thirtyfold8625

https://faq.usps.com/s/article/How-is-Undeliverable-and-Misdelivered-Mail-Handled#report_return_misdelivered

This video suggests that the human population will stabilize at an appropriate level for a given environment, and that it can rebound quickly if that’s necessary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-oVwcDg5Uc

https://www.comicagile.net/comic/conways-law/

https://www.comicagile.net/?s=conway's+law&post_type=comic

I’m interested in whether this information was already taken into account when people were editing https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ and https://www.privacyguides.org/en/mobile-browsers/

Ah, I didn’t realize that “Con” meant “conservative”! I thought “Con” meant “scam”.

How do you know this is a con?

It is surely good to occasionally test whether unforeseen events will cause disruption. Do you know how often such a test is performed?

For example, nuclear weapons systems are tested occasionally, and seeing a failure is probably important information.

Giving moderators practice with moderating will probably improve their performance when they are actually needed.

There are things that cannot be communicated by reading alone.

Zen is said to be based on a “special transmission outside scriptures”

I suspect that actually looking at someone (preferably while you’re together in the same room) lets you understand things better.

The balance of power shifted in February 2021 when New Ideas (Nuevas Ideas), the party Bukele had helped found in 2017, and allied members of GANA captured 56 seats in elections for the 84-seat legislature. That two-thirds majority meant that Bukele had the legislative support he needed to replace both the country’s attorney general and five of the Supreme Court’s justices. With some of the checks on his power minimized, Bukele began to take an increasingly authoritarian approach to addressing some of El Salvador’s pressing problems.

I suggest making some reforms to state institutions before someone else gains control of at least two thirds of the political power. Having support from two thirds of a legislative body is sufficient to completely rewrite a constitution in many cases, so the only question is whether a “supermajority” can reach some consensus.

I personally don’t have a lot of hope for peaceful reform, given what I see from https://ballotpedia.org/Results_for_ranked-choice_voting_(RCV)_and_electoral_system_ballot_measures,_2024

I suspect that, when certain election methods are used, it’s possible to make your preferred candidate lose if you express support for them:

instant-runoff voting is also sometimes vulnerable to a paradoxical strategy of ranking a candidate higher to make them lose, due to instant-runoff voting failing the monotonicity criterion.

I can imagine that someone’s best choice can be to entirely abstain from voting in some situations. I don’t think it’s ethical to force people to vote if doing so would harm them.

Making a law about an obligation to vote will probably make future electoral reform harder (since people will have to figure out / get confused about whether a change will make it more likely for them to land in court), and making it hard to change bad systems is surely a bad thing.

Incentivizing someone to show up and just cast a blank ballot could make it harder to detect fraud. For example, it might be convenient to dispose of ballots that someone intended to misuse by mixing them in with the legitimate ballots, and having more blank ballots that are actually legitimate would make it less clear whether something illegal has happened.

“Voting in all federal elections in Australia is a legal obligation for citizens aged 18 and over”, but there isn’t a very steep penalty for not doing so (and you might even get your name published in a newspaper, which some people might value for its own sake):

Failure to vote in the federal election initially results in a $20 fine as per section 245 of the Act, which can grow if left unpaid to a $220 fine and court fees.

Having early voting and making the “main” voting day be a holiday for a large number of people seems like a good idea, since that makes voting easier for people who want to vote. Hounding people who don’t want to vote (regardless of their reasoning) seems like a worse idea.