That’s a fairly major power. The question was about a small thing as a power.
Like the ability to know what judges and politicians are corrupt… From reading the newspaper and their court filings, because they already tell everyone that they’re corrupt, like all the time. It’s not hidden, it’s just next to impossible to get people to care about it. Or to get the right people to care about it.
Like, look at Clarence Thomas, the fucker is corrupt as all hell, and since the Republicans don’t care, nothing can really be done. Because it’s technically not illegal, and Republicans are blocking any form of Ethics reform.
I’d take things a bit further than just communism. I’d imagine a world where farm and factory are all largely automated and publicly owned.
Anyone who wants a role has one, but no one is punished for not. Housing and food are guaranteed to all, as are most small luxuries.
Want to make the world a better place? Do it. Science and Tech would be fully funded. Want to sit around and just sort of live? Sure, you get UBI.
The only work places not owned by the workers would be the ones owned by government. If it’s an essential service, it’s government owned and government operated. If it’s for fun, then sure, let some people get together and work toward making something fun.
Another change; copyright and patent law would be maxed at 14 years. That number has actually been shown to be when 97% of the profit is made on most copyrighted work. This one change would open up so much potential for public domain creativity.
I’d allow for continuing trademark of character, if they were in continuing use. i.e. a sort of serialization exemption to the copyright limits. If the author keeps putting out new material, they get to keep a form of control over their works, but if they stop, then it’s all public domain.
I may have put a lot of thought into this over the years, and parts would still likely need to be adjusted during implementation.
Not yet, Several are in active development.
This is the one I’m waiting for. @ArtemisApp
American cheese is just normal, cheddar style cheese but with the addition of some sodium citrate.
Sodium citrate is a fun little food chemical that give the cheese a slight citrus bite, but more importantly acts as an emulsifier. It keeps the oil and water inside the cheese bonded together. This means the cheese melts and then never becomes greasy.
You can abuse this. You can make a super creamy cheese sauce for a higher brow mac and cheese by using some shredded cheese, a couple slices of American, and a few splashes of the pasta water.
Absolute best would be STAR.
A good runner-up would be Approval.
Ranked choice is probably the worst option for a poll like this…
I’m betting if you ran this exact poll under different rules, say multiple choice allowing unlimited selection, you’d get a vastly different answer.
This is because Ranked Choice is a horrible voting system. If First Past the Post wasn’t so bad, RCV would have the title of worst system ever created.
Hell, the site you linked even has a “pros and cons” section where they even admit to the massive problems with the system but then hand wave them away.
Ballot exhaustion alone is a showstopper. They pretend that the voter “just didn’t choose someone popular enough to win” when the reality is much more insidious. The most common form of ballot exhaustion is when your 2nd or 3rd choice is eliminated in the first round, and then your 1st choice is eliminated in a later round.
And because of how votes are counted, if you had put your 2nd choice in the 1st slot, they could have won the election, even if they were not your literal favorite.
Up to 20% of ballots cast in RCV elections are thrown out due to ballot exhaustion. That’s enough votes to massively shift who wins or loses.
The basic truth here is that RCV is good at one thing. Preventing fringe candidates from spoiling an election between two front-runners. It can prevent another Bush v Gore, but that’s it.
Also, in real world use, it’s fucked up several elections.
Due to the need for centralized counting, the 2021 NYC mayoral race had 130,000 extra votes that turned out to have been test ballots that should never have been in the same location as the actual election ballots.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/6/29/22556830/nyc-board-of-election-pulls-preliminary-mayoral-results
Centralize counting and an overly complex system also resulted in the wrong winner being chosen in California. The wrong winner was sworn in and served in the position for a full month before the error was found.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Alameda-County-admits-tallying-error-in-17682520.php
There are vastly better options than RCV.
You can read up on them here. https://www.starvoting.org/
And here, https://electionscience.org/
To be fair, Facebook employs a man named Joel Kaplan as their head of Global Policy. Formerly their head of US Policy, Formerly a Bush White House Toady.
Kaplan is the reason who all the right-wing conspiracy websites pretending to be news orgs weren’t banned from Facebook news feeds. He personally exempted them all from community standards and Facebook terms of service about lying and shit. He then ordered left leaning news to be scrutinized more heavily.
He’s been stuffing the ranks of Facebook’s middle and upper management with loyalty tested conservatives.
Kaplan also refused to make changes to the algorithm that would have helped fight hate speech, because anger and outrage drive higher engagement.
He’s also ignoring at least three ongoing racial cleansings that are being actively powered by Facebook, because they’re happening in countries that are not the US.
So in a way, it really is a vehicle for the fascist control of the population, or at least a fascist friendly media stream.
They already said quite clearly that they’re transphobic. The “I don’t think children should undergo gender or sex transition” is almost verbatim an anti-trans talking point.
Here’s some actual research on the subject of trans people, including trans youth, and suicide risk. With citations;
Bauer, et al., 2015: Transition vastly reduces risks of suicide attempts, and the farther along in transition someone is the lower that risk gets.
de Vries, et al, 2014: A clinical protocol of a multidisciplinary team with mental health professionals, physicians, and surgeons, including puberty suppression, followed by cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery, provides trans youth the opportunity to develop into well-functioning young adults. All showed significant improvement in their psychological health, and they had notably lower rates of internalizing psychopathology than previously reported among trans children living as their natal sex. Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population.
Gorton, 2011 (Prepared for the San Francisco Department of Public Health): “In a cross-sectional study of 141 transgender patients, Kuiper and Cohen-Kittenis found that after medical intervention and treatments, suicide fell from 19 percent to zero percent in transgender men and from 24 percent to 6 percent in transgender women.)”
Murad, et al., 2010: “Significant decrease in suicidality post-treatment. The average reduction was from 30% pretreatment to 8% post treatment.”
De Cuypere, et al., 2006: Rate of suicide attempts dropped dramatically from 29.3% to 5.1% after receiving medical and surgical treatment among Dutch patients treated from 1986-2001.
UK study: "Suicidal ideation and actual attempts reduced after transition, with 63% thinking about or attempting suicide more before they transitioned and only 3% thinking about or attempting suicide more post-transition.
Heylens, 2014: Found that the psychological state of transgender people “resembled those of a general population after hormone therapy was initiated.”
Perez-Brumer, 2017: “These findings suggest that interventions that address depression and school-based victimization could decrease gender identity-based disparities in suicidal ideation.”
Here’s a study showing that children know what gender they prefer and don’t change their minds on it.
Here’s another meta study on trans youth who received gender-affirming care, and who saw a decrease in suicide risk.
What OP doesn’t seem to want to understand is that Left vs Right is Up vs Down.
The origins of Left vs Right as terms come from the days of the French Revolution. There was a vote called to ascertain the power of the King. Those who wanted to grant the King an Absolute Veto were asked to sit on the right side of the speaker’s podium, those who were against, or wanted no king at all, were asked to sit on the left. There were many such votes.
Thus left vs right was born, the left represented the power of the people, and the right represented the power of the nobility.
Then conservatism was created, replacing birthright nobility for those who were merely rich and powerful.
Right and Left then became shorthand in the press for Conservatism vs those with more Democratic ideals, be it communist, socialists, or merely those who believed in taxing the rich and using that money to improve the lives of everyone. The press in Europe used the terms from almost the beginning, but it took a while for those terms to reach America.
Sadly, the Right figured out pretty quickly how to suppress and demonize the Left. They also figured out how to turn hatred to their advantage, to expand the ranks of the Right Wing supporters at the expense of the Left. Because you don’t personally need to be super rich if the people you’re taught to hate are super poor.
The thing is, the Left cannot abide attacks on those people. Which is why minority and lgbt+ rights are such a big part of the platform. Because those people are in fact part of The People, and the Left is the Power of the People. The goal is to lift everyone up, to protect everyone equally under the law.
After all, as Frank Wilhoit said;
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”
You would think that, but no. It’s specifically the Red Cross organization. Which is an international organization.
It can also be used by militaries and such for Geneva Convention complaint medical use, such as search and rescue operations or medical centers and such.
That’s it. Those are the only legally allowed uses. And even Geneva Convention complaint medical use is often run by the international organization.