So is biomass. And wind. And fossil fuels. And hydro.

In fact, I think only geothermal and fission aren’t fusion-based.

Nader 2004: 465,650

Nader wasn’t even the Green candidate in 2004. Nader ran as an independent in 2004.

That year the Green Party ran David Cobb, who got 119,859 votes, putting him behind the Constitution Party, the Libertarian Party, and the independent Ralph Nader.

In 2008, Nader ran again as an independent and beat the Green Party once again, with 739,034 votes, versus McKinney’s 162k. In between were the Libertarians in fourth place, and the Constitution Party in fifth place.

The Green Party has never even come in third place, and several times hasn’t even come in fifth place, in our two party system.

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.

Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.

Why do you care if the person you voted for wins?

Because it’s an election with consequences, not an online fandom.

“Feminism” is like philosophy in that over time it makes certain wins, and the discussion around that topic gradually sheds the label.

In the same way that ancient philosophers were establishing the disciplines we now call mathematics, geometry, and physics, or early modern philosophers were establishing what we now call economics and political science, and mid-century/postwar philosophers were establishing what is now called computer science and information theory, the history of feminism is notching wins and making them normal:

• In Anglo American law, women were able to own their own property beginning in the early 19th century, starting in the American South (somewhat ironically driven by southern concerns about preserving the institution of slavery).
• Women were allowed to be considered for credit and banking services, equal to men, beginning in the 1970’s.
• Women earned the legal right to equal pay for equal work in the 70’s, even as cultural attitudes in many circles still considered that to be government overreach (even today).
• Marital rape and other forms of domestic violence were outlawed pretty recently. The last state to criminalize marital rape did so in 1993, the same year that Jurassic Park came out in theaters.
• Liberalized divorce rules throughout the 80’s allowed women to leave abusive husbands more easily.
• Most gender segregation in official government institutions were dismantled in the 1980’s and the 1990’s, including the abolition of male-only universities, and laws imposing different legal drinking ages between men and women.

Today, many of us who were alive when these rules were in effect think of them as totally backwards. Nobody is seriously advocating for a return to denying women the right to have their own bank accounts, or giving husbands the right to rape their wives without consequences.

But the cultural understanding of the meaning of feminism rarely considers preserving past wins, even recent wins. People only think of it as fighting for something in the future.

Most men have experienced the stifling gender norms that force them into a box: they’re not allowed to cry or show any feeling other than anger, there’s no such thing as non-sexual touch or romance, women don’t like sex so trying to get close to them is inherently rapey and goes against their desires.

Feminism fights against that trap, that men are only men if they check certain boxes. That’s what’s toxic: telling men they’re not allowed to be certain ways.

So yeah, feminism does have a lot to offer men. Toxic societal expectations are bad for everyone.

I read it in Larry David’s voice.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

SNL had a fun sketch about this 12 years ago.

Haiti’s gonna hate hate hate

why wouldn’t I use my platform to share those beliefs?

I think it’s perfectly valid to say “the system that gave me this platform is unfair and I shouldn’t have benefited from it to the degree that I have, but I have the platform now so I’m going to use it for good.”

I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.

The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

The NOVA system is bad science, in my opinion.

When asked to classify centuries-old staples like cheese or jam or bread or pickles, the experts struggle to find a consensus on which category any given food is. And so the classification system itself is so imprecisely defined that studies based on the system will rest on a shaky foundation.

It’s better to identify what specific foods and what specific cooking techniques are bad and how they might be bad, rather than trying to say that the act of chopping, blending, mixing, cooking, or fermentation automatically makes a food less healthy.

If certain additives are bad, say that those are bad. Don’t try to lump in the other processing techniques into one basket.

Typing of the dead

Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.

For the U.S. at least:

With condos, there’s a condo association that owns all the common areas. Then the association itself is owned by the owners of the units, and the management is elected by the owners.

With co-ops, the unit owners directly own the common areas in common, and the management is also elected by the owners.

Functionally speaking they’re very similar, and co-ops tend to exist in places where this legal structure predates the invention of homeowner associations (basically New York).

Prosecutors are generally somewhat accommodating of victim/witness preferences, because being subpoenaed to testify in open court can be intimidating in even low profile cases. And forcing a person to testify against their will generally isn’t a good trial strategy for winning cases.

if it’s immediately rewarding

Hell of a caveat there.