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Equality of everyone under the law is an end, not a means. That's not completely synonymous with consistency, but it's not going to be achieved without a pretty high level of consistency.

No, because the slave states got to count slaves as 3/5 of a person for EC purposes.

If the president was elected by popular vote, slaves would count as zero because they obviously weren't going to let them vote.


That's independent of the EC. They could have given the slave owners 3/5ths of a vote for each slave without the EC. And obviously that part of the system is no longer in operation, whereas the part Democrats complain about is that each state gets +2 electoral votes regardless of its population.

Which nominally gives slightly more weight to the lower population rural states, but that isn't even the primary consequence of the EC. The primary consequence is that it gives significantly more weight to swing states, which by definition don't favor any given party.


> They could have given the slave owners 3/5ths of a vote for each slave without the EC

Yes, I suppose if you could accept the idea of a ludicrous hypothetical alternative that would have zero chance in reality of being implemented you can contort yourself enough to ignore that the EC is part of the compromise on slavery that forms the Constitution.


It's ludicrous by modern standards because the premise of owning other people is ludicrous by modern standards. Giving states more votes based on them having people there who can't actually vote is exactly the same amount of ludicrous, but that's also the part that isn't there anymore.

The primary thing the electoral college does in modern day is allow -- not even require -- states to allocate all of their state's voting power to the candidate that wins the majority of the state. With the result that they mostly do that and then states like New York and Texas get ignored in Presidential elections because nobody expects them to flip and getting 10% more of the vote is worthless when it doesn't flip the state.

Ironically it's the partisans who are effectively disenfranchising the people in their own state. If the states that go disproportionately for one party didn't want to be ignored then all they'd have to do is allocate their electoral votes proportionally according to what percent of the vote the candidate got in that state. Then getting 10% more of the vote in a big state would be as many electoral votes as some entire states. But the non-swing states are by definition controlled by one party and then they're willing to screw over their own population to prevent the other party from getting any of that state's electoral votes.


It would be fine if the Trump administration didn't show a systematic and pervasive contempt for due process, the rule of law and facts.

I don't know what you're talking about, we have the best facts. No one has facts like we do. You've never seen facts like these.

And if you don't like these facts, we have alternate facts in the back room.


Retirement is going to be effectively pay-as-you-go no matter what you do (at least until we invent much more sophisticated robots).

You can't stockpile nurses and save them up for when you retire.

If you save money or invest in financial instruments, you're still relying on labor from subsequent generations and if there aren't enough of them, higher labor costs will eat up everything you saved.

The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.


>You can't stockpile nurses and save them up for when you retire.

But you can?

It's called paying nurses more to encourage greater supply...


> The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.

Indeed, and we didn’t do that. We invested in issuing debt and other non production capacity efforts.


In what sense was anyone in the US forced to get a Covid shot? I know many acquaintances who never did.

> Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.

Primary sources aren't completely disallowed, but they are definitely discouraged.


So, not, not allowed.

"The concept of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources originated with the academic discipline of historiography. The point was to give historians a handy way to indicate how close the source of a piece of information was to the actual events.[a]

Importantly, the concept developed to deal with "events", rather than ideas or abstract concepts. A primary source was a source that was created at about the same time as the event, regardless of the source's contents. So while a dictionary is an example of a tertiary source, an ancient dictionary is actually a primary source—for the meanings of words in the ancient world."

"All sources are primary for something

Every source is the primary source for something, whether it be the name of the author, its title, its date of publication, and so forth. For example, no matter what kind of book it is, the copyright page inside the front of a book is a primary source for the date of the book's publication. Even if the book would normally be considered a secondary source, if the statement that you are using this source to support is the date of its own publication, then you are using that book as a primary source."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...


I'd be interested to see how these quotes show that primary sources are not allowed on Wikipedia.

It was an interesting read. Go ahead and do read the link.

Perhaps the jist is more about 'Primary' means different things to different groups in different context. And just saying the plain sentence "Wikipedia doesn't use Primary" is a really shallow incorrect take.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_source

"For example, a memoir is a primary source when it is used to study its author's life or personal relationships, but the same text becomes a secondary source if it is used to investigate broader cultural or social conditions. Thus, the categories “primary” and “secondary” are relative and depend on the historical context and the purpose of the study. "Primary" and "secondary" should be understood as relative terms, with sources categorized according to specific historical contexts and what is being studied."


There's still plenty of room to improve lighting.

If you want to light an indoor room to be as bright as the outdoors on a sunny day, you're going to need a lot of heavy, expensive equipment that produces a lot of waste heat (LEDs produce way less than incandescent, but still a significant amount). It's also not going to be a full continuous spectrum of light the way that sunlight is.


Because without Musk's reality distortion field, Tesla stock would lose most of its value.


A 9 month old baby also can't play tic tac toe, but that doesn't mean tic tac toe is difficult.

There was millions of years of very strong selective pressure making humans evolve to learn to walk easily. There has been very little selective pressure making humans be good at learning tic tac toe.

Often whether something seems difficult or easy to humans has more to do with how well evolution has prepared us for it than with the inherent difficulty of the problem.


Ah, yes, that liberal hivemind saying that first amendment rights are a thing and that mild resistance is not grounds for summary execution. Classic liberal hivemind.


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