https://investors.yum.com/news-events/financial-releases/news-details/2023/Yum-Brands-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-Results-and-Increases-Dividend/default.aspx

We repurchased 10 million shares totaling $1.2 billion at an average price per share of $119.

They are just greedy. They have the money, but giving the money to the rich is evidently more important.

https://cwa-union.org/stock-buybacks-hurt-workers

What holds youtube from blocking all videos to addblock users just as other sites do?

It’s a constant game of cat and mouse, an arms race till the end of time. You can’t block videos from ad-block users if you can’t tell which users are using adblock and which are not.

I don’t understand why self hosted videos aren’t more popular

It’s quite complicated technologically, and requires quite a lot of storage space. Viewers only go where the creators go, and the creators have no reason to go to someplace that is more of a pain in the ass to host videos.

Shit like that is also a far, far better use of airspace/resources

None of us should ever have to go back. We need to vote them out of office like our lives depend on it. Because they very much may be if the right wing decides to go full Gilead.

It’s not a perfect replacement, and I never claimed as such. But for most people’s needs, gimp is perfectly capable.

That, and Gimp is quite a capable photo editing tool.

Homelander is the type to side with oil.

The next budget is due in a month, so there’s a good chance he’ll be gone after that.

So the lettuce has a nonzero chance of outlining his office.

They’re going to blame democrats for not voting for a moderate republican, even though republicans are the ones who can’t get their act together and elect somebody who isn’t pro-sedition.

Not only that, but there have been straight up death threats sent to republican from republicans over the house speaker circus.

So there will be no speaker.

That, and generally republicans proudly support the electoral college, a system that intentionally weighs votes unequally, and destroys any chance of 3rd party candidates. So it is double ironic.

While the moon has basically no atmosphere, I don’t think it would matter much. Plenty of lunar dust would get blown around by the force of the engines, and the mass or that dust would contribute. Beyond that, the exhaust itself has a lot of force, and is probably plenty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HQfauGJaTs

Look at the Apollo missions taking off, it’s quite violent for the surround area.

Not sure I follow the “FPTP with layers” argument. After each layer, the votes go to the next choice rather than being wasted.

Round one is a check for a +50% majority. If there is no majority, then it eliminates the lowest voted candidate and moves on.

/\

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This first half is identical in function to FPTP voting. So ranked choice is basically FPTP but repeated a couple times with eliminations. Like I said, it is still definitely better than FPTP, but it has the possibility of vote splitting, albeit to a much smaller degree. A strategic voter wouldn’t vote for their first pick first, but would instead vote for the closest candidate to them that has a high chance of winning. And that’s the hole we are currently stuck in as is.

but ballot counts could definitely be published as they come in (N ballots with order ABCD, M ballots with order DBA, etc)

If there are 5 candidates in a given race, something that is rather common, then there would be 120 different orders. That’s not data that is easily digestible or auditable. And that number gets exponentially worse the more candidates there are, and ideally we should have a good number of candidates to choose from to make sure we get the best one.

Ranked is definitely superior to our current system. But it still has its flaws, which is why I didn’t mention it.

The biggest flaw is with counting. Ranked isn’t a purely additive process like STAR or approval, so you only ever get the results once they’re complete rather than as you count. And that goes a long way towards trust in the system and auditing.

Ranked is also basically just FPTP, but with several layers. So the same flaws in FPTP are present within Ranked, just a bit muted.

But like I said, even ranked is better than the shit show we currently have.

No, just the government. If no new spending bill passes it will be pretty not great.

The two party system is the natural result of FPTP voting. We desperately need to switch to STAR or approval.

But how are their parents going to get them to work? /s

That is basically what is going on. We do technically have representation in the same way La Croix has taste.

Actually, the only thing you can really call “apartheid” in Israel…

That’s not true.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

You might complain about the property decisions from decades before that

Yeah. Those decisions are exactly what people are talking about when people call it apartheid. And those decisions have never stopped, it’s been happening ever since the Israeli-Palistinian conflict started.

When somebody comes in, says they own your home, and then try to kick you out because of your race/religion, that is apartheid.

but the tenants agreed to the rent terms in the early 90s,

“Agreed” is a strong word to use when the alternative is homelessness.

so framing this as “ethnic cleansing” is pretty nuts.

It is the intentional homogenization of a region, dispelling people from their homes that they’ve lived in since their birth. That is by definition ethnic cleansing.

More or less, yeah