The UN is not meant to be a world government. It’s meant to be a forum that allows all countries to maintain a bare minimum of diplomatic relations. The overarching goal is to prevent nuclear war and prevent WWIII.

It’s predecessor, the League of Nations, was meant to prevent WWII and had some teeth to help enforce their decisions. The result was that it collapsed quickly and did very little to prevent another global conflict.

For me it’s, “I shouldn’t be doing this. I’ll never find it again. This is an awful place to put this,” as I commit to setting something down in the abyss.

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.

That’s the big reason why I loved Diablo II, but was lukewarm on the following two. The skill tree was fixed and a had nice synergies between the skills. I used to keep a notebook with plans for different builds that seemed fun and was primarily interested in the skills rather than items.

In Diablo III, the skill tree was much more limited, and you could swap things out at any time. So planning out a build and starting a new character was pointless. You could just swap the active skills.

It also didn’t seem to have any hard spots. If you followed the main quests, your character improved just fast enough to keep the challenge throughout consistent. So I never really felt a need to grind. I mean, I hate games that are all grinding, but I also like it when there are walls that you have to spend some time and effort to move past.

Diablo IV was even worse for this as the areas adapt to your level. So no matter where you were, the challenge was the same.

Neither of the two were awful, in my opinion, but they dropped the parts that made Diablo so exceptional to me. So I really didn’t spend too much time with either of them whereas I played Diablo II for about 10 years.

And his advisor on, and ambassador to, Israel literally wrote a book promoting a one state solution where he said that the US has a Biblical obligation to help Israel win. His ultimate plan is to set up an apartheid state where Palestinians do not have the same rights as Israelis.

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.

In case you missed the joke, this is a reference to how John Hinckley Jr shot Reagan because he thought it would impress Jodie Foster. It’s posted today because of the assassination attempt on Trump yesterday.

Yeah, reading the article, it sounds like they’ve decided to park at the space station because the parts that malfunctioned during the journey to the space station were not designed to survive re-entry, meaning that they won’t have the opportunity to understand what went wrong with them after they return to Earth. So they’re delaying the departure in order to collect as much information as possible about what went wrong in the first part of the mission. They’re still confident that a safe return is going to happen.

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.

You’re talking about the court system. They are talking about Content ID. YouTube makes it easy to submit faulty copyright claims with little repercussions if they fail, so there are more fraudulent claims than you’d see in the actual court system. They want YouTube to penalize the abuse of their system more strongly so people that upload videos don’t have to deal with so much shit.

I can’t read this article due to a paywall, but I know that Janet Yellen has been leading an effort to set a minimum corporate tax rate worldwide. I don’t know what her stance is on wealth taxes in general, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s just trying to ensure that a minimum corporate tax rate work is not derailed by changing the target to something more controversial.

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.

You’re saying that it doesn’t matter because the US government is able to prove his citizenship, but that isn’t in question. The crux of this matter would be whether OP was ignorant of his citizenship and if that ignorance would have any relevance to his case.

Securing official documents only available to American citizens makes it more difficult to argue that he was ignorant of his status as an American citizen. He likely could still make a compelling argument (provided he acts quickly), but it does make it a bit more difficult.

If you ever use SQL Server Management Studio, you can experience the opposite. Whenever there’s an update, you’ll get a notification in the application, but to actually install it, you need to go to Microsoft’s website to download the latest version and install it yourself. Chrome, on the other hand, updates itself upon restart without requiring anything special from the user.

As a software developer, I really like that part. It means that websites I work on only need to consider the features supported in the latest version of major browsers rather than the last several (as was the case with Internet Explorer).

So, it’s nice and something that I remember really appreciating when Chrome was getting popular. But it’s still a weird thing to brag about.

I like Robert Delaunay, and also his wife, Sonia Delaunay. Their work involves a lot of bright, vibrant colors. It also was rather abstract or impressionistic, which I enjoyed. I think I like Piet Mondrian for similar reasons. Jan Sluyters would be another.

I also like JMW Turner a lot. I’m a sucker for lighting and dynamic skies in paintings, and his work features that very prominently. Frederic Edwin Church is another painter along these lines that I really enjoy.

A more contemporary passive that I like is Nina Tokhtaman Valetova. Her work also involves a lot of bold colors.

For digital copies of written works in the public domain, projectgutenberg.org is a good source.

The vacuum is the hard part, not the maglev. You would need to enclose the entire track inside if a vacuum, and that world be ridiculously expensive and practically impossible with current technology. It’s already very expensive to build a tunnel for a train, which is why they are avoided if possible. But this would need to be all tunnel that is air tight, so even more expensive than regular train tunnels.

To put it into perspective, the current largest manmade vacuum chamber is at a NASA research facility in Ohio. It’s a cylinder with a diameter of 100 feet and a height of 122 feet. If this were laid on its side, about 1.5 New York subway cars could fit inside. The largest vacuum ever made can barely fit the vehicle inside, let alone allow it to travel between two different places where the extra speeds would be warranted.

Yes. The last person that the United States executed for desertion, Eddie Slovik in 1945, was tried in a military court, found guilty, and executed.

I assume that Russia would have rules for the same. Whether they are followed is the question.

Historically, women did not feel welcome at open chess tournaments. Chess talent was seen as synonymous with intellectual brilliance, so some men would not take it well when they were beat by a woman. I like to think that this has changed, but there’s probably still an element of this. Regardless, women’s tournaments were set up so that women who wanted to play chess competitively would have an opportunity to do so safely and without the fear of harassment. They still exist because people still compete in them and enjoy them, so why stop?