Oops, 4 months ago. Still not a couple of years.

Yes, but we as a species already know enough not to trust rocks.

At the very least, the Democrats are fighting back with the same dubious tactic. Here in Maryland, we just squeezed out another Republican seat with some extremely sketchy-looking districts.

That's one, mind you, compared to the three or four they were finding in North Carolina. It would take decades for Democrats to try to regain control of the legislatures. It would be much better to replace the system with one less easily corrupted (or at least, less immediately corrupted), but I do expect both parties to live down to the tactics of the worst. It's what gets you elected.

The Democrats happen to be worse at it (for now), and I'd love to see them be able to use that to campaign for a less corrupt system. The trick will be getting people out to vote for it. It's not on most people's priority list. That list consists primarily of pocketbook issues.

I'd like to give PR a try, though I don't expect it to be the end of the two-party system. Minority parties tend to be subsumed into one of the two leading parties, because any vote on legislation ends up dividing people into "yes" and "no" camps. Ideally, the coalitions would differ from vote to vote, but since the best way to get to "yes" on some issue is to trade off a vote on another issue, the coalitions tend to be fairly stable over time.

The advantage of PR, in the United States, is that increasingly people are voting for party over personality anyway. Personality tends to serve mostly as a liability: if you end up calling attention to yourself it's usually for something you screwed up. In a safe seat (as so many are), a distinctive personality will help you keep winning the primary, but in competitive seats the names you remember are largely the ones who committed some terrible "gaffe" (often manufactured or blown out of proportion by the press and the opposition party).

Once elected, they tend to vote the party line. If they do anything distinctive, it's most often just grandstanding, with little effect on the legislative outcome. A good politician actually can do some real wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, getting a favorable position for their district, but the effects are usually hard to see. The most prominent things they do are to vote the same way as anybody else would with the same letter after their name.

So since we're voting for parties over personalities anyway, we might as well give PR a try. Don't expect it to cure the ills you expect it to, since what we end up with is going to look a lot like a two-party system anyway, but it will at least allow us to reconsider the system. It might even end the practice of voting against whichever politician is most easily tagged with negative personality traits, so that they can focus on the party most in line with their ideology. (I'm not crazy about that, either, but at least it's slightly more real.)

It doesn't matter how much land it takes to create animal protein, not per se, not in relation to sustainability.

The Great Plains once has giant herds of bison roaming across them. Humans could eat those bison sustainably as long as they didn't take enough bison to disturb the equilibrium between bison and grass. Taking one bison out of the equation would simply cause the equilibrium to produce one more bison. Reducing the buffalo herd from 25 million to 600 on the other hand is a different matter.

What matters for sustainability is the disruption of natural systems, not the acreage.

False. Legislators are required to draw districts in such a way that minority votes will NOT be diluted. Thus, if they are forced to redraw districts (say, due to new allocations of the number of representatives after a census), they are REQUIRED to take minority distribution into account and produce a new set of districts which will not negatively affect minority voters.

It has been easier for these issues to end up in the courts in places that have a history of suppressing minority votes -- but the restrictions are binding on all states, regardless of past wrongs.

Oops -- wrong link. The article linked in TFS that I quoted is here.

Who the hell modded this as "troll"?? Not only have other posts cited examples of how the VRA has frequently been used for it, the issue is specifically discussed in one of the linked articles in TFS:

You don't mod someone as "troll" for bringing up a legitimate issue that's actually discussed in TFA.

They're only required to gerrymander minority districts if they have a history suppressing minority votes.

This is kind of like equitable relief, where the court compels a guilty party in a civil case to perform some action to remedy an unfair action it performed earlier.

The state lottery commission.

Oddly enough, a state that can't be counted on to run an election competently and honestly can *still* manage to run a competent lottery.

Yeah, and you know what? One of the most famous ones is in North Carolina, the site of this study.

And guess who created it and why? Democrats did, in order to secure a minority voting block big enough to elect a black person to Congress. Ever since, it's been one of the most litigated districts in the U.S.

I'm always shocked at how many people don't realize that this is one of the primary LEGAL rationales for gerrymandering -- back in the 1980s and 1990s you even saw unholy alliances between minority leaders and conservative Republicans conspiring to create awkward districts in some states that would give each group what they wanted: the minorities got enough people together in a district to elect a minority to Congress, and the Republicans got to excise many of those annoying mostly Democratic minority voters from their districts.

We are still living with that legacy in many states, and I frankly have found news coverage in recent years of gerrymandering to be lacking in discussion of this issue. It's not all just Republicans who have taken control of state legislatures -- we've also had a committed effort for quite a few decades to segregate voter districts in such a way that would allow more minorities in Congress.

But of course that creates a problem, because it ends up disenfranching non-minority Democrats who get stuck in all the surrounding districts that can no longer elect a Democrat because a large portion of Democrats were deliberately removed from swing districts to create the minority-majority district.

So the Democrats end up in a Catch-22. If they want to promote Congressional "diversity," they can create districts where minorities get elected, but they can end up screwing themselves over in the process because then all the surrounding districts become more Republican and make it more difficult for Democrats to actually achieve an overall Congressional majority.

It's certainly not the only issue that has led to Republican majorities in Congress -- but it's one that's not often talked about, and it has had some significant effects.

70% of your market buying your stuff is great. 70% of your market liking the thing they bought from you last year and not deciding to upgrade is a problem. This was also Microsoft's problem with Windows XP - it wasn't great, but it was good enough for most people. When the iPhone came out, it and the other new smartphones with big touchscreens were a big change from what went before. Now, even a cheap smartphone like the Moto G is more than powerful enough for most users, so what's the incentive to upgrade?

It depends a huge amount on what you're listening to. For about 90% of my music, I can't tell the difference between the original CD and 128kb/s MP3. A few things have noticeable artefacts that don't go away no matter how high you put the bitrate. Substitute 128kb/s AAC and that changes to over 95%. At 256kb/s AAC, I can't tell the difference for anything I own, but I've heard some recordings that hit pathological cases in the algorithms used for AAC and sound terrible at any bit rate (usually orchestral pieces with a single voice and only for short samples). With FLAC, you can 100% reconstruct the original, bit for bit, so you won't suffer from any unfortunate coincidence between your choice of music and the CODEC of choice.

The big advantage of a lossless compression though is for recompressing. For a long time I had a DVD player connected to my living room speakers that could play back MP3s, but not AAC. If I wanted to burn a CD-RW or DVD+RW to play on it, I had to recompress, which usually sounded noticeably worse than if I'd gone straight to MP3 from the source material. If I'd ripped everything as FLAC, then that recompression would not have introduced any new artefacts.

This is true, and I have absolutely no doubt that there is some serious manipulation going on in drawing districts, as there has been by both parties for centuries.

That said, there's quite a big gap of logic in one of the assumptions of this study. From TFS:

To what extent is this assumption valid, though? The model appears based on the assumption that ALL voters are "straight-ticket" types who just vote Republican or Democrat mindlessly.

In other words, it doesn't take into account whether (1) a voter might actually care about a specific candidate and what he/she says, (2) a voter might actually respond to campaign advertising or other candidate promotions, (3) for incumbents, a voter might actually continue to vote for an incumbent is he/she is perceived to have served well. (Stats generally show that incumbents have a huge advantage in elections -- voters prefer to vote for familiar names.)

Without controlling for such factors (e.g., by looking at previous election vote counts and comparing how "faithful" voters are to a particular party over the course of a number of elections), this study is SERIOUSLY flawed.

Also, candidates run campaigns according to the rules that are in place. They may visit areas in their district because they have to win those areas and make promises they might not otherwise make because those areas are in their district. If the district lines were drawn differently, they would probably campaign differently.

This strikes me as flawed as those who get into arguments about how Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election. (To be clear, I definitely was never a Bush fan, but I'm interested in rational argument, not fantasies.)

Anyhow, Gore and Bush weren't campaigning to win the popular vote across the country. They were campaigning to win the electoral college vote, which required strategy based on regions and state boundaries. To come back later and say, "But, but... Gore should have won because he got the popular vote" is like some idiot saying, "I know I lost Monopoly, but I had the most properties -- if you changed the rules to allow me to build houses based on the number of properties I own rather than the number of monopolies I had, I could have won!" So what? Those aren't the rules of the game.

The rules of the game may be stupid (and are in the case of gerrymandered districts). But the players choose strategies based on them. The voters may respond to such strategies. None of this appears to have been considered in this model.

I was happy to re-buy DK and DK2 from GOG when they were on special offer for $2 each: for that price, it's worth not having to find the CDs. The fact that they had pre-packaged Mac versions and I didn't have to futz with WINE myself was a bonus.