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5 votes
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Spain: Will a snap election spell the end for Pedro Sanchez?
6 votes -
Astronaut (YouTube Toy)
12 votes -
How a Slovakian neo-Nazi got elected. In 2013, Marian Kotleba won a shock victory in regional elections. Four years later, he was voted out in a landslide. But now he’s running for president.
6 votes -
Private Mossad for hire - Inside an effort to influence American elections, starting with one small-town race
7 votes -
Keep calm and carry on: Managing electricity reliability
6 votes -
John Galton wanted Libertarian paradise in ‘Anarchapulco.’ He got bullets instead.
9 votes -
Venturing into Sacred Space | Archetype of the Magician
4 votes -
The neo-nazi podcaster next door
7 votes -
The founders created the electoral college to prevent a foreign-influenced candidate from winning—it didn't stop Trump, so let's scrap it
6 votes -
Virginia AG admits blackface photo as chaos deepens
8 votes -
Russian-style kleptocracy is infiltrating America
12 votes -
JavaScript toy that demonstrated a model of how demographics cluster
A while back I saw a cool link on Tildes, I think it was before the save feature was implemented, which is why I've lost it. It was an article with an accompanying JavaScript toy to demonstrate...
A while back I saw a cool link on Tildes, I think it was before the save feature was implemented, which is why I've lost it. It was an article with an accompanying JavaScript toy to demonstrate the point: if a system starts clustered, equality alone won't bring the system to equilibrium because the system has momentum. You have to swing hard in the other direction to get to actual equilibrium. (i.e. it was a defense of affirmative action.)
Basically, you set some conditions meant to represent demographics. The people were represented by little squares in the simulation. The conditions were things like "start X% concentrated" and "squares must have 2/3/4 different colored neighbor squares."
I think it was on Medium, but I'm not sure, and I can't for the life of me find it again even after scouring Tildes, Reddit, and Google. Anyone know what I'm talking about and where I can find it again?
4 votes -
Salad Fingers 11: Glass Brother
9 votes -
Paul Manafort in Ukraine
4 votes -
How did Arron Banks afford Brexit?
9 votes -
Interesting Wikipedia page mega-thread (post Wikipedia links here)
As suggested in this thread. Post links to interesting wikipedia pages and maybe a tldr with them.
19 votes -
Brexit: Game theory suggests we may be headed for a no-deal Brexit. The parties are trying to play two different versions of the prisoner’s dilemma; to agree, they need to pick one.
10 votes -
The claim that democracy fares better in the West than in Africa is a fallacy
7 votes -
The alt-right playbook: The card says moops
18 votes -
The plot against George Soros - How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory
12 votes -
Still simmering: Freedom of navigation in the South China Sea
3 votes -
What would happen if the US House of Representatives decided to investigate sitting Senators?
The current US Senate majority continues to support the president. However, the current president may have been compromised by the Russian government. The connections that several senators have to...
The current US Senate majority continues to support the president. However, the current president may have been compromised by the Russian government.
The connections that several senators have to Russia (Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, to name two) raise the very real possibility that the current Republican majority in the Senate owes its existence to Russian help.
The FBI, a renewed Republican target, has suggested as much in briefings given to that same U.S. Congress.
What are the chances of the House investigating sitting menbers of Senate, and what twists and turns might occur should it happen?
9 votes -
What are your thoughts on Reddit's r/movies subreddit ?
Personally, I strongly dislike it. Every aspect of every film is way overblown there. If there's a funny scene in a movie, they LITERALLY die laughing and wake their whole neighbourhood up. If...
Personally, I strongly dislike it. Every aspect of every film is way overblown there.
If there's a funny scene in a movie, they LITERALLY die laughing and wake their whole neighbourhood up.
If there's a scene that is in the slightest bit sad, they're going to cry their eyes out for months.
If there's a movie that's decently good, then it's an absolute masterpiece and the best movie of the decade.
And so on... Everything is always really exaggerated.
On top of that, there's always the circlejerk hivemind aspect. Threads are closed after 6 months, so the whole discussion about the film is divided between many threads, but because every thread is small and new, you often get the same fluff comments.
For more popular flims, it is the absolute worst. With half the thread being just funny quotes from the movie with no additional commentary or anything valuable, yet having thousands upon thousands of upvotes. It's kind of sad.
I used to go to IMDb boards, –which, admittedly, had their own issues– but they were still pretty useful for discussion. And shutting people up wasn't as easy as it is on Reddit, so the opinions there were much more varied. However, since they shut them down, Reddit is the closest thing I've found. Moviechat.org is supposed to be a replacement to the IMDb boards, but it's pretty inactive.
So, even though I kind of despise r/movies, I'm sort of forced to use them. But reading it makes me somewhat bitter.
What about you?
13 votes -
Macron and French centrists don’t have answers as “Yellow Vest” protests head for tenth week
8 votes -
How the UN migration pact got trolled
5 votes -
A basic analysis of the 2018 US midterm elections suggests it was less gerrymandered than other recent elections for the House of representatives
Now that the ballots for the 2018 House of representatives election have been counted, how badly was the vote gerrymandered? Gerrymandering is the creating of political districts to maximize the...
Now that the ballots for the 2018 House of representatives election have been counted, how badly was the vote gerrymandered?
Gerrymandering is the creating of political districts to maximize the number of representatives a political grouping gets per vote.
The degree of gerrymandering can be approximated by calculating the difference between the outcome of a proportional voting system and the actual districted representatives each party gains.
Here's a look at the last 5 elections to the House of representatives.
In this congress, the Democrats have 235 representatives, the Republicans have 199 and there's 1 other representative.
Voter turnout was 50,3%, the highest for a midterm election since 1914.
The Democrats got 53,5% of the popular vote and 54,0% of the seats. The Republicans got 44,8% of the vote and 46,0% of the seats. Others got 1,8% of the vote and a single seat.
Since the Republicans are no longer getting vastly outsized representation, is gerrymandering dead?
If the US would have had a proportional voting system, 7 of the 435 seats would have been distributed differently in 2018.
The Democrats would have had 3 fewer representatives, the Republicans would have had 4 fewer and others would have had those 7 seats.
Here are the similar figures for the last five elections.
Year Votes per seat ('000) Dem diff. Rep diff. Other diff. 2010 199 -3 +18 -15 2012 281 -11 +27 -16 2014 179 -10 +24 -14 2016 295 -15 +27 -12 2018 261 +3 +4 -7 The change from getting 27 seats "wrong" in 2016 to 7 seats "wrong" this year is large and changes the historic trend.
Turns out that higher turnout led to more accurate representation in 2018. Who would have guessed.
(There are many other additional possible explanations for why this has changed too)
If we just look at the two major parties, what does this mean in real terms?
Here's an overview of the average difference in the number of voters the Democrats have needed for each seat they actually got in the last five elections compared to the Republicans.
Year Additional Dem voters for a seat 2010 8,6% 2012 19,4% 2014 16,6% 2016 21,4% 2018 0,8% There are other ways of trying to engineer specific election results.
This basic overview only looks at people who actually vote. Therefore it obviously doesn't consider those who are prevented from voting in the election process, whether that's from voting requirements, accessibility of polling places, registration requirements, etc.
It will be interesting to see what happens in 2020.
Is this a trend that'll continue?
Is it just a blip because those gerrymandering haven't been able to predict what party voters vote for in today's political climate?
What about turnout?
15 votes -
Ontario is under one-man rule. Who will stop Doug Ford?
13 votes -
The holes in the map: England's unregistered land
6 votes -
Is trade in turmoil a change for justice? The global free trade system is being battered like never before. Can any good come of it?
7 votes -
A 1950s TV show had a fear-mongering conman named Trump who wanted to build a wall.
7 votes -
The noisy dispute over the meaning of populism is more than just an academic squabble – it’s a crucial argument about what we expect from democracy
12 votes -
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps firing back at her haters
19 votes -
What America can learn from the fall of the Roman republic (Interview with historian Edward Watts about his book "Mortal Republic")
10 votes -
This Little-Known Libertarian Training School Is Making Federal Judges More Conservative
11 votes -
A most nuclear year: What did we learn about nuclear weapons, deterrence, and arms control in 2018?
6 votes -
Andre the Giant Has a Posse (Viral '90s street art campaign)
4 votes -
The question for France: Where do the Yellow Vests go from here?
8 votes -
Eyes Left (Podcast)
5 votes -
The green big deal
6 votes -
Test your knowledge of American incarceration
9 votes -
Warning to Democrats: Most Americans against US getting more politically correct
13 votes -
Mark Blyth Global Trumpism
5 votes -
We know Michael Flynn lied to the FBI. But why?
7 votes -
A.G. Underwood Announces Stipulation Dissolving Trump Foundation Under Judicial Supervision, With AG Review Of Recipient Charities
11 votes -
Base Culture
3 votes -
Economic Update: Cooperation Jackson: A Closer Look
3 votes -
My Dad's Friendship With Charles Barkley
9 votes -
The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek
7 votes -
What happens to charities when the end goal is to become redundant?
6 votes