Schulze is great, but good luck explaining how it works to my mother.

Schulze is good for elections at STEM organizations. For the general public, something like approval voting or STAR are better.

How many net new housing units did they build from 2011 to 2021?

Or, better yet, we could just build more units.

They tried banning landlords in specific neighborhoods in Rotterdam.

It lead to gentrification.

The people who bought the units, on average, were more wealthy than existing renters, but less wealthy than existing owner-occupiers. Basically, it forced poor people out of that neighborhood, and replaced them with middle class people.

There’s a lot of reasons why buying a house is expensive. In many places, it’s less because of corporate landlords, and more due to population growth outpacing housing growth.

If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

Crosswords have clues going across and down.

The words just use common letters so they’re things puzzle creators wish were real words. They’re not currently words.

Not particularly, but I can at least recognize that electing a third party practically requires getting rid of the electoral college.

If no one gets a majority of EC votes, the winner is picked by the house of representatives. So any third party president needs to get a majority of the vote in a majority of states to win. No third party candidate has ever come remotely close to that.

Under STAR, score, condorcet or IRV? It’s unlikely but possible. With the EC? It’s essentially impossible.

Important words undergo sound changes all the time.

For example, in Germanic languages, Proto Indoeuropean p sounds consistently morphed into f sounds. So the PIE word pods became Proto Germanic fots became English foot. pəter became fader became father. The preposition per became fur became for.

Lox is mostly unusual in that it didn’t have any major sound changes affect it in Germanic languages.

The idea of a Pokémon clone isn’t protectable, but existing Pokémon are.

You can make a Pokémon clone with entirely novel monsters, but if a judge thinks they look too much like an existing Pokémon they’re gonna have a problem.

Merriam Webster is a descriptive dictionary. They don’t tell you how words “should” be used, they say how words are used.

Using literally as an intensifier goes back literal centuries. The earliest written citation we’ve found of that usage goes back to 1769. It can be found everywhere from Dickens to Brontë.

It’s also hardly the first word to go on a similar path towards becoming an intensifier. Very originally meant “genuine”, really meant “in fact”, absolutely meant “completely”, etc.

But who complains about sentences like “I was really bored to death”, or “I was absolutely rooted to the ground”? Does saying “it’s very cold” just mean “it is a genuine fact that it is cold”?

Literally still means what it means. You can’t use literally to mean “yellow”, for example. People aren’t generally confused when they come across the word.

There’s a pretty good Wikipedia article on it

As mentioned, it’s the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. It’s been used by Palestians since at least the mid 60s in a number of different chants, e.g. “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free/Arab/Islamic” (technically, the latter two are “from the water to the water” because otherwise the Arabic doesn’t rhyme).

Hamas’s charter says

Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea

While Netanyahu’s far-right Likud party’s 1977 manifesto says

between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty

It’s historically been somewhat controversial, with Zionists typically saying that it calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and/or the expulsion of Jews from the area. CNN fired a political commentator for saying it ~5 years back, and it’s regulated as hate speech in some places in Europe. Most pro Palestinian activists think that’s ridiculous, but it’s worth being aware of.

This is specifically talking about mitigation for highly pathogenic avian influenza. HPAI kills chickens fairly quickly, so to contain the spread and minimize the risk of zoonotic spread to people, they kill every bird on every property that it’s detected on.

This is one of those situations where no one thinks it’s a great solution, it’s just a pragmatic one that minimizes the risk towards workers while quickly depopulating the barn. The problem is that this is one of the cheapest and least humane ways to depopulate a barn, and shouldn’t be allowed. We should insist that barns allow humane depopulation, or at least less inhumane methods.

The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight. The good thing with that is that we use much less power overnight than we do during the day.

If you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.

Alternatively, you build a nuclear or gas plant sized to overnight usage and run them 24/7. Then, you build way smaller batteries to handle dispatchability and smoothing demand over the course of a day. Nuclear is good for baseline power, and doesn’t come with the environmental costs of a gas plant. It has a niche.