What are you even on about? If there’s a flaw in the system, the best that can be done is make it clear to the group that we shouldn’t abuse this, and hope the official rules are changed at some point.

If nothing has happened, then nothing needs to be done. I sometimes float exploits in the rules past my friends for various games, but make it clear I have no intention of playing that way.

I even tested something in Terraforming Mars this past weekend. I made it clear with the group ahead of time that I wanted to try something, what the strategy was, and how I would be playing. They were all fine with it, and it turned out the strategy was broken as hell. Won by 12 points against a fairly experienced group. It’s also a boring way to play that game and I wouldn’t care to do it again.

That’s also how I know that it’s fruitless to expect rules to avoid these situations entirely. They must be handled socially. Any other tool is inadequate.

I know you’re joking, but I wanted to take this opportunity to make a side note. Nuclear test ban treaties have been effective enough for long enough that we don’t have to scavenge old shipwrecks for low background radiation steel anymore. That’s a huge success, and we shouldn’t squander it.

No, it’s cities. Many cities have their own ordinances that clear out homeless encampments. Rural folk didn’t institute those ordinances.

Under the new Florida law, any citizen or business can sue beginning in January if they feel the anti-camping ban is not being properly enforced.

This is pants on head stupid. We could probably count on actual police and DAs understanding the situation and not enforcing this law in extraordinary circumstances. We can’t count on every HOA board member doing the same. Even if a judge grants an immediate motion to dismiss, it’s still a complete waste of everyone’s time and money. That’s the best case scenario.

What we infer from it all is that someone is using a rule in a way that’s detrimental to the group. We may want to change the rule, or it may be time to have a talk, or it may be time to kick them out.

As far as assumptions go, that cuts both ways All I’m saying is that we don’t take any of the options above off the table.

Yet ostracizing people is a more acceptable position than a rules patch?

Yes. If you can’t get someone to knock off bad behavior, the rules do not matter.

If the rules aren’t something to be changed, why do they charge so much for the rules revision they just put out?

There are good reasons to change rules. People breaking social norms is not one of them.

DnD isn’t just a set of rules, though. It is inherently a social activity, and that means there has to be a certain level of expectation for social norms. If your group has toxic people in it, they will be toxic while playing tic-tac-toe.

The solution is to employ social pressure or ostracism for those people. We can certainly modify rules that have proven abusive in the past, but enforcing rules of conduct must always be the first line of defense.

Oh, yes it would. The global economy flows entirely through the US dollar as a reserve currency. If it goes, everything goes. China can’t sell anything to Europe, Europe can’t buy oil from the Middle East, and the Middle East becomes a power vacuum. Given time, these could be worked out, but not before their governments collapse.

That’s why BRICs have been looking to disentangle themselves from the USD, even to the point of floating the idea of their own currency union. That’s a terrible idea for other reasons (it’d let China put a noose around the other three), but there’s a reason behind it.

It would. In some ways, the 2008 financial crisis hurt the EU more than it hurt the US, even though all the problems originated in the US. By 2010, the US was looking like the best place to put your money.

If the US government fails, everyone is going down. That’s a singularity event. By which I mean we can’t usefully prepare for whatever happens next. At best, we can do some prepper shit, but hiding in a prepper hole isn’t something that works in the long run, and sure as hell isn’t a desirable life.

Cryptocurrency means nothing in this scenario.

Cuban is the best guy on Shark Tank. This is not a high bar, and isn’t worthy of unqualified praise.

The idea that AES states have “devolved into Capitalism” is wrong as well (except the USSR into the various post-Socialist states).

TIL a country with 814 billionaires isn’t capitalist.

I love this article while also finding it frustrating. The author seems to be a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, but also goes into detail about how all the ML states have devolved into capitalism. Maybe that should be taken as evidence that ML’s vanguard party is a fatally flawed concept?

There are intelligence briefs that we get from Israel, and the money we give them tends to boomerang right back into the US military-industrial complex.

OTOH, Israel collapses in a week without US support. Maybe politicians should realize this and use it to tell Israel to knock it the fuck off.

Except it doesn’t check out when you break down the numbers.

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr.

The EC in the 1800 election was 73/65 in favor of Jefferson. The popular vote was 60% in Jefferson’s favor, but he got 53% of the EC. If anything, the EC put him at a disadvantage.

The tie spoken of above was a technical issue between Jefferson and his intended Vice President, Aaron Burr. It doesn’t have much to do with slavery at all. They were trying to hack around the system of setting the second place winner as Vice President, and it blew up in their face. Burr was always intended by the Democratic-Republicans to be Vice President.

The 12th amendment was passed before the next election to do away with that means of selecting the Vice President. It was ratified by both slave and free states. It was rejected by Delaware and Connecticut, both of which had <10% of their population as slaves in the 1800 Census (only three states had zero slaves by then).

Adams was by far more consistently against slavery compared to Jefferson. You can find writings where Jefferson was against it, but his actions plainly speak otherwise. Adams never owned a slave and even avoided employing them secondhand. Which is about as difficult as avoiding products from tobacco industry subsidiaries today.

Adams lost, but he would have lost with or without the EC.

Anything that happens later (which is where the article goes after the above) isn’t particularly relevant to how the EC was intended to work. The population dynamics and entry of new states couldn’t have been predicted at the time.

The three-fifths compromise, though? Absolute fucking evil. Adams maybe wins the EC in 1800 without that, and (more importantly) Congress would certainly look very different. The EC was, if anything, a counterbalance to the three-fifths compromise, though not a very strong one.

The EC should go away because it’s antidemocratic. The argument that it was for slavery, though, just doesn’t add up.

When do politicians realize that Israel needs the US a whole lot more than the US needs Israel?

While there’s plenty of criticism of the constitution along slavery lines, this isn’t one of them. Sorting the 1790 census by total population and then comparing the percentage of slave population, you’ll see that it’s very mixed. If the EC were to protect slavery, we would expect states with a high slave population to have a lower population overall, but that isn’t the case.

Also of note is that only two states (Maine and Massachusetts) had zero slaves. There were a handful of house slaves in almost every state at the time. Those states didn’t have a heavy economic dependence on slavery, though. It’s the southern states, with their whole economy built around plantation slavery, that are the real problem. But again, they don’t line up in ways that would give them an EC edge.

Let’s see what the founders had in mind:

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,‘’ yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.

In other words, it’s supposed to stop someone like Trump from ever being President. Since that clearly failed, maybe we should junk the whole thing.

Even this is generous. The Federalist Papers, IMO, should be taken as a way to sell the new constitution to the populace. They make it sound like the whole thing was more well thought out than it really was. The constitution that came out is just the compromise everyone could live with after debating it for hours. Politicians back then aren’t that different from today; they have their own agendas, their own ambitions, and their own squabbles. They also get tired after long debates and will vote for anything as long as it gets them out of there.

On top of that, a good chunk of what they were thinking at the time–which you can see echos of in the quote above–was deflecting criticism that democracy couldn’t work. The US was the first modern democracy, and there were plenty of aristocrats in Europe (and even some useful idiots domestically) who laughed off the idea of a government run by peasants. The result is a system that doesn’t go all in on democracy, and has all these little exceptions. “No, no, see, the electoral college will stop a populist idiot from taking executive power”.

We’ve changed a lot of those over the years, such as electing senators rather than having them appointed by state governors. In hindsight, these were not necessary at all. It’s time for the electoral college to go.

It popped up during the Obama era with HAARP, a scientific research station in Alaska that monitors the ionosphere. Wingnuts claimed it was a weather control machine; they claimed the increase in disastrous weather wasn’t because of global warming, but because HAARP was causing storms so Democrats could take over and institute Full Communism.

It disappeared from the right wing zeitgeist for a while, but recently got revived by Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Anything to pretend their own actions aren’t at fault.