Pipoca

joined 1 year ago
[–] Pipoca 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That sounds a bit more like a nightclub.

I'd never want to live next to a nightclub, but living next to a tavern or pub would be fine.

[–] Pipoca 8 points 10 months ago

Ah, yes, Disneφ

[–] Pipoca 1 points 10 months ago

Vav is a product of ashkenaszi pronunciations due to yiddish. Originally it's Waw.

Vav has nothing to do with Yiddish.

The pronunciation shift occurred in a large number of groups that didn't speak Yiddish, and shifts like that also aren't uncommon cross-linguistically.

The exact same shift happened in Italian, as well: v in classical Latin made a w sound, but morphed to a v in most romance languages.

Pronunciation shifts don't have to come out of influence of other languages, they just kinda happen normally on their own. Sometimes this causes spelling changes (such as the many Spanish words with an h that came from a Latin f, like hablo or hijo), other times it changes the sound of the letter, such as how the Greek phi went from an aspirated p to an f sound, or a j went from a y sound to an English j.

And the multiple names for God thing comes from Kaballah

Kabbalah talks about the multiple names of god, but the Torah itself uses a number of different names for god.

For that matter, look at Hebrew names. You have names like Matityahu (gift of god), Daniel (god is my judge), and eliyahu (god is my god), using different names of god. Why do biblical Hebrew names use both el and yahu to refer to god, if multiple names was a kabbalistic innovation?

[–] Pipoca 4 points 10 months ago

Similarly, the nation directly south of Moab was Edom.

Edom means red in Hebrew, so the Bible has Edom being founded by Isaac's oldest son, Esau, who has red hair and sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of red lentil stew because he was hungry.

It's less of a jab than the origin of Moab, but it's still not super flattering.

[–] Pipoca 1 points 10 months ago

The profit motive drives profit, not development. See: rapid enshittification and exploitation.

The important thing there is 'how are incentives aligned?'

With a lightbulb factory, both the capitalist and the public wins if they're making better, cheaper lightbulbs. Because incentives are aligned, both the capitalist and the public wins when they figure out how to improve the factory. Look at the prices of LED bulbs or TVs over the last few decades.

Enshittification is due to the public being the product. The public does worse when the capitalist does better.

The profit motive is fundamentally a mixed bag.

[–] Pipoca 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Precisely three third party candidates have won any EC votes in the last century: George Wallace, Strom Thurmond and Robert La Follete. Follete won Wisconsin, and the other two unsurprising only won states in the deep south.

The likely "best case" scenario would be something like the 1912 election, which was essentially a three way race between former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt running third party against the incumbent Republican Taft, and the Democratic challenger, Willson.

Willson won 41.8% of the popular vote, and 81% of of EC vote. Taft got 23% of the vote, and managed to carry Vermont and Utah. Roosevelt got 27% of the vote, and carried 6 states. Eugene Debs didn't win a single state with his 6% of the vote - and its worth noting that the last time a third party candidate did as well as Debs was Perot, back in 96.

A majority of the country voted for a current or former Republican president, yet the election was a land slide for the Democrat in the EC.

Because of the structure of the EC, third parties are either irrelevant protest votes (such as the south protest voting for segregationists) or they blow up in your face. Why would this time be different?

Edit:

One significant problem with a pro-Palestinian third party revolt against Biden is that Democratic support for Palestinians isn't anywhere near high enough for a universal revolt against Biden on that issue. It'd just be begging for a repeat of 1912.

Netanyahu's poll numbers are pretty rock bottom among Democrats, but a majority of older Democrats see Israel as a legitimate state with an unfortunately far right current government that's going too far in their current war against a terrorist organization. They're not looking for a free Palestine that stretches from the river to the sea.

[–] Pipoca 1 points 11 months ago

Curb weight is the weight of the car itself, plus any gas, oil, etc it needs to function.

Gross weight is maximum weight the vehicle is designed to support. It's the curb weight plus the payload capacity.

If a car has a curb weight of 3k lbs and a gross weight of 4k, it doesn't weigh 4k lbs unless you have 1k lbs of passengers and cargo in it.

[–] Pipoca 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ish.

There's precisely zero skill involved in e.g. roulette.

Poker, fantasy football, and horse betting though, are influenced by skill. But they're all clearly still gambling.

The important thing in those 3 is that you're not betting against the house. You're betting against other players, and that you're the smart enough to come out on top even after the house takes their cut. Unless you're Nate Silver, though, chances are you're not the smartest person in the room.

[–] Pipoca 8 points 11 months ago

Better yet:

Give me $1, and I'll roll two six-sided dice. If you roll two sixes, I give you $20.

[–] Pipoca 8 points 11 months ago

The Onion started as a joke/satire newspaper in 1988. They stopped printing physical papers back in 2013, but you can still buy print collections of their articles.

Their articles range from satire about current events to World Death Rate Holds Steady At 100 Percent.

[–] Pipoca 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Inflation is calculated off of the cost of some particular basket of goods, and tends not to be even across those goods.

Yeah, if you eat a lot of corporate fast food, prices have skyrocketed recently. At a rate that far outpaces the local pizzeria and Chinese restaurant down the street, or the cost of chicken and eggs from the grocery store.

[–] Pipoca 2 points 11 months ago

Not particularly, but I can at least recognize that electing a third party practically requires getting rid of the electoral college.

If no one gets a majority of EC votes, the winner is picked by the house of representatives. So any third party president needs to get a majority of the vote in a majority of states to win. No third party candidate has ever come remotely close to that.

Under STAR, score, condorcet or IRV? It's unlikely but possible. With the EC? It's essentially impossible.

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