I hear you. Didn’t mean for that to come across as an attack on you.

Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won’t go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.

Second, sure, it’s a low risk bill because they know it won’t go anywhere, but damn isn’t it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?

https://rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections/

Just wanted to direct folks to !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world, which is a brand new community for exactly these kinds of discussions. Cheers!

Just wanted to direct folks to !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world, which is a brand new community for exactly these kinds of discussions. Cheers folks!

The recent NCAA conference kerfuffle proves money was only part of the problem, though. While there certainly have been declines in state support and endowment revenue, they’ve also spent decades prioritizing things like sports, facilities, and coaches over research and academic programs. And we can’t even justify it by claiming that Universities need to prioritize revenue-generating entities to support non-revenue generating entities, because sports lose a stupid amount of money each year. They’ve lost track of what Universities are supposed to be doing, which is education, and they’re doing it in a way that keeps them trapped in a financial doom loop.

I’m not sure you’ll get that from any instance that allows politics, to be perfectly honest, as politics will tend to swamp all other discussion because it generates more traffic and discussion. I’ve spent time on microskiff.com (a boating forum), which is intensely right-wing, and it got so toxic they had to ban political discussion altogether. They have an open feud with The Hull Truth (another boating forum) which leans more left and attracts more voices who challenge conservatives. /r/Hunting was kinda conservative and generally policed itself, but that’s because the mod team nuked anything that went off the rails.

Conservative-friendly spaces usually stay functional one of two ways: either they create a conservatives-only safe space or they refuse to let conservatives be overtly conservative. As someone who was a Reddit moderator for over a decade, you’re kinda driving at the major gripe conservatives have with the open internet. They tend not to get a warm welcome not because they’re conservative, but because when they flock together they tend to get disruptive and toxic very quickly. So then the warnings, removals, and bans come out, and the toxic crowd crows about being “censored”, and the toxicity/pushback ramps up in an endless loop. It’s the same song and dance everywhere they go, unfortunately. The conservative-sphere is just too infested with toxic conservatives for non-toxic conservatives find breathing room.

Additionally, Lemmy the platform has a steep learning curve which limits it to a more tech-savvy audience, and these kinds of forums naturally attract more left-leaning users, so I don’t think Lemmy is the place you’re going to find much conservative traffic in the first place.

Yep. Page 30 in the referenced study.

Yes, but the lede is why. They don’t really get to anything resembling a resolution until something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the article. Even now I’m still unsure whether the 500k excess deaths were rabies infections or due to tainted water. They never got around to providing much clarity on that front. The paper only goes so far as to say a) more rabies vaccines were sold, b) people saw more dogs, c) fecal counts in water went up, and d) DO in water went down. But that comes with two huge caveats:

1. Feral dog data were collected after the ban and “do not allow us to reject that feral dog populations were already higher in the high-vulture suitability districts even before the collapse of vulture populations.”

2. Fecal coliform also has human origins. And the uptick in fecal counts (along with the decline in DO) was in areas where more people live.

Correlation between excess human deaths and vulture decline wasn’t actually teased out into any kind of causation, and the best they could do was link death upticks with spatially isolated poisoning nodes. Urban areas had a more pronounced effect, but urban areas have a lot of other factors that can cause death, and none of those factors were controlled for, or really even mentioned in section 6.2 or the conclusion. Overall the paper is crappy because the study is quite poor, so I guess the author did the best they could with a study that tried to do far too much with far too little data.

Blech. The opening to the article isn’t any better, and they clearly buried the lede to keep you scrolling. Here’s the gist:

1. Vultures eat cattle carcasses.

2. Anti-inflammatory cattle medicine Diclofenac is toxic to birds.

3. Price of Diclofenac falls in 1994, becomes widely used.

4. 95% of vultures in India die over 1990s and 2000s.

5. Diclofenac banned in 2006.

6. Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs and rabies.

7. Districts with no vultures saw uptick in human deaths. Districts with vultures saw no uptick. About 500,000 excess deaths across India.

What a fucking terrible article.

Lol, yep. Oh you spray lots of stuff that’s designed to kill bugs? I think it might be killing lots of bugs!

not doing good things that make people’s lives better

They sit back and watch the world burn

They spent billions to upgrade drinking water infrastructure across the country, as well as roads and bridges. They protected and strengthened the Affordable Care Act by allowing states to extend postpartum coverage up to 12 months, by disallowing several state-level work requirements for Medicaid, by fixing the “family glitch”, by dropping the number of uninsured by 3.5%, by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, by capping the price of insulin, and by banning surprise billing for out-of-network care. They raised the minimum wage for federal workers. They forgave billions in student loans. They expanded VA health care and benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances. They rescheduled marijuana. They established decade-long tax credits for everything from electric vehicles to direct air capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide. They ratified the international Kigali Amendment on reducing HFCs. They implemented drinking water standards for PFAS. I could go on, but I’m bored.

Get your fingers out of your fucking ears, open your eyes, and stop repeating baseless propaganda. I’ll also echo what the commenter above suggested:

kindly shut the fuck up. I’m an American, I’ve ACTUALLY had to live in this country with Trump and Biden as president, and it’s no contest for me.

edit: Downvoting incontrovertible facts. Again. This community never ceases to amaze me.

Arrrgh?

Agreed. It’s like walking around a party with a post-it note stuck to your forehead that says “Don’t ask me about watermelons.”

All anyone is going to do all night is ask you about watermelons. Every single time.

No, that’s not a plain text reading of the statute. You have to refer to the definition specified, and you can’t replace it with the implication. It would be:

“or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

So clearly the second phrase is meant to capture mechanical alterations that turn it into a weapon with automatic fire, not mechanical alterations that turn it into a weapon with simulated automatic fire, or a weapon that approximates automatic fire. Intent isn’t the operative clarifier in the sentence, the functionality is, and intent only comes into play if you intend to convert it into the different functionality. A bump stock doesn’t do that.

Yep, the phrase “by a single function of the trigger” is absolutely key in this case. Bump stocks help you pull the trigger again very quickly after the initial pull, but multiple trigger pulls are still required. It’s the difference between automatic fire and simulated automatic fire.

This conversation is over now.

This conversation is over now.

You are both trying to win by reporting the other’s comments, so I’m kindly asking you both to stop.

You are both trying to win by reporting the other’s comments, so I’m kindly asking you both to stop.