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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Looking at a map with the current polls (and focusing on the toss-ups), it seems that the most viable path to victory for Harris is to pick up PA, MI, and WI. If she drops PA, she’d need MI, NV, WI or AZ, and GA or NC, but that seems like a big ask. If she wins PA, she could lose WI if she picks up AZ, GA, or NC and she could lose MI if she wins GA, NC, or AZ and NV. But winning PA and losing both WI and MI would require winning AZ and either GA or NC.

    So there are a few paths to a Harris win, and a few don’t seem very farfetched, but none of them seem likely enough for comfort. Definitely not how I was hoping to be feeling at this point in the election.



  • When it comes to lead pipes, it is possible for them to safely carry water without the risk of leaching lead into the drinking water, but it relies on the pipes being properly maintained and the water being properly treated. This is where the issue came with Flint.

    Prior to 2014, the Flint River was a backup source for drinking water with the primary source being Lake Huron. However, Flint was facing a financial crisis and decided to switch their water supply to the Flint River. When they switched, they also chose to save money by not treating the new water source with the additional anticorrosion materials that would be necessary for the different properties of this water. This caused the existing lead pipes to corrode through the protective layer that had naturally formed previously, allowing lead to leach into the water supply.

    Aside from the dangers of lead contamination for the human body, there is another concern when it comes to water treatment. Lead reacts with chlorine, and chlorine is added to drinking water to protect against harmful bacteria. Since there was now a significant amount of lead leaching into the water, a notable portion of the chlorine was now bound to the lead and was not available to kill harmful bacteria. This created the initial problems that were identified by residents in Flint, MI, and it was later discovered that the water supply now had detectable levels of lead.

    So Flint exemplifies the issue well. Lead pipes are dangerous and should not be used, but that danger isn’t absolute. Because lead pipes can be safe, we’ve let this problem fester for decades. However, it takes a lot of care and attention to keep using these pipes safely, and, as can be seen in Flint, it is very easy for those precautions to be tossed aside. When that happens, it becomes a major crisis very quickly.


  • Your assertion is that Biden has not tried to contact DeSantis to offer help. You were provided with an article that says otherwise and dismissed it as false. What evidence do you hand that supports your claim that Biden has not attempted to contact DeSantis? Other Republican governors have said that Biden was quick to reach out in regards to Helene, so it’s hard to believe that he hasn’t tried to contact Florida.




  • I actually had written an answer about the effects of the 12th amendment on the politics StackExchange that details how the original elections worked (or failed) under the old system.

    The interesting thing to me about this is that after Washington, there had always been running mates, and the problem wasn’t that the President and Vice President may be political opponents. The problem was the old system was open to gamesmanship that thwarted the will of the voters.

    1796 did not end with an Adams-Jefferson administration because Jefferson came in second. If things went as planned, it would have been Adams-Pinckney instead. But Hamilton preferred Pinckney over Adams and tried to sway the electors for Jefferson-Burr to vote Jefferson-Pinckney instead, which would have led to a Pinckney-Adams administration despite Pinckney campaigning with Adams as his presumptive Vice President. However, his plan didn’t work out, and Jefferson ended up getting the second most number of votes. This led to an Adams-Jefferson administration which was not supposed to happen. This was bad, but the shady dealings happened in the dark, and Adams was at least elected President in accordance to the popular vote. The politicians at the time thought that they could just sweep this under the rug as they now had a better understanding of how to manage their electors.

    But, that turned out to be false. In 1800, they planned to be smarter with allocating the electors’ votes, but the Democratic-Republicans failed and accidentally cast the same number of votes for both Jefferson and Burr. Under the Constitution, a tie is decided in the House, and the makeup of the House meant that Federalists had the advantage. They preferred Burr over Jefferson, so they tried to subvert the election and appoint a Burr-Jefferson administration rather than Jefferson-Burr. Hamilton ultimately convinced the Federalists to relent and give the election to Jefferson. This was now the second time that Hamilton intervened to orchestrate the results of the election, and this time, it was all out in the open on the House floor. Furthermore, in both of these instances, Hamilton’s actions screwed over Burr, leading to the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel that left Hamilton dead and Burr disgraced. So not only did the election show that this Constitution was failing in the democratic ideals of the revolution, it also led to the untimely downfall of two of the country’s top political leaders.

    So yes, the 1796 election exposed a pretty major issue, and the 1800 election showed that that issue could not be ignored. However, if you’re suggesting that the 1796 election led to the 12th Amendment because it showed the problems that arise when the President and Vice President are not politically aligned, I’m not so sure. It’s possible, but I don’t think that was a revelation to them. At the very least, the parties at the time were always trying to fill both offices with specific people, even before the 12th Amendment. The biggest problem they were trying to address was the way that the old system could be gamed by political elites.

    Also, sorry for the big wall of text. I just find this to be a very interesting topic.


  • It’s not so much that as that the coalitions and eventual parties wanted to hold both seats, so they ran multiple candidates with the assumption that one would be president and the other vice president. The electors would then structure their votes to ensure that the correct person was elected to each position. However, with the difficulties in long-distance communication at the time, this was prone to error. In 1800, this almost led to the candidate for vice president being elected as president.

    After that, they realized that it didn’t make sense to use one slate of candidates for both positions, so they separated out the ballot into president and vice president. That’s essentially how the elections had been running up to that point (particularly because they always had two votes to cast), but it was to easy to make a mistake. Both before and after the amendment, there was a presidential candidate with a running mate vying for the vice presidency.


  • He was a 19 year old man in the Netherlands talking to a 12 year old child in the United Kingdom on Facebook. He traveled to see her in the UK, got her drunk, raped her, and then attempted to get a hotel room with her. They couldn’t, so they slept under a stairwell and he raped her twice the next day. She had told him at one point that he was hurting her, but that didn’t stop him. After that, he flew back to the Netherlands and told her to go to a clinic for contraception.

    So they were essentially strangers to each other with a significant age gap. I don’t know what her exact intentions were when speaking with him, but she was 12. Even if she were thinking about sex, it would not have been with an understanding of what that actually meant. She wasn’t just under age, she was well under the legal age of consent. There’s a reason that children cannot legally consent to sex.

    Also, he’s never really shown any remorse for his actions. At best, he’s said that it was the biggest mistake of his life, but his overall stance seems to be that he regrets getting caught rather than raping a child. He’s much more angry at people calling him a pedophile than he is at himself for doing wrong. So your final points may be true, but they aren’t really relevant to his case because it doesn’t appear that he could be considered rehabilitated. He’s merely completed a prison sentence which was made lighter by Dutch law not classifying his actions as rape at the time.


  • The ask that YouTube manage their system better. Currently, they assume that a copyright claim is valid unless proven otherwise, and it is difficult for content creators to actually get them to review a claim to determine if it is invalid. So, a lot of legitimate users that post videos without actually violating anybody’s copyright end up being permanently punished for somebody illegitimate claim. What we want is for YouTube to, one, make it more difficult or consequential to file a bad claim, and two, make it easier to dispute a bad claim.

    However, that’s not going to happen because the YouTube itself is legally responsible for copyrighted material that is posted to their platform. Because of that, they are incentivised to assume a claim is valid lest they end up in court for violating somebody’s legitimate copyright. Meaning that the current system entails a private company adjudicating legal questions where they are not an impartial actor in the dispute.

    So your concern is legitimate, but it’s ignoring the fact that we already are in a situation where a private company is prosecuting fraud. People want it to change so that it is more in favor of the content creators (or at least, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty), but it would ultimately be better if they were not involved in it whatsoever. However, major copyright holders pushed for laws that put the onus on YouTube because it makes it easier for them, and it’s unlikely for those laws to change anytime soon. That’s what I’d say we should be pushing for, but it’s also fair to say that the Content ID system is flawed and allows too much fraud to go unpunished.






  • He’s referring to what he said when the Senate acquited Trump after he was impeached by the House.

    Trump’s lawyers are trying to argue that he can’t be prosecuted by the courts for actions he took as president unless he is first impeached and convicted in Congress for those actions. When Trump was impeached and acquitted in 2021, McConnell stated that Congress can’t impeach him as he is no longer in office and that the matter is an issue for the criminal justice system.

    As shit as McConnell is, he is not confused with his dates right now, and his statements from 2021 are very relevant to this case and have been discussed in the news a lot recently.

    I’m also not sure what’s wrong with your quoted text. Nothing about it sounds confused to me.

    US News (Feb 14, 2021): Text of McConnell’s Speech

    President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen, unless the statute of limitations has run, still liable for everything he did while in office, didn’t get away with anything yet – yet.

    We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.