I’m upvoting just to counterbalance the people downvoting because they dislike someone else’s subjective opinion.

While that’s true, it’s worth remembering that congresspeople and senators see these results, and take them into account when deciding whether to support or oppose trump. If his approval rating gets low enough, other politicians will start seeing it as detrimental to their careers to support him. If just a few republican senators or congressmen start actively opposing him, his power will be significantly reduced. If it goes low enough they might even decide that it’s in their own best interest to either impeach or 25th him. The last two are a loong shot, but the point stands that terrible approval ratings can actually have tangible impact on things.

Saying you’re surprised something hasn’t happened is a long shot from encouraging that it’s done.

With the amount of unstable and desperate people out there I’m surprised nobody’s kidnapped Elon musks kids for ransom. I don’t wish his kids any harm, and don’t hope it happens, but I’m still a bit surprised that it hasn’t happened when you consider the amount of people out there with nothing to lose, questionable morals, and a big desire to make a lot of money.

The damaging kind necessarily carries enough energy to cause damage, what’s preventing it from being harvested?

Isn’t a major challenge of trying to surpass Voyager 1 that it had extremely good conditions for slingshotting off a lot of planets?

Or… is that the point when the parent (having now learned what it takes to make someone else independent) finally becomes an adult?

That’s not the point, it’s more like

• Fire an arrow at an enemy wearing full plate armour and carrying a crossbow
• Arrow bounces off armour
• “lol that’s so outdated” shoots you back with a crossbow

Sure, you could get lucky and hit a gap in the armour, but what you’re doing is wildly inefficient. As stated in the article, a bunch of the north korean missiles are detonating before reaching their targets, and they’re also very inaccurate. Just like in the arrow/armour analogy, it’s not like they’re useless and can’t cause harm, it’s that they’re wildly ineffective compared to modern missiles.

More importantly, the point is the state of russian (+ allies) manufacturing capabilities. If they were capable of fielding enough modern weapons, they wouldn’t be using outdated and inefficient ones. Sure, you can arm modern soldiers with swords and crossbows, and they can probably kill people with them. However, you’re going to choose firearms and grenades 10/10 times if you can.

In Norwegian we operate with “førstkommende” which translates more or less directly to “first-coming”. It’s extremely practical when planning dates, because you can always just say “Not the first-coming Thursday, but next Thursday”, or “On the first-coming Thursday”, and it’s completely unambiguous that you mean the first Thursday we encounter from the moment of speaking.

For the sake of efficiency, [let’s just revert to representative democracy]

I think that’s pretty reductionist to the argument I was making. I was arguing (with a long list of concrete examples) for why I think the system you’re outlining will either inevitably revert to representative democracy over time, or be incapable of working at a large (millions of people) scale. I’m not saying that none of what you said has merit, or that the form of representative democracy we work with today is the optimal system.

I think both of us (and anyone that has worked in a system where groups send delegates to super-groups to represent them) is familiar with the concept that our group decides on boundaries for what we think are acceptable decisions, and then gives our delegate a mandate to come to an agreement within those boundaries. The simple reason is that negotiations take extremely long if every iteration needs to go up and down the entire decision chain, so the negotiators (delegates) need some kind of flexibility to come to an agreement. I provided plenty of examples of situations where this is applicable.

To be honest, it seems a bit to me like you might have a slightly narrow view on what “representative democracy” entails. I would argue that once you have a delegate representing your interests with any kind of leeway to make decisions (that is, they’re actually a delegate, not just a messenger), you’re working with representative democracy. You can have a wide range of ways to decide who the delegate should be, how broad their mandate should be, and how long they function for. However, if the delegate has any kind of mandate outside of being a messenger, I think it stands that you’re electing (choosing one person from a group by consensus is a form of election) a representative to represent your interests, and thus have a representative democracy.

I’m the first to admit that power can corrupt, and that any representative democracy should have solid mechanisms in place to prevent the emergence of a “ruler class” (which most representative democracies today have in some form or other). Doing stuff like limiting the duration and number of terms is of course one option. At the end of the day, it largely boils down to a tradeoff between efficient management vs. direct involvement of everyone affected. Like you said, the most efficient decision making system is probably a dictatorship, but at that point we’ve tipped over into the opposite ditch (no involvement from the people affected).

For the record, I’m not the person downvoting you :)

Of course, neighborhoods do not exist in a vacuum - neighborhoods would want to work together to share resources and to collaborate to achieve greater goals, so confederations of neighborhoods could be formed. Each neighborhood could select one or more delegates to attend confederation meetings and speak on the behalf of the neighborhood, but not make decisions on behalf of them. Instead, each delegate would attend the confederation meeting, and meet with their neighborhood to bring them news of what was discussed at the delegation meeting. Then, in the neighborhood meetings, each neighborhood would come to their own decisions around what should happen at the confederation level, and a delegate - not necessarily the same person as before - would take those decisions, questions, concerns and discussion points back to the confederation, where either a consensus would be reached, or further discussion - which could again, be brought back to the neighborhood to share. In fact, rotating the role of delegate would be a really good idea, so that multiple people can get a better idea of the issues in the wider community and understanding of how the bottom-up power structure functions.

This sounds like a really good idea, but let me point something out: For the sake of efficiency, it would quickly make sense for most neighbourhoods to give their delegate a mandate of the type “We want something like this, but you can make minor changes to points X, Y, and Z in order to reach an agreement with the others”. For example: We want the new road to be a gravel road that’s about 2 m wide, but you can decide the exact quality of gravel, and whether the road is 1.5 m or 2.5 m in the meeting with the others. Whether we have light posts every 40 or 80 meters isn’t so important, as long as the road is well lit (just make sure the lights are strong enough if they’re widely spaced).

Further, once we get to scaling this up from the neighbourhood level to a scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, we’re going to get progressively more details and specialist tasks that need ironing out: Should there be import tariffs on any goods? If so, which? What should the tax be? Should it be progressive? If so, how should it scale? What should be the standard bridge-height on a highway (very useful to standardise if you want any kind of long-haul transport)? How many students should there be per teacher in classrooms at different grade levels, and what kind of education should we require from those teachers? etc. etc. etc. This absolutely massive number of questions that need answering, will in practice demand that your delegate receives some kind of mandate to make decisions within the limits of what you’ve decided.

The larger the society in question, the wider those limits will need to be in order for the society to be able to reach any kind of consensus within a reasonable time frame. If every detail needs to go neighbourhood meeting (O(100 people) => neighbourhood confederation (O(10 000) people) => community meeting (O(100 000) people) => national meeting (O(1 000 000) people) and back for every iteration, the kids are going to be grown before you’ve decided whether a 5th grade teacher needs minimum high-school level or university level mathematics in order to teach science classes, or even before you’ve decided on whether this should be something you coordinate at the national level or not for that matter.

Once you start giving your delegates a mandate to make decisions within some pre-determined limits… you’ve reinvented representative democracy.

Well, in the sense that Orbans primary political views are “We should build a far-right nationalist dictatorship/oligarchy led by Viktor Orban”, Magyar does actually disagree with his core political views.

How do you propose, in practice, to ensure that every citizen has a practical opportunity to weigh in on all the individual things affecting them, without giving them the option to have a representative?

Off the bat, I can think of a myriad of reasons this becomes prohibitively difficult for anything more than a few dozen people, but I’m honestly interested in hearing about a solution that could even conceivably work at a district (tens of thousands of people) not to speak of societal (millions) or international (billions) level.

Oh, definitely. But that’s also where the “upfront” part could have saved them: If they had contacted you and been direct about “hey, I’m selling utilities now, would you be interested in switching?”, then followed up with “on another note, it’s been a while, wanna grab dinner and catch up a bit?” That would have been a completely different story.

I would actually prefer that they’re upfront about contacting me because they need a favour, and then using that as an opening to catch up. If they first spend 30 min catching up before jumping to “btw, could you help me out with this” it gives the feeling that they only did the catching up to get me to help them. When it’s the other way around, it feels like they genuinely want to catch up a bit, and used the favour as an excuse/opportunity to contact me to catch up. A personal favourite is if someone wants help with something in the house and asks if I want to come over to help them out and then we can get some beers and a pizza afterwards. Having something to do together can make it a lot easier to pick up the conversation with someone you haven’t met for a long time.

It’s completely fair to ask a favour of an old friend, I’ve both asked and been asked of favours from people I haven’t spoken to in years. However, I think you should be upfront about it, and not act like you’re trying to get in touch for other reasons. Something like “Hey, it’s been a while, but I just came across XYZ and wondered if you could give me a hand?” is completely fine IMO.

Isn’t the Chinese army in fact subordinate to (or a branch of) the CCP though? I mean, it’s a one-part system, so it doesn’t make much of a difference, but I seem to remember that the army is in fact formally controlled by the party, not the government.

PS. Note: I’m not at all sure, just drawing off an old, possibly incorrect, memory.

• Attack and bomb a country during ongoing negotiations.
• Wipe out a truckload of their air defences
• Use air superiority to bomb thousands of civilians
• Propose ceasefire without having achieved any political goals at all
• The country immediately starts rebuilding their decimated air defences to prevent you from bombing them during the ongoing negotiations
• shockedpicatchu.jpg
• this_is_a_provocation.wav

Best I can do is three fiddy :/

Accidental means you didn’t have consent.

Dude… at this point you’re just looking for something to be triggered by. If I open the kitchen door and it hits my SO standing on the other side, that’s not domestic violence, it’s an accident. If my hand gets caught in her hair while we’re messing around that’s not non-consensual hair pulling and sexual assault, it’s an accident.

When accidents happen, you apologise, accept the apology, and keep having fun together.

I’ve found myself sitting alone in my car in an abandoned parking lot just listening to some music and wondering what I’m doing with my life. The strange thing is that, by all objective measures, I have a really good life. I have an SO that I love more than anything in the world, and which is fantastic to me, I have parents and siblings that I have great relationships to, I have a job that I really enjoy, and I have good friends. Despite all that, I sometimes get this need to just “disappear” for a little while and isolate myself while listening to sad music. I don’t really enjoy it either, it’s more like some kind of cathartic feeling, like theres some kind of sadness in me that occasionally just wells up and needs to be given some space. It’s quite rare (maybe once a year or something on that order), but it does happen. It’s actually really nice to see that this is something relatable - I’ve never really spoken to anybody about it.