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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Pretty fucked, but not as fucked as Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, or Taiwan.

    NATO will be fucked for a while if the US withdraws, but other NATO countries may ramp up military spending over time.

    This situation is a worldwide danger. The US is/was a world power, it has/had the largest national economy in the world, it has the largest military in the world.

    Previously, we could be concerned that democratic countries (including the US) weren’t putting enough pressure on authoritarian countries (like Russia, China, and North Korea) to improve. Now we have to worry that the US will actually become a fully authoritarian country, like Russia or China.


  • Any regular hex nut works just fine as a jam nut. Basically, a jam nut is when you jam two nuts together. (It is gay, because the nuts do touch.)

    And note that those nylon inserts kinda only work once. The bolt carves a thread into the insert when you insert it, so it will be weaker the second time you insert it.

    Honorable mention: cage nuts. A square nut, permanently attached to a fastener that can snap into a special square hole in a 19 inch server rack. When you tighten the bolt against the nut, it tightens against the fastener, so that the nut, bolt, and fastener are secure against the square hole.








  • For anyone who honestly believes in third party stuff: try supporting ranked voting at the local and state level. Once we have more ranked voting at local and state levels, it will be easier to push that at the federal level, which is the best way to solve strategic voting problems in presidential elections.

    Nobody would support ranked voting for presidential elections if that’s the first time they hear about it. But if people use it already in local elections, and see that it works better, then extending it to presidential elections is a logic choice.






  • Limonene@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldNevar Forget
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    21 days ago

    Third parties certainly know what effect they have. Their motivation is not to make the second party candidate win. Their motivation is to change the first party candidate.

    According to Hotelling’s Law, a two-party political system with FPTP voting results in candidates that are very similar. This is why the Democrats won’t run real progressives for most offices, and why Sanders was forced out in 2016 with the excuse that he wasn’t “electable” enough.

    Third parties running for president aren’t trying to win. They’re trying to eat some of the votes on their side, thus pulling the main party candidates toward that third party candidate to reclaim those votes.