Pipoca

The US parties are weird.

Because there's no PR, anyone who wants to be effective has to join one of the parties. Because of that, diversity in each party is way higher than you see in places that use party list PR.

For example, the Democrats have both Alrxandria Ocasio Cortez, who describes herself as a democratic socialist, and Joe Manchin, a fairly conservative former coal exec from West Virginia.

The real interesting bit of American elections tends to be the primaries, where all the voters registered with a party vote on who their candidate should be. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez got elected because she defeated the incumbent Democrat in the primary.

In 2020, everyone from Bernie Sanders to billionaire Michael Bloomberg ran in the Democratic primary. There was some real choice there until Biden won and it became just Trump vs Biden.

I mean, to make that argument about the holocaust you'd need to lie about the numbers.

There were 17 million Jews worldwide in 1939, but only 11 million in 1945. In Europe, the population went from 9 million Jews just before the holocaust to only 3 million Jews continent-wide after it - even counting those in allied and neutral countries.

Poland, before the holocaust, had over three million Jews; 90% of them were murdered by the Nazis. Those people didn't just evaporate.

Meanwhile - did I lie about the numbers? Keep in mind, 2 million is the current number of Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage.

What exactly is the map going to tell you?

There's almost two million Palestinian citizens of Israel. In 1952, Israel gave citizenship to the ~160k Palestinians living in Israeli territory who hadn't fled during the 1948 war; they lived under martial law until 1966.

No one is displacing Palestinians in Israel; Israeli settlers are displacing Palestinians in Palestine.

Climbing harnesses are usually sitting harnesses that are more padded around the legs and back than work harnesses are.

The bigger thing, though, is that suspension trauma typically happens when you're purely hanging. The amount of time you can hang in a void in a work harness is way, way shorter than the amount of time you can bounce off a wall in a work harness, particularly if you're able to support much of your weight with your feet.

For climbers, the main worry would be hanging around if you're somehow incapacitated from a heart attack or having been knocked out somehow, because workers are a lot more likely to be suspended over a void than climbers.

Suppose you're going to disney for a week as a family of 4.

6 days of tickets for 4 people is $2,400. Cheap jetblue tickets on sale might be $1000; honestly, they're probably more. If you're staying at a $350/night hotel room, you're already up to $5,500.

Then, figure at least $50 in food per person per day, or $100 for the adults if you get alcohol. That's another $1,200-1,800. And if you go to any of their fancier restaurants it'll be a lot more. Add in a couple hundred in souvenirs and you're there.

Of course, if you're within road trip distance and just go to the park for two days, you could do it way cheaper.

The question about "calling for the Genocide of Jews" was couched in a statement about Pro-Palestine protestors using the term "Intifada", which isn't a call for Genocide but instead a call of support for Palestinians instead.

If Americans remember much of anything about the intifadas, it's probably the many suicide bombings of busses, cafes, malls, night clubs, etc. during the second intifada about 20 years ago.

Which is certainly not genocide, but you have to be living under a rock to not think that people aren't going to hear a call for global intifada as a call to commit antisemetic terrorist attacks...

Stick assembly is the key thing.

You're not going to find a thread strong enough to pull a few tonnes of stone, but you can easily pull it with a large number of ropes pulled by a few hundred people.

Similarly, a single 8x8 beam as a lever arm would just snap, but a dozen 8x8 beams as lever arms for a dozen levers probably wouldn't.

The 1931 census, carried out by the British, found a total population of a bit over a million people. Looking at other estimates doesn't have it increasing that much between 1931 and 1947.

Israel's population is currently about 9.7 million, which doesn't count the ~5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. So about 15x the population as in 1931.

In Israel, there's currently around 7 million Jews and 2 million Arabs. About 80% of Arab- Israelis are Sunni Muslim, 9% are Christian and 9% are Druze.

So, uh, it looks like the Muslim population of the land that is current Israel has more than doubled since 1947?

The problem is mathematical.

To win the presidential election, you need to win a majority of the vote in enough states to win a majority of electoral college votes.

If no-one gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives meets. Each state delegation gets 1 vote. Right now, that means that the Republican wins, due to e.g. Wyoming and Alaska getting just as much of a vote as NY and California, and Republican gerrymandering of swing states.

There's literally no way for third party candidates to be elected president. The best that a third party has ever done was in 1860, a 4 way race between a Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist.

Lincoln, the Republican, got 39.8% of the vote but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes. The Democrat, Douglass, got 29.5% of the vote but only won a single state. Breckenridge got only 18.1% of the vote but carried most of the southern states. And Bell got 12.6% of the vote and carried 3 states - Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

So Douglas ended up with more than twice as many actual votes as Bell, but got over 3x the electoral vote. And Breckenridge only got less than half as many electoral college votes that he'd need to win, and could realistically have only picked up Bell's.

The last time a third party candidate won a single electoral college vote was in 1968, when George Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the former governor of Alabama, and had left the Democratic party after the 1964 civil rights law and 1965 voting rights law were passed by Johnson.

The Democrats are also more of a big tent than most parties in counties using party list PR would be. In Italy, AOC and Manchin wouldn't be in the same party, while in the US they basically have to be to win.

The two party system exists for structural reasons. Plurality only works well in two candidate elections; third parties only do well in districts where they functionally replace a major party. Getting rid of the two party system is possible by changing the structure - switching to e.g. STAR voting in the senate and presidency and using e.g. MMP or STV in the House. But burying your head in the sand to pretend the structural issues don't exist just doesn't work.

Take an RF designer and have them man the till at McDonald's with the day or two of training that most of these places do. See how they fare. I'm an EMT. Peoples lives literally depend on my skills.

I'd guess the answer would be "be slow at checking people out and be super stressed, but be a net productivity boost to the team".

Meanwhile, if you made him an EMT with no prior training he'd either just be shadowing an actual EMT and at best be a go-fer, or he'd kill someone. He'd likely be a net negative for a while.

Junior devs are expected to learn on the job, but to come in with a solid base level of proficiency.

My internships and first junior position didn't require me to know the language they used, but they required me to know a similar language and be able to program already. Being able to at least write pseudocode was absolutely required for those interviews.

Entry-level doesn't mean no experience required, it means no professional experience required.

An entry level engineering job requires an engineering degree but no work experience. That's literally 4 years of required experience.

An entry level software engineer job requires you to have a CS degree, bootcamp, or equivalent self-taught hobbyist experience. I haven't heard of any recent entry level software jobs that would accept someone who hasn't even written a hello world before.

An entry level physician job requires you to have completed a medical residency and medical degree.