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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlChoice
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    25 days ago

    This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

    Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

    Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

    Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

    But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

    Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

    TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.





  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comResearch
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    1 month ago

    There are a bunch of interacting factors, too. Something like 10% of the homeless are chronically homeless and don’t really have good prospects of being able to give themselves housing stability even if given money. This population in particular seems to be better served by the “Housing First” movement where they are given homes and supervised so that they can then get the treatment they need relating to substance abuse, mental health, etc., from a position of at least having a place to go home to. Here is a summary with citations to studies.

    But for the housing insecure people who are at risk of becoming part of the 80% of the homeless experiencing transient homelessness, or the already homeless in that category, dropping money in their lap might be an effective way to improve their lives permanently, putting them on a better trajectory. From what I’ve seen of the reporting of very recent studies, many of which were complicated by the fact that a pandemic happened right in the middle of the experiments, there is some evidence that giving money directly is helpful. But there’s open questions about whether it should be a lump sum, whether big numbers ($500+/month) result in something different from small numbers ($25/month), etc.

    So yeah, I think even if we start from the assumption that giving directly is more effective than in-kind support like free/subsidized food or healthcare or housing or childcare, or treatment for mental health or substance abuse, we have to figure out which populations are best served by which intervention, and whether temporary/time limited programs are as cost effective as long term commitments, etc.




  • I get how it works with wifi connections, and Bluetooth scanning (since that’s a peer to peer protocol that needs to broadcast its availability), and obviously the OS-level location services, but I’m still not seeing how seeing wifi beacons would reveal anything. For one, pretty much every mobile device OS now uses MAC randomization so that your wifi activity on one network can’t be correlated with another. And for another, I think the BSSID scanning protocol is listen only for client devices.

    Happy to be proven wrong, and to learn more, but the article linked doesn’t seem to explain anything on this particular supposed threat.







  • I think the comment is specifically talking about storing future times, and contemplating future changes to the local time zone offsets.

    If I say that something is going to happen at noon local time on July 1, 2030 in New York, we know that is, under current rules, going to happen at 16:00 UTC. But what if the US changes its daylight savings rules between now and 2030? The canonical time for that event is noon local time, and the offset between local time and UTC can only certainly be determined with past events, so future events defined by local will necessarily have some uncertainty when it comes to UTC.




  • Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.