I can recommend against enders. I have two friends with them, and one myself. Between the 3 of us none of them are currently working, and its been like this since i found out all 3 of us had 3d printers. Keeping them working is like pulling teeth.

Simplicity tends to sell better than complexity, and RCV is the one that’s known of already.

Agreed. And that’s why I think approval is such a big improvement over ranked choice.

“Tell us who you approve of, candidate with the most approval wins”

Is a hell of a lot simpler than

“Rank every candidate without ranking multiple as the same level, then we check if any candidate has a 50% majority, if not, the lowest candidate gets booted and the next wave of second choices comes in, repeat until there is 50% majority.”

And that’s before the peripheral benefits.

So far they’ve been more than happy to ignore everything except the status quo, unfortunately.

Agreed. It’s honestly sad.

My city/state has been warming up to these kinds of talks and candidates at least, which gives me a glimmer of hope. But for now it is not enough.

Arguably, RCV is just as complicated as STAR, and approval is simpler than RCV. And part of the difficulty in the heavy lift to get RCV is that it has some pretty rough flaws, flaws that don’t exist within the alternatives.

And the political environment is easing up to the idea of moving towards better voting methods. I’m not saying we should let perfection be the enemy of progress. All I am saying is that if we are going to be making changes, we should at least attempt the better options.

I absolutely agree with pushing the issue at a local level, however we should probably be aiming for approval or STAR voting:

https://dividedwefall.org/star-and-approval-voting/

RCV is way better than our current system, but even RCV has flaws.

We also need regulation requiring election reform within party primaries, because as of right now it is a clown show.

Friendly reminder to all:

The prime directive is a great example of how even a good rule taken to the extreme can end up causing more harm than good.

But beyond that, it’s just an easy aid for the writers to add a point of conflict for their stories. The prime directive as a value within the federation seems secondary to me.

The republican/right wing party attempted to overthrow an election. And they are unabashed about that. And somehow they still have a 3rd of the country still supporting them.

Is that not enough for us to qualify as having a real fascism problem?

Yeah, the NPVIC is… I mean, let’s be honest here. It’s not great. It’s better than our current system, absolutely.

Agreed.

But it’s far, far inferior than rank choice.

I’d say it goes like

Approval >>> Ranked >>>>>>>>>>>>> FPTP (popular vote) >>> FPTP (electoral college)

Agreed.

We would need election reform for that to change, and while we are getting closer to that state by state, I don’t think we will ever get enough states to sign on for the laws to kick in.

I assume you’re talking about the NPVIC. But yeah, we are getting marginally closer to reform each year. And public sentiment towards FPTP voting is changing, which is good. The only downside is that it is slow, and people seem more keen on rank choice instead of approval (IMO the best).

And these changes will never happen with our current system in place, so it’s a catch 22. Can’t change the system without reform, can’t reform with our current system.

Honestly that’s the case with most problems in the U.S., it’s just a bunch of catch 22s the whole way down, and the whole way up.

Yeah, congress needs to be stacked with representatives that actually give a shit about protecting workers and democracy. And that’s never going to happen with a 2 party system and legalize bribery (“lobbying”).

And those things won’t get fixed until people start giving a shit and voting accordingly, and/or we have massive protests.

I don’t think that’s a starter.

I wasn’t being literal. There are a million things that need fixed, a few of them you’ve listed and I 100% agree with. The one I named was just one of them.

IIRC about 2/3rds of americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That is not an economy that is working for the people.

We need dramatic overhauls that Biden, and especially Trump will never deliver. We need employee ownership of companies for starters.

nobody should use chatgpt to generate long rambly paragraphs complaining about nothing in particular with no point or ending or punctuation coupled with maildrop.cc as a temporary email

as “literally anyone except felons”

Oh don’t worry, they’re revising that part too. They want no limits whatsoever. They want felons to have guns.

I don’t think there are enough such edge cases for it to make sense for it to be legal.

If a corp needs an employee to be that close, then they should hire local, and/or rotate staff.

At a bare minimum, I agree, no corp should profit off of housing.

That’s how a lot of co-ops works. Or maybe it’s called non-market rental. I don’t remember the exact name but it’s definitely a thing.

Either way, landlord parasites are not needed.

restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.

Agreed, we should be doing all of those things. Corporations should not be able to own any kind of housing at all, and multi unit buildings should be under non-profit co-ops.

And to penalize unoccupied housing, we should have a georgist taxation system.

That, and there is a lot more stabbing in the Klingon Empire.

Also a big fan of both series.

but if they have struggle dealing against a 2000 human civilization rebellion

There is a big caveat to this though, the combine are ridiculously pragmatic, to the point where they use humans to keep humans as slaves. Why specially create enforcers when there is already units that you can augment/brainwash into working for you, who already are well suited for the environment and atmosphere?

So that’s what the combine do, they use humans to keep other humans in check. So that revolt of 2000 humans was really only a revolt against other humans. Stories like that are a dime a dozen on earth.

The Combines dosen’t even have shields, the Combine Gunship can be throw away with just three real life rocket launcher and so far we see that’s one of their stronger airship synts units the combine have.

The shields one is a stronger argument, though again I think that might fall in line with the pragmatism of the combine. If all they are facing is humans, it could be the case in the eyes of the combine that putting extra defenses on your armored units is kind of pointless.

So they may very well have that tech, or something even more superior, but they just don’t bother wasting the resources on it.

Couple that with the fact that the gunships are themselves organic/enslaved, the combine probably don’t mind that the gunships are esentially cannon fodder. They might have the mindset that they can just breed up more.

But destroying a Borg cube? That is a feat even for an advanced civilization, or many of them.

The combine certainly are an advanced civilization. If you take the peripheral writings as cannon, they have at least one Dyson sphere. The tech for that might be beyond the borg, because even the borg’s biggest structures are grains of sand in comparison to the size of a dyson sphere.

Size doesn’t automatically mean a win, but the engineering required for a dyson sphere is huge. If they have that level of engineering, I could see them taking out pretty much as many cubes as they like. Especially if their dyson sphere(s?) are in any way weapons weaponized. And knowing the combine, they probably have sought such a weapon.

personally I think being a Stalker is worst than being assimilated by the Borg

Agreed 1000%. I’d rather be a borg than a half life stalker. If I’m going to have a hellish life with no agency and only pain, I’d rather not be conscious.

At the end of the day, the true strength of the borg is not particularly well defined (at least in my opinion), and thr true strength of the combine is even worse defined. The writers on either side have left too much up to question for any real definitive answer.

The current situation with trains is shit because we as a country have allowed it to deteriorate.

Waiting 3 hours for a freight train is one such example. The majority of rail lines are owned by freight companies, so they give their own trails priority over passenger trains. That shit is unacceptable.