Duverger’s Law is structural

Or maybe it’s bullshit, designed to scare people into voting for bad candidates.

Even Duverger himself did not consider it some universal law, merely as a statistical trend. A better formulation would be ‘under these conditions, a third party has difficulty forming and attracting voters, and an established party can survive longer than it should, purely based on merit’. Says the exact same thing, but cannot be misinterpreted as easily.

Duverger’s law is about how there tend to be two parties.

Emphasis on the ‘tends’. It’s a probabilistic observation, not a law of nature. Treating it as the latter leads to people acting against their best interests.

Sri Lanka has ranked ballots. It’s not a Plurality voting system.

You are right, in theory, but please check how many additional votes the winner (or the runner-up) got as second-prefrence votes. It was around 2% of their totals. This is because in practice, most voyers didn’t bother putting second and third preferences.

Instead of calculating who they hate more, the Sri Lankan people voted for the candidate they liked - an anti-corruption activist who got ~3% of the vote last time and was supported by a fringe left-wing party - and he won the presidency over the candidates of the two established parties.

The new guy won despite winning <5% of votes in the last election. If people vote for the candidate they like instead of trying to game the system by calculating who they’d rather not win the most, then maybe we can kick out corrupt incumbents and get in fresh faces (they’ll get corrupted over time too, at which point you rinse and repeat).

I’m guessing the destroyers are doing something beyond just than praying they don’t get hit.

In this context, I guess the self-employed would be an intermediate ‘middle class’. A doctor or accountant with her own practice, a master tradesman who can pick and choose his clients, a programmer who does contract work for companies - none of them are propertied enough to have their own workers, but neither are they employed by a boss who takes a cut of their pay. But I agree that a lot of people who call themselves middle class are actually either upper class or working class.

In India, you might throw gazillion-dollar weddings for your children.

If throwing lavish parties was all our oligarchs did, I’d be happy. I know Indira Gandhi did a lot of horrible things, but sometimes I wish we elect someone like her again, to once again put the fear of nationalisation into these leeches.

This is some Mushi-shi level theory.

That already exists. It’s called arXiv, and is used by mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists. Everyone else has to pay up.

better yet how about they take enough for donation and decanter a portion out an do blood testing both to make sure the blood is clean but alsoso the individual is aware of they are free of X

This is already how they do it here (India). They’ll test all donations for a number of infections, and you can give them your mobile number / e-mail / postal address to inform you if they find something.

Not a mathematician, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t necessarily true. What if L is -1 and f(x) = x^2? Also I think your function has to be continuous.

I think it was Charlie Chaplin who said that the best jokes make you first laugh and then cry.

It could be a different stratum of society. Maybe like politicians and businessmen. They say ~5% of Indians have iPhones, but I only know two people with iPhones (and one was second-hand).

I don’t think SMIC refuses to sell to non-Chinese companies. Nokia mostly uses Unisoc chips, which are made in China (not sure if by SMIC).

But if they did, it would be a pretty serious problem, since I don’t think SMIC even has a viable competitor in the entry-level smartphone chip market.

They have microSD, audio jack, okay chip (Snapdragon 4 Gen 2) and RAM (4-8 GB), replaceable batteries and screens, and HMD has pledged spare parts for seven years. That’s a good start, but it’s a bit overpriced for its specs and currently only available in Europe, so it probably won’t sell very well.

Apple is leading in a lot of countries despite Android being the dominant OS, because the Android userbase is divided among different manufacturers. See China, for example.

Govt jobs in India have 30-40 days, which is 6-8 weeks. But the private sector will riot if you try mandating anything close to that.

The second image in the lead is showing the list of countries who recognised Palestine after the episode in question. Based on the title, you need the list of countries who recognised before.

And yes, we recognised them in 1988.

Thanks!

I’m using data from StatCounter, as mentioned in the figure. See Belarus and Russia. They could be wrong; their figures are based on website hits.