are only two candidates left, one will have to have a majority. That candidate wins.

Under RCV, as long as you mark every box with a preference your vote can never ever be wasted. It will always end up with a candidate that wins or one that loses, but it cannot ever be exhausted and therefore meaningless.

Many people with vaginas have a lot of sex that makes no babies

The reference is to Rupert Murdoch; a man who hasn’t been Australian since 1985 when he gave up his Australian Citizenship to become naturalised as an American. He created NewsCorp which became the Fox Corporation; one of the most politically viable and mainstream news sources of the 20th and 21st centuries in the US media landscape.

The revocation of the word ‘mate’ just honestly shows that Americans are so very alien to the concept of immigrants that even an Anglophonic immigrant who’s been a US citizen for almost 40 years still isn’t somehow ‘American’ if their slang hasn’t been fully naturalised as well.

I guess it depends on your definition of ‘major’. I think in a pluralistic democracy, any party that represents 10+% of the population meets that criteria. Of course, from the perspective of a two-party system 10% doesn’t seem like much, but it’s significant enough to have held the balance of power many times since the Greens came into existence in the ‘90s.

I dunno, if I suddenly grew a vagina I might want to use it.

Original source: https://facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2656977204337311

Denis Lushch - ‘The Bullshit Weaver’

It bugs me that this image has been altered and reproduced so many times without crediting the artist. It’s a wonderful political cartoon and very pointedly aimed at Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp.

• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
• Super Paper Mario
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
• Paper Mario: the Origami King

Depending on your definition of ‘sidekick’, these may also count:

• every Mario Party game
• every Mario Kart game
• every Mario & Sonic Olympics game
• Super Smash Bros Melee, Brawl and Ultimate
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

There might be more I’m forgetting.

We have four Major Parties - Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens. If you understand their relative power based on our system of government, you’ll see that we’re somewhere in between the US and the EU with regards to representational democracy. It’s not great, but in the Anglospheric context we do pretty well because the others don’t have our combination of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representative Voting (PRV) and Mandatory Voting.

Labor is the largest single party in the Lower House. The Liberal Party has (almost) never gained a true majority. The National Party, with whom the Liberal Party coalesces (known in Australia as The Coalition or the LNP) is our current major opposition, and they only hold that position as a coalition. The Greens regularly poll between 9-12%, which causes our Federal Senate to end up giving them a significant amount of power. We also (thanks to changes a recent government made) have a significant crossbench made up of The Greens, minor parties and independents. Our current senate (and most previous Senates) has many potential ‘kingmakers’ (including previous AFL legend David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie and others) which mean that governments can’t pass legislation without courting those outside their party.

To the outsider it may seem that we only have two parties, but in our context we understand it to be more complex than that. Many Australian jurisdictions have known minority-government, government-by-coalition and Lower House government tempered by Upper House diversity which tempers the passage of legislation.

Like I said, it’s not a perfect system (and pretty far from direct democracy) but we sit in this interesting position between the absolute Two-Party System of FPTP jurisdictions and other systems that produce 5+ parties that need to form government together. Our system is far from perfect, but it’s not terrible.

As someone who lives in a jurisdiction where every single vote I can engage in is RCV (Australia; NSW) I can honestly say that it’s so much better than FPTP. I don’t know what the perfect voting system is (frankly a subjective topic as it currently stands; please feel free to correct me with statistically valid alternatives) but RCV at the very least means that I can (and personally have) never vote for a major party as #1 and I can know for sure that my vote has never been exhausted, because I’ve never left a blank box. We also have mandatory voting, which helps to keep things sane.

In Australia, government election funding is only ever allocated to the parties based on #1 votes, so I can also confidently say I’ve never contributed to a major party’s election coffers as I’ve also never donated to any major party. I obviously support one major party over the others, as based on my preferences, but I’ll always give the election funding to a smaller party or Independent.

RCV is a wonderful step to take from FPTP. I understand that it may not be democratically perfect, and frankly no representative voting system may ever be, but it’s a far cry better than FPTP. It’s a known concept that here in Australia politicians vie to represent the ‘middle’ rather than the extremes, because the vast majority of voters aren’t overly-enthused political lunatics. We still have our issues to be sure, but I’d rather that the political class fight over the centrist majority rather than court the political extremes in order to convince people to actually vote thanks to mandatory voting.

If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.

This is an argument I’ve been pitching in the Australian context for some 20 years now - we should have been world leaders in solar technology, to the extent that by now we should have massive solar farms across the North of Australia in order to export clean, green energy up to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and other near-neighbours. We could have created a whole new industry of both research and advanced manufacturing, and if we’d nationally sequester our resources correctly we could be doing every step of the way - dig out the minerals, refine them, manufacture them into panels, export those panels - all the while generating very low cost energy and exporting it for profit as well! Not to mention so many new jobs!

Even once you take away all of the obvious arguments for climate change action (environmental, ethical, prevention of future disasters etc.) there was always going to be a strong financial incentive in a capitalistic market to move to technology that has the lowest input cost to generate energy, which just so happens to be renewables. It just baffles me that so many politicians crucified themselves on the altar of coal when they could’ve been remembered for ushering in simultaneous economic benefit and environmental benefit, with a long term impact of lowered inflation through cheaper power bills, but that’s what the minerals lobby in this country has managed to achieve. What a disgrace.

Good to see a world leader using the economic arguments in addition to the other more obvious ones.

Cubicle is the noun (mini office); cubical is the adjective (having cube-like properties). :)

Blood and Wine was honestly amazing. I haven’t enjoyed a DLC or xpac that much since Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I think maybe the Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind’s expansion Bloodmoon was a great contender as well, but Blood and Wine just took Witcher 3 to a new level. It truly deserved its spot at the top of the heap.

Mate, I’ll be honest with you here - I grow bananas on my property and I can definitely tell you the last term I’d use to describe their trunks is ‘woody’. They’re so moisture-laden and ultra porous that anyone who’s ever had to cut or cull banana will know for sure that they’re not made of wood. You can easily carve through a 15-20cm trunk of a banana plant with a sharp machete and one strong swing - try that on anything generally considered to be a tree and you’ll be lucky to get a fair chip out of the trunk.

I’ve got no skin in the game as to whether or not they’re trees, or what the fuck a ‘tree’ even is, but anyone who’s dealt with growing bananas is pretty unlikely to consider them in the same group as woody trees. Damn things grow like weeds anyway!

Like I said mate, fair call. If he’s your ally, then so be it.

Fair call mate, he might be your ally but sadly he’s not mine. I’m not sure if you’re LGBTQIA+, but if you’ve spent time in the community you’ll know that not even all of those who identify as queer or non-cis support one another. To the best of my knowledge May doesn’t openly identify as queer himself, and thinking that he’s an ally just because he’s been friends with gay and/or bi men isn’t necessarily the best indicator that he’s an ally to all peoples. Personally, I feel like that argument is pretty similar to “I can’t be racist because I have a ____ friend”.

Probed on whether Queen would be able to win a BRIT gong in 2021, he was reported to have responded:

“We would be forced to have people of different colours and different sexes and we would have to have a trans [person]. You know life doesn’t have to be like that. We can be separate and different.”

Apparently he was ‘ambushed’ and ‘stitched up’ and his words were ‘subtly twisted’ but he never stated what his original words were, if they were different from the quote. I’m not usually a fan of people who use terms like “a trans” or who lament “cancel culture” because gendered categories are removed from awards ceremonies.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/11/28/queen-brian-may-brit-awards-twisted-trans/

If Bethesda created a paid mod market where creators could charge for access and Bethesda only took a super nominal amount of those payments to cover transaction fees (say, 2-3%) I would so be in favour of that. I love the idea of passionate creators being rewarded for their work, and frankly it could (and should) create a new employee pipeline for them.

Sadly though, then Bethesda might make 0.01875% less profit this quarter than they did last quarter, which these days is the death knell of the capitalistic venture.

They definitely did learn. They learned that they could charge for mods and people, sadly, will pay. They’ve learned that they can make more money by paywalling what should be essential patches and bugfixes. They learned that the average gamer is willing to be fleeced. They learned that they can run an IP into the ground and still extract maximum cash from it.

They’ve learned. They just didn’t learn the lesson that we here on Lemmy wanted them to learn. That’s a sad fact of being part of a minority community.