zkfcfbzr
@zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world
- Comment on How do Americans win their country back? 2 weeks ago:
That’s it, yes - each state gets as many electoral votes as it has congressmen, including senators. Most states award all of their electoral votes to whoever wins the state, with no proportionality to it at all - only two states (Nebraska and Maine, neither one large) do anything proportional with their votes.
With a system like that it’s easier to see how things can end up with the less popular candidate winning - they can, for example, sneak by with 50.1% of the vote in just enough states to win, but bomb it out with 20% of the vote in all the other states. That’s an extreme example specifically for the purpose of illustration, but less extreme versions of that are usually what happens.
The electoral votes also aren’t distributed entirely fairly - the number of electoral votes per person tends to be larger for less populated states. The less populated states also tend to be Republican states. So in a very real sense, each person’s vote counts for “more” in those states, and “less” in states with high populations. I don’t believe it’s really possible to fix this problem without vastly increasing the number of electoral votes, but congress currently has its size capped at 535 members for what I consider not very good reasons.
Yes, the whole system is trash from the ground up. But much of its structure is defined in the constitution itself, which is very difficult to change.
- Comment on How do Americans win their country back? 2 weeks ago:
Faithless electors have never once affected the outcome of a US election.
- Comment on How do Americans win their country back? 2 weeks ago:
This is not correct. The electoral college is exactly as susceptible to giving the win to the person with fewer votes as it was in 2000 and 2016. It’s also not an issue that’s due to any state in particular and is not an issue that can be solved by individual state action. The NPVIC would fix it but requires the cooperation of many states and is not in effect, and has stalled pretty hard in recent years.
- Comment on Is lemmy really any different from reddit? 3 weeks ago:
The main difference to me is the lack of a profit motive, which is the primary driver of enshittification. The federation helps harden it against things like abusive admins, since it’s dead simple to jump ship to another instance in that case, but honestly that’s pretty secondary to me.
- Comment on Suddenly firefox on ios shows ads on homescreen 1 month ago:
I dunno about the iOS version, but on the desktop and Android versions both you can also disable them directly from the new tab page itself.
- Comment on Anon is a tour guide at a museum 1 month ago:
Or a terrible one!
- Comment on Anon is a tour guide at a museum 1 month ago:
Maybe the museum exhibit was about his nephew?
- Comment on Palworld faces the difficult choice of whether to become a live-service game or stay buy-to-play, PocketPair’s CEO says 2 months ago:
Meanwhile I avoided playing because I wanted to wait until it was out of early access and had its full release… Seems like I’ll either never get that, or by the time I do, the game will already be dead
- Comment on Day 54 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots 2 months ago:
Could be that for sure - like I game a bit every day, but if I was doing this same project, all of my screenshots from the past three weeks would have been from Crash Bandicoot 4 - and the three weeks before that would all be from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2. I basically just beat a level a day. If other people were chiming in every day maybe I’d mix it up.
It could also be self-selection bias - like, I would never do a project like this because I know it would be super repetitive. Maybe they were willing to do it because they already played a hyper-varied selection?
- Comment on Day 54 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots 2 months ago:
You have more variety in the games you play than I have in the foods I eat
How many of these 54 have been unique? What are you doing that you play a different game almost every day?
- Comment on Is this a triangle? 2 months ago:
Would the southern shape here also qualify as a triangle?
What if you went the short way instead of the long way, creating the spherical triangle people usually use - then is the “outside” portion of the triangle itself another triangle?
- Comment on this is the view from my apartment 2 months ago:
I was curious about whether ChatGPT, if shown this image, would see the beach or the face. I found its response mildly amusing and thought other people might too.
- Comment on Seconds 2 months ago:
You’ve got it - it is a Newton-meter
- Comment on Seconds 2 months ago:
Muphry’s law at work - for both of us, actually. I looked it up (since with Ns the units no longer worked out between E = mc² and F = ma), and a joule is actually a Nm, a Newton-meter. And with that the units do work out correctly on both equations.
- Comment on Seconds 2 months ago:
A joule is 1 Newton / second, but those units do still agree
- Comment on This Google Photos popup 2 months ago:
It used to be even more annoying. Until a couple of months ago, after you tapped the No option, it would bring you to a full-screen screen where it asked you to select specific photos you’d like to backup anyways.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
- Comment on Eeeeee 4 months ago:
Kind of intentionally obtuse since they used eₑ as a variable and eₑₑ as another variable, and used (e-e) as an exponent a few times, which is basically the equivalent of multiplying by 1 in a fancy way.
The same integral written in a saner form is:
integral from -e^e to e^e of (integral from -e^e to e^e of (e^x*e^(-y^2-x^2)*e^-x)dx) dy
- Comment on What makes it “Legitimate Interest“? 4 months ago:
What does it say when you hover/click on the question mark next to it?
- Comment on How do you search for honest product recommendations? 5 months ago:
Sure, but it’s still a lot more reliable than something like the amazon review section, or a lengthy AI-generated article comparing the two products you just happened to google together that somehow manages to say nothing at all.
- Comment on How do you search for honest product recommendations? 5 months ago:
Honestly, I still just google for relevant reddit threads. Lemmy’s the only place I actively participate in, but this is one of the use cases it hasn’t been able to replace reddit for for me either yet.
- Comment on Solve a puzzle for me 6 months ago:
- Comment on geoengineering 6 months ago:
People are more than isolated tweets. He’s a man who’s made hundreds of public statements on climate change in the past, only one of which is contained in this tweet.
- Comment on suck it, math nerds 8 months ago:
Plus even that isn’t enough: 10/3 has an infinite decimal expansion (in base 10 at least) too, but if π = 10/3, you’d be able to find exact circumferences. Its irrationality is what makes it relevant to this joke.
A mathematician is also perfectly happy with answers like “4π” as exact.
Plus what’s to stop you from having a rational circumference but irrational radius?
Writing this, I feel like I might have accidentally proved your point.
- Comment on Stop Big Geology 8 months ago:
- Comment on I'm at a roulette table. I only bet on red. When I lose I triple my bet, when I win I restart. Is this a roulette strategy? 10 months ago:
Expanding a bit more on what everyone else says: This strategy works, as long as you never lose n times in a row, where n is the number of bets it takes to bet ALL of the money you currently have.
So the more money you bring with you, the longer you can make this strategy work - but the mote devastating it’ll be once you inevitably lose.
If you go with a doubling strategy instead of a tripling strategy, that means you have to lose floor(log₂(x+1)) times to realize an unrecoverable loss (you don’t have enough to make your next bet), or one more than that to lose absolutely everything. With your tripling strategy the calculation is floor(log₃(2*x+1)). x is the amount of money you had after the last “reset”.
So if you go to the casino with $100,000, your strategy will work as long as you don’t lose 11 times in a row - once you do, you’ve suffered your devastating unrecoverable loss. Every time your money triples you can last one more loss. Tripling your money is very difficult with this strategy, as most of the time when you win, it’s a small amount relative to what you’re holding - you need large losing streaks to make a real difference, and large losing streaks make reaching the threshold of an unrecoverable loss easier, obviously.
Others have said it already, but - you can use this to win in the short term if you have a lot of money and only want to win a little bit more. If you use this strategy in the long term you will lose everything.
- Comment on Is it normal that I feel pretty bad for ignoring homeless people begging for money? 11 months ago:
While some people do fake it or some people may actually be too lazy, on the whole attributing homelessness to personality flaws or moral failings is just a coping strategy for lots of people - lies they tell themselves to make the situation be despicable instead of pitiful. Most homeless people aren’t faking it, and most homeless people wouldn’t be homeless if they had any choice in the matter. Many of them are homeless due to poor or temporary circumstances, many others due to mental health issues combined with lacking a support system.
- Comment on Alright, where do I begin? 1 year ago:
Easy. Start with The Orville, then watch Galaxy Quest.
- Comment on Are there any websites that track upcoming cultural events, with a focus on sports and TV? 1 year ago:
Thanks, this is really cool and pretty close to what I wanted.
- Comment on Are there any websites that track upcoming cultural events, with a focus on sports and TV? 1 year ago:
By “less important” I just meant, for example, games that are in the beginning or middle of their respective league instead of the championship game - or shows for a series that are in the middle of a season, instead of a premiere or finale.
I know every game is vitally important to someone, or that every episode of a given show is important to a dedicated enough viewer - but season/series premieres/finales and sporting league championship games are definitely set apart from the rest. Lots of people watch the Baseball World Series finale games. A lot fewer watch every game leading up to it. Lots of people will watch the series finale for a popular TV show, even if they didn’t happen to catch every episode preceding it. That sort of thing.
I’m not too concerned about the cutoff for “popular”. If the site wants to tell me about the Curling world cup, then by all means.
