xor

Shit

Anyway 9 is still not exactly “long”

The longest word in that sentence is 8 letters…

LGTM

Sorry, but vote splitting categorically is a thing. You can say “they won’t do better”, but on a fundamental level that just is how FPTP systems work. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but here we are.

As a counterpoint, my country had a direct referendum on voting reform a while back. So yes, you absolutely can change a two party system by voting for one of the two parties.

You’re right, the right wing parties will do better

Is that the change you were going for?

The way you get to positive results is through grassroots movements (including within major parties), protest, and voting in a way that gets you as close to a good outcome as possible. Mamdani’s victory is a glowing example of that strategy working.

I think it’s also worth noting that the independent candidate (Cuomo) was not the 3rd party candidate - since Mamdani and Cuomo were the 2 viable candidates, Sliwa’s votes moved to the nearest viable candidate.

Lots of people seem to think that 3rd parties are defined by lack of party nomination

The issue is that voting for third parties doesn’t make third parties viable in first-past-the-post systems. I, for example, would love if my country had a diverse parliament, but I continue to vote for the saner major party in my constituency because if votes are split between them and the party I’d really like to be in power, then neither of them will be.

Tactical voting is the symptom of two party systems, not the cause.

I’m not sure I’d agree that tackling system factors would be required for a gun ban to reduce deaths - though some of those factors arguably could have more impact than the ban would.

I think one of those systemic issues is that the US has an unhealthy relationship with guns, from my understanding they’re often treated like toys rather than lethal weapons, and I think strict regulation would help combat that too.

Hey, this is my screenshot I posted on Reddit a few years back!

Alright, wrap it up boys, we’ve been made

It makes it difficult to use the pavement, especially for elderly people and people with disabilities, costs the council a bunch of time and money to repair, and doing the repairs often require killing off the tree

I think the best example of how deeply ingrained classism is in the UK is the video of now ex-Prime-Minister Rishi Sunak as a young man:

I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class… well, not working class.

I think people often don’t immediately see how stark the class divide is in the UK, especially tourists, because the UK has a relatively large middle class especially around touristy areas. But the difference between Kensington and, say, Middlesbrough is stark

I like him, so we’re up to America + this one guy

When in doubt, double down with more slurs, I guess?

Technically, it’s basically equivalent to “oh my god”, but the Vietnamese phrase Oi Troi Oi is outstanding

As a more serious aside to the above, it is generally worth paying a bit of attention to which instance other users you interact with. There’s obviously no blanket statement you can make about the users of particular instances, but there are definitely certain instances that are more appealing to… certain groups of users.

lemmy.ml in particular has a bit of a reputation for having tankies on it, but there’s lots of very interesting and reasonable people there (or here, I suppose, given this is an ml community), also.

I think 3) is a really interesting point, and probably the primary reason why a model like that may be less viable for e.g. the Guardian. I think having that parasocial relationship is key to having people take interest enough to be willing to pay for the extra content around the main news output. My concern is that a model like that might incentivise being intentionally divisive and/or making the main content be more like entertainment than information.

I think that’s largely for the same reason; their legal obligations to ensure they don’t facilitate illegal stuff means that the risk of working with companies that do e.g. amateur porn makes the potential consequences (financial processing ban, i.e. effectively the entire company being shut down) massively outweigh the potential benefits.

So you’re right that PH’s legal liability was part of the reasoning, but that pressure largely came from payment processors, for whom the legal consequences are more severe.

Sure, personalised ads can be seen as a form of an invasion of privacy, and everybody has a right to not engage with any organisation for any reason they like. But ads are an imperfect solution to the fact that it’s impossible to run a news organisation at that scale on voluntary donations and un-personalised ads alone, and it’s definitely preferable (in my view, at least) to having a total paywall.

Unless you have an innovative alternative income source to propose, I’m not sure I see what alternative there is.

Respectfully, your argument seems to simultaneously be that they:

a) need a better source of income, because ads and subscriptions aren’t raising enough revenue

b) are acting unreasonably by asking you to allow them to use one of those revenue sources

“Would you rather pay for this service, or have ads on it?” Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask, frankly. Especially given that it can be trivially avoided with an ad blocker, anyway, and will not prohibit you from reading the article if you do so (this, to me, is the key difference compared to other outlets that have similar requirements).

As far as I can tell, their statement was that they will always make the content available for free. Serving that content with some ads alongside it doesn’t violate that policy.

Edit: as an aside, having “my one news source” is a bad way to engage with the media. Every source will have their own priority, biases, errors and blind spots that will change over time; you should have a diverse set of sources, ideally with different mediums.

Per the above, here’s some of the sources in my media diet, in no particular order: The Guardian, Byline Times, TLDR News, BBC News (digital & radio), Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the UN, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, New York Times, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Bellingcat

Edit: wrt “Centralist [sic] bore me”, yeah, sometimes a reasonable take on the news is boring, but important nonetheless. Sorry 🤷