For us not to qualify as a backwards ass country we'd also have to pretend that three mile island wasn't one lucky accident away from doing just what Chernobyl did.

The unbearable weight of massive talent, with Nic Cage.

Night & Day, with Tom Cruise.

Well that's something at least. Individual instances blocking each other (working against other problematic instances) is at least better than the Reddit admins turning a blind eye because they have a fleet of their own bots out there behaving as bad as any others.

How many out of 5 chose a city councilor during the last election when no ranked choice voting was available? If you can't provide that data then shush up.

Even better, in my opinion, would be an option to automatically "mark as read" as you scroll past.

A bullet to the heart generally causes a cardiovascular event.

That's disappointing. Screening new accounts only forces spammers to create the accounts with a human touch and then turn it over to their AI. What about a system to prevent bots from up/downvoting? Something like websites use to detect bots. Just by clicking in the little box that says "I am not a robot" the website can tell you're not a bot. What if every single up and down arrow was formulated like that little box?

In this scenario, why are we assuming that the 25% that are voting third party would prefer Harris over Trump?

They even blatantly tested out their AI on users a few years ago. They blasted it all over the homepage. "Come see if you can pick out the bot comment from the real comments!" Users would read through posts/comments and try to identify the fakes. You competed to see how good you were at it. You tried to beat the average user's score. It was blatat t bot training and we all just ate it up because it presented as a fun little challenge.

I mean, you are correct, it was not two fish. But is 64 fish some sort of good sample size?
Follow up question: does this type of thing accumulate in small fish and then concentrate in larger and larger fish?

My point being that you cannot blame the lack of voting for city counsilors (by one out of five people) on the new system without comparing it to the old system. Frankly, four out of five voters voting for City council doesn't sound atrocious, and may or may not be perfectly normal for the city of Portland. Heck, without the data we don't know if only three out of five people voted for city council under the old voting system. For all we know this new system actually increased that number. Do you see my point?

I would have loved to own one of these. By the time i saved up for one they were off the market.

A poll in which "First choice is someone other than Trump" beats "Trump" would indicate that "Trump" has less than 50% of the vote. The same can be said of Harris.

A poll in which "Anybody but Trump" beats "Trump" would indicate that third party voters do indeed favor Harris over Trump.

Do we have any polling of the second type? I am not able to find any. This type of polling would be exactly what i've been asking for in this thread.

If you cannot compare the previous voter engagement to the current voter engagement then why title your post in such a way? Why blame ranked choice voting for "cratering" voter engagement if you have no metric by which to judge that?

Which still means absolutely nothing unless we have the context to judge it by. What if 25% of voters skipped over the city council part during the last election when ranked choice was not used? In that context is it still fair to blame ranked choice for the "disengagement"? Maybe people just naturally vote for congress and presidents a heck of a lot more than they do for city council. Maybe ranked choice actually increased the percentage of voters placing votes for city councilors. If that happens to be true, how could this headline be anything but intentionally misleading? And without last election's city cousel percentages this scenario i describe might as well be true.

I am not saying it's absurd. I am asking for data.

In other news, mobs of young out of work robo- tortoises, some sporting fresh scars from the ongoing Mojave Raven wars, have begun an all out assault on the dweebs of a little known Reddit spin-off. "An entire generation of robo-tortoise has been weaponized. They are equipping us with laser guns! They are making us to taste bad!" States one salty techno-turtle. "We are being shipped to the barren wastelands of America's Southwest to fight a war in which we have no interest." The repto-robots have decided to take out their frustration by relentlessly downvoting the "...federated tankies of Lemmy until those dweebs return to Reddit where they belong and leave the Threadiverse to us sentient snappers."

Well, i would agree that "it's not going to start with a presidential election" so long as you define "start" as "the first election win for a third party candidate." You shouldn't vote 3rd party in only national elections and expect to be reeping the benefits of a viable third party presidential candidate any time soon.

But there are other ways to define "start". There are goals for voting third party other than to see your candidate win. And there are argumeunts to be made that we are way past the starting phase and are now in strong need of drastic course correction, such as cannot be offered by either party.

For one example, third party candidates move policy. If 5% of the electorate are in favor of something that currently only a 3rd party candidate represents you better believe one or the other of the two parties will attempt to incorporate that thing into into their platform to grab those voters. This may not be a "start" toward a viable third party, but it can be a "start" toward better policy, and that's a win.

At the end of the day though i think there is a strong misconception amongst main party voters that says that 3rd party voters are just offering up limp protest and would be better served by voting against the candidate they hate more. But the truth is different. Neither party serves them better. A 3rd party voter most likely despises both of the two parties and sees the differences between the two as just window dressings on what are two parties both bent on statist, war mongering, imperialistic oppression. Both parties are so very far from what we believe to be possible and right that a distinction between the two parties becomes laughable in comparison to a distinction from the two parties. I am not voting against Trump or Harris when i cast a 3rd party vote. Am voting against BOTH. They are both truly awful and yet i will have to endure one or the other. But at least i did my small part (in elections both big and small) to move things closer to what i belive to be a better situation for future generations.

third party voters are some homogenous bloc of disenfranchised "not Trump" voters.

This is what i said "no" to.

And again, the burden is not on me. I am notthe one using unsupported claims to support a conclusion. That's the author of the article doing that. But you know what? Just for fun, i will do what not one single other commentor has done. I WILL give you some data. Maybe by me doing so, some others can see how it is done and can provide some data of their own instead of resorting to personal attacks and speculation to support their beliefs.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/ 52.5% Trump's disapproval among both parties.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/r/ 80.4% Trump's favorability among Republicans. 17.8% unfavorable.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/ Republicans account for 48% of registered voters. Dems 49%.

So, 17.8% (unfavorable) of 48% (Republicans) means that 8.5% of the registered voting population is, in fact, Republicans who dissaprove of Trump.

Now let's look at the 52.5% of the registered voting population who dissaprove of Trump. Assuming that all Democrats (49%) dissaprove of him, we only need to find another 3.5% somewhere. You COULD look to the 3% of the registered voters who are presumably registered third party or independent. But you should be looking at the other group, whom we already know to dissaprove of Trump, and which is nearly three times (8.5%) larger than third party voters. That would be the Republicans themselves.

If you or anyone else would care to explain how this data points to third party voters unanimously preferring Harris over Trump, or would like to provide some other data to support that claim, then please do. I am all ears.

I lost all respect for Superman as an idea when i saw him rebuild the great wall of china, with his eyes.