Liz

1. the voting system alone won't break the two party system.

2. Approval Voting is a better voting method anyway.

3. We're going to need to move to some kind of proportional system in order to get more parties, and sequential proportional approval is better suited for that task as well.

I'm only coming at you so strong because it's important that we get this right the first time. Approval is the way to go, both in the short term and the long term.

For those that don't know, approval works like this: vote for any number of candidates, most votes wins. That's it. It's dead simple while being one of the more accurate systems by multiple measures.

Link 1 Simulating Elections with Spatial Voter Models

Link 2 Simplified Spacial Model Example

Link 3 2012 OWS Polling

Link 4 Democratic Primary Polling

Link 5 2024 Republican primary

RCV has problems with spoilers, vote-splitting, and non-monotonicity. RCV is so messy we're not exactly sure how often an RCV election was influenced by a spoiler, but it could be as high as 14%, which would put around 75 people into Congress thanks to a spoiler. We know our happened in the Alaska special election, for example.

Anyway, if you want to help switch your local or state elections to approval (and you absolutely should) volunteer here!

Is the chrome OS not full-fledged? I used it once ten years ago. Seemed fine.

Edit: nevermind, this conversation has run its course.

Let's pretend that they do. Do you think the local Texas municipalities know everyone who has a plow attachment for their grader and loader that's road-appropriate and do you think they have contracts with them for road plowing in the event that it snows in Texas? Do they have salt or sand spreads, too? Because if the answer to any of those is no, they ain't clearing the roads to a safe condition.

Now, let's go back to the original point. Chicago almost certainly has some capacity to handle asylum seekers. They're a large city with an international airport. But that capacity is probably limited, since most of their direct international flights are coming from Canada. They don't have enough capacity to handle having extra seekers flown in from other areas that typically handle more. They don't have enough temporary housing contracted, they don't have enough lawyers that specialize in asylum, they don't have enough placement contacts to get people integrated while they wait for court, etc.

Having a system to deal with either snow or asylum seekers requires specialized knowledge, equipment, and organization, none of which are easy to scale overnight when you're suddenly faced with a problem different to the one you're set up for. The people shipping migrants across the country know this perfectly well, but they're counting on you to be ignorant about it, hoping that you'll believe a city can just turn on a dime and perfectly deal with a problem or a magnitude they've never faced before.

The inability for an individual to handle a situation and for a local government to handle a situation are two different things. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there wasn't a single snow plow in Texas.

What? I'm honestly not sure what you think is in my head. I was referring to people who are scared to live life in what is actually a safe area?

Then those people are wrong and don't understand how dealing with snow or asylum seekers works.

I'm not sure that's true, but I'd have to double check. I'm pretty sure it's federal money to be spent as the state sees fit.

Also, in this analogy, this is a regular snow storm. It's just, you know, you gotta have snow plows.

Both are unexpected events for which the affected area isn't equipped but the other is. The main difference here is that people are responsible for dumping these humans into an area that's not equipped to handle them, whereas no one is responsible for snow.

Yeah yeah, I hear you, but there's a difference between rational fear and irrational fear. You know full well I was talking about folks who live in safe neighborhoods. Even then, you should be practiced enough that you're not walking around paranoid and anxious all the time. It doesn't do you any good to shoot at noises in the dark.

If it snows in Texas do we point to Illinois and say then that Texans should be able to adapt fast enough because the Illini can handle a problem they're used to?

Texas does have a more developed system for handling asylum seekers, so yeah.