Primaries help but they aren't a complete solution. First, primary results can be overridden by the party leadership. It's best to think of primaries as a non-binding poll of the electorate. This alone makes primaries a pretty unreliable way to filter candidates.

Second, some states allow voting in either party's primary; there's no declaration of party affiliation and no check to make sure you're a member of the party whose ballot you're marking. So if your own party's nomination is pretty much settled, why not just vote in the other party's primary and pick the least electable candidate? See if you can trick the other party into running an absolute idiot that your guy can easily defeat.

Third, the losers of the primary can still decide to run in the general election under a different party or as an independent. In my example, Lion wins the primary so Tiger runs as neither herbivore or carnivore, but switches to the omnivore party or runs as an independent. This is still going to leech votes away from Lion and put us back in the situation of the minority candidate being elected.

Finally, the biggest advantage that ranked choice voting has that primaries can never have is that it encourages third-party candidates. First past the post almost inevitably devolves into what we have now, two equal parties full of voters who aren't voting *for* their own candidate as much as they are voting *against* the other one. In a close race between two big parties, voting for a third-party is very much not in your best interest. It makes it more likely for your *least* favorite candidate to win. Primaries can't fix that, it's inherent in first past the post voting. Ranked choice voting can bring in third parties as it lets you vote for them without fear of helping the candidate you least like. And who knows? Maybe there are enough others who are voting strategically to keep one party out of office who, if they could actually vote for the party they *like* for a change, could get one of the third-parties elected.

So much there in that short paragraph. Saying Canada shouldn't antagonize Trump is fine, but the problem is there's *nothing* we can do that *won't* antagonize him and nothing we can do to placate him, short of inviting him to come be a king. What can Greenland do to not antagonize him (what can Ukraine do to not antagonize Putin)? See the problem?

Nonsense, it's easy to placate him. It just involves depositing very large sums of money into one of his many offshore accounts. Combine with flattery and gifts (solid gold jets, second-hand peace prizes) and he'll do pretty much anything you want him to. Canada is willfully antagonizing him by not bribing him and kissing his ass well enough, and that's on them.

Wow, you've completely missed the point of ranked choice voting. It's not to make the voter feel good about having been able to vote for the ultimate winner. That's absolutely backwards. It's so we can elect a politician more in line with the desires of the voters.

Super simplistic example: Say you have two major candidates, Lion and Gazelle. A majority of the voters, 60%, would happily vote for Lion. But a third candidate, Tiger, is also running. Tiger is a lot like Lion, but has a few interesting new ideas. Half the Lion voters switch to Tiger. Now Gazelle ends up with 40% of the vote, Lion and Tiger each get 30%. Gazelle wins, even though only a minority of voters actually want a herbivore prey animal in office. 60% would still prefer a big cat, they just have a minor squabble over *which* big cat.

This is the problem ranked choice voting aims to solve. It lets you vote for the candidate you really want in office, without the risk of splitting the vote and losing to the candidate you *least* want to win.

This is why my printer is an aged monk with a calligraphy pen. Even his yellow security dots are lavishly illuminated works of art. The only problem is that his pages-per-day output is in the low single digits. That's more than offset by his vow of silence, though. He never talks back or blasphemes by telling me PC LOAD LETTER.

Training AIs on combat data? Yeah, that always ends well.

Do you want Skynet? Because this is how you get Skynet!

It's a proxy for "Trump doing something batshit crazy",

Not sure why this is modded funny, it's the most insightful comment on this article. It certainly explains why she focuses on panic caused by "the US disclosure of aliens" rather than panic caused by the actual fact of aliens.

And I mean, come on. Who would believe the US actually knows about aliens? A couple years ago we had a full-blown world-wide pandemic, with actual people actually dying, and people were calling it a hoax. What evidence could there be for aliens that would convince people better than a pile of dead bodies did for COVID?

It's kind of amazing how some people can believe that the government is utterly incompetent in just about everything, except when it comes to covering up conspiracies involving thousands or even millions of people. THAT they can do without question.

Man, parties in the 80s were the BEST! Get in an unmarked van with a stranger, eat their Halloween candy laced with LSD, listen to Metallica backwards to really get the satanic vibe flowing, then head down to the steam tunnels where you'd play D&D until the drugs wore off. It was the standard Friday night routine growing up and it never got old.

Too bad social media came along and ruined it all.

Current 3D printers don't slice, but I predict they will at some point in the near future. Old 2D printers didn't have much in the way of on-board smarts either. They could accept a text file and turn that into symbols on a page, but if you wanted graphics you'd have to individually fire pins in the dot matrix print head. That ability was often included in the print driver, but you needed a manufacturer-specific driver for each and every printer available.

Now you can pretty much send a Postscript file to the printer, which parses the file and produces the image it describes. That will happen for 3D printers, too. Someday they'll be standardized enough that you can send something like an STL straight to the printer, which will slice it and generate its own toolpaths. The CAD software will have a "File / Print" entry, you'll get a system dialog that asks for standard parameters (the equivalent of a 2D printer's settings for duplex, color/b&w, paper tray, etc.) and the model will go from CAD drawing to physical object with no (user-facing) middleman. It'll be just like printing from Word. (And you'll probably have your printer flashing something obscure like "PC LOAD PLA" when your filament runs out.)

Of course, trying to recognize a "gun part" is still an idiotic concept. It would be akin to having a 2D printer recognize a "bank note". Not a specific set of extant bank notes, or some watermark like the EURion constellation, but anything that could have the function of a bank note. Like Monopoly money, for example. It's not generally possible unless you're willing to put up with a lot of false positives.

Markdown (and all of its "infer the typesetting from unadorned plain text" brethren, such as reStructured Text) is cursed in pretty much the opposite direction. What should be a simple tool for simple use cases has been twisted into a full-blown markup language.

The whole point to these Markdown-style languages is that you can use loose formatting rules to make a document that looks good in a plain text editor and as a fully styled, typeset page. So the language starts off with a few simple conventions, like *italic* and **bold**; paragraphs separated by a blank line; and conventions for several levels of section headings. Looks great in plaintext and translates easily to HTML or some other more capable markup language. Cool.

But then someone comes along and says, "Hey, how about strikethrough?" So you add a rule for that. It's kind of hard to tell what the intent is in the plain text version, but it mostly works. (The same person also asked for underlines, but you told them to get stuffed. They must have done something to really annoy you.)

Then someone else comes along and says, "I'm writing docs for Markdown, and I'd really like to write them in Markdown. I need a way to turn off Markdown formatting so I can show examples." This poses a bit of a problem, because it's impossible to infer which sections need to be escaped just from the document structure. So you grudgingly add in an explicit markup sequence to designate the regions not to format. The document is still pretty readable in its plain-text form though, so everyone's happy.

Then another person looks at it and says, "I've got some tabular data here. How about if Markdown supports that?" That sounds like a pretty simple request, but you soon realize that tables are hard. It's not just columns of numbers, you have to deal with text overflowing cell width, borders, and all sorts of other things. People traditionally handle these in ad hoc ways in plain-text documents and humans can generally get the idea, but it's hard as hell to write a parser for. There is no general way to handle everything and still have it look like simple tabular data in plain text. So you break down and add even more explicit formatting. It almost, kinda, still looks like a table in plain text but it's definitely harder to read than you'd like it to be.

And THEN some wise guy comes along and says, "What about illustrations? How do I include illustrations?" Which is just stupid because illustrations beyond simple ASCII art by definition can't be viewed in plain text. You need to add explicit markup to include something that can not possibly be viewed in the plain text version.

And then people ask for auto-generated tables of content, indexes, and footnotes. More things that just don't fit into the plain text format. More and more explicit markup. Less and less readable in a plain text editor.

Sooner or later you find that what started as a few simple formatting conventions has accreted into a full-blown markup language and you might as well have just bit the bullet and learned nroff, TeX, or HTML from the very start.

Just a few questions before I go off my meds and hit the gym...

1. I know several fit people who exercise regularly, yet are still depressed. Should they take meds or do they just need to exercise even more?

2. Does exercise have a long term effect? Say, I'm sedentary and depressed. I resolve to go to the gym more, and I actually stick with it. The depression goes away. Now, if I keep up with the exercise can I expect the depression to stay away? Or will the depression return as I become accustomed to the new brain chemical levels brought about by the exercise? Another way to put it, does the effect depend more on the absolute *level* of these brain chemicals, or the relative *change* in levels? And does the effect disappear once the novelty of the higher levels wears off?

If it sounds like I simply don't want to get off my butt and exercise more, then yeah, guilty as charged. But I also want to make sure this isn't just a way to blame the person suffering the depression. "You're depressed? You should exercise more!" "Still depressed? Exercise even *MORE*!" One thing that pisses me off in gyms is the sort of motivational poster that reads something like, "Keep pushing! You can always do MORE exercise!" At some point, enough is enough. How much exercise does someone need to get before they can in good conscience say, this isn't working? Maybe it's time to try the medicine? Without having the world shout at you, "Just exercise more, you lazy bastard!"

Ankrah recently declared that most prophecies submitted to him are "total bunk."

I'd be fascinated to know which ones weren't total bunk, and how he determined their legitimacy.

So whenever ICE wants to detain someone, all they need to do is say they suspect a forged ID. And it might "take them a while" to verify it as genuine, especially if they're motivated to believe it's not. So how is this any different for the citizen from not carrying ID in the first place?

Given the mistakes found in the image In wondering if "modern and whimsical" is code for "lacks classical drawing skills and attention to detail".

I've been thinking this for a while now. I've been seeing all kinds of mistakes in print advertising, mostly really obvious typos, from companies that you'd think would be concerned about looking reputable. I don't think the mistakes are accidents. I think they're intentionally matching the sloppy writing that so many people use on social media, most likely to lend an air of authenticity or credibility to whatever they're advertising. If this is correct, it would not surprise me in the least if artwork in advertisements similarly had performative inattention to detail.

Seems to me like game developers are going at this the wrong way. You don't force invasive anti-cheat methods on the players... You offer them as a higher tier of service. Sure, the hoi polloi servers are full of cheaters. You don't want that, do you? Well, if your system can pass our 100% Certified Cheat-Free(tm) environment test, run our 100% Certified Cheat-Free(tm) drivers, and pay for premium access to our 100% Certified Cheat-Free(tm) servers, you can compete directly with the other elite gamers! You are an elite gamer, aren't you?

The gamer bros with the 'leet gaming rigs will eat it up and will jump at the chance to prove their 'leetness. Oh, they may complain, but none of them are going to go back to the normal servers. That would be an admission that the only way they won before was by cheating. Meanwhile, people like me who run an 8 year old laptop and only ever go online because even the single-player mode demands it for some reason are perfectly happy playing in the cheap seats, without the intrusive spyware.

* Certified Cheat-Free(tm) is a registered trademark and is not meant as a literal description of the end-user experience.

This actually *should* be the answer, but unfortunately that ship sailed a couple decades ago. Designers and their managers insist on what they think is subjectively attractive rather than what is functional.