Did anyone else see Gen 3 and think, “Hoenn?”

In hindsight, it’s kinda crazy how Moviefone came out of nowhere to become completely ubiquitous within a few years, and was then made completely obsolete by the internet just a few years later.

“Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!”

I stopped letting YouTube save my watch history years ago because their suggestion algorithm became too intrusive: watch a quick cooking tutorial, get nothing be cooking channels, look up the proper way to use a toggle bolt, YouTube wants to teach me how to re-shingle a roof. It was out of control.

First, they took away my home screen, because they claimed they couldn’t reccomend videos without my watch history (even though they’d done it for years). Then they took away the shorts tab, because they said they couldn’t reccomend shorts without my watch history (even though they’d done it for months). So now I just have my subscriptions, a curated list of things I actually want to watch. They’ve punished me with the product I wanted this whole time.

Fair enough. I spend a lot of time learning about right-wing extremists, so I guess I forget that it might not be common knowledge that Evangelicals support Israel because it ties into their apocalyptic death-cult prophecies.

Wait, is that by percentage or raw numbers? I know there are a ton of Christian (especially Evangelical) Zionists, but Jewish people make up less than 3% of the U.S population, so if it’s by raw numbers that’s kinda a meaningless comparison. Like, there are less Jewish…pretty much everything in the U.S.

I read an article about this a few years ago, and the answer is whatever they want. I remember one couple said they just decided they liked the wife’s grandmother’s maiden name, so they just picked that. She was confused but flattered.

…TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn’t sell. It also would lose access to US-based web hosting services.

Oh no. Where would children act out jokes they stole from old tweets?

Well, I think we’re at the point where we have to agree to disagree, but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. I’d never heard of some of the ideas you’d brought up before, it certainly given me some new things to look into.

Interesting, I’ve never heard about this system before, it definitely sounds interesting. I think this will be my next rabbit hole, thanks for sharing!

I mean, that’s not really how I’d describe the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and you’re not really addressing how this body would lessen the impact of NIMBYism. It seems like, if anything, it would be easier for largest states to caucus together and dictate what they don’t want in their backyards. You’re also not addressing why it’s fair for states who already control less than 50% of the land within their borders to have even less influence over those lands. It’s certainly an interesting proposal, but I still think you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the Senate’s check on high density states.

I don’t think that’s true at all. I’m not one of those, “states rights,” guys that believes that every state should decide who gets basic human rights, but I do think there are tons of ways larger states could use their outsized power against smaller states. The one that comes to mind is nuclear waste storage, which was a huge fight in the 80s that required a lot of negotiation. Imagine if New York, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Florida just got together with and decided Montana just had to manage it all.

Also, considering the western states have a much higher percentage of federal land than eastern states, their communities are much more likely to get screwed by the federal government. If I lived in Utah, where the vast majority of the land in my state is under federal control, I would certainly want more than 3 out of 435 Representatives in the federal government.

Hmm…that’s definitely an interesting idea, but it still gives the highly populated states unchecked power over the smaller states. Either way, if the house remains the same, then gerrymandering will still need to end.

Yes, but I think that’s more of a problem with our politics rather than the senate. The Republicans have gone to political extremes that just aren’t popular with the majority of the country, so they struggle to pass legislation that their base would approve of through the House. Instead, they adopted a culture of obstruction in the Senate, because blocking legislation is all they can do. There are ways that their ability can obstruct can be limited, like abolishing the filibuster, but changing the culture of extremism is the only long-term solution.

Ending gerrymandering is probably the biggest institutional fix towards that goal. Right now, Congressional Districts are basically giant echo chambers that amplify the most extreme voices. Breaking down those chambers and forcing politicians to appeal to a plurality of random voters should bring rhetoric down to sane levels, and that should apply to both the House and the Senate.

This is very interesting, but I’m struggling to see how it would work within our current system of single-district representatives. Would Congressional Districts be abolished, and each state pick their allocated Congressmen through Approval Voting? I also don’t see what benefits Approval Voting has over Rank Choice Voting other than simplicity.

The electoral college is a mostly separate problem. The biggest problem caused by gerrymandering is partisan divides in the House of Representatives. Congressional Districts are drawn to keep districts as red or blue as possible, so Congress gets made up by extremists. If districts were drawn fairly, politicians would need to appeal to a broader community, and their positions would be more nuanced. Gerrymandering essentially lets the politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.

I would go with computer generated district lines based on population, with some sort of non-partisan or bipartisan zoning committee to review and approve them, but there are tons of workable solutions. The problem is both parties benefit from gerrymandering, so there’s no political will to fix it. The solution is simple, but not easy.

I would add, “abolish gerrymandering,” at the top of that list. I’m not entirely sure how, “merge Senate into the House,” would work, but I think that’s probably a bad idea.

Some people complain about the the Senate because it gives each state 2 Senators, so less populace states have outsized power, but that’s kinda the point. It may not seem very fair, but neither is the 5 most populace states voting to strip mine the Midwest, which is the kind of thing the Senate is meant to be a bulwark against. The Senate does put too much power in the hands of too few, but I think a better way to fix that would be to take away the Senate’s power to confirm appointments and shorten Senate terms, not abolishing it or, “merging it into the House,” (though again, I’m not entirely sure what that would entail, so maybe it would work).

People, I’m begging you…

Edit: Wait, hang on. I just realized I interacted with this account a few days ago. They told me Obama wasn’t conservative because he didn’t strip gay people of their rights; I pointed out that Obama didn’t support gay marriage until his second term, and that he didn’t actually do anything to legalize gay marriage, a conservative leaning Supreme Court did. They then called me privileged and said they couldn’t address my idiocy (or something along those lines).

Anyway, I think I know what happened with this guy and the, “tankie,” mods.

I mean, it’s pretty hard to make an argument that Trump would be materially worse for Palestinians than Biden if both are going to defund UNRWA and give Israel military aid. What Biden is doing now is definitely a step in the right direction; I hope he keeps this up, even when the Republicans inevitably say he’s being, “soft on terrorism,” (or whatever the talking point becomes).