Burn the phoenix again.

Yeah, Bleem won that lawsuit. And the next lawsuit. And the next.

And then they ran out of money.

They sent goons to his house.

What he got out of it is, they left.

they should force WhatsApp/Apple/Signal/Telegram to scan all our private messages

Average person: “Fuck right off.”

for suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM)

Average person: “OH WELL I GUESS IT’S OKAY THEN.”

I’d appreciate any details on how the fuck.

Sauron could besiege and assault Tom’s forest, and find his strongest engines casually turned into decorative fountains, with any surviving troops rigorously tending the gardens around them. He could march up to Tom’s front door, himself, and hammer at it with a mace the size of a man, and only achieve polite knocks which somehow turn into knock-knock jokes, which would send him into downright apocalyptic rage. He would literally breathe fire.

But then after interminable years of arson, scheming, setting things on fire, skirmishing, setting the fire-machines on fire, wargaming, setting the fire on fire, and generally trying to smash everything with every other available thing - Sauron would catch Tom out for a walk and say “What a lovely trinket! May I see it?!” And Tom would just fucking hand it to him.

If Sauron got anywhere close while Tom still had the ring, sheer narrative convention would ensure Tom keeps it for as long as possible. It is not his role to fight and defeat the embodiment of discordant evil and mortal suffering. But it is absolutely his role to defy change, flout attacks, and generally frustrate any effort to deal with him in sensible terms. Because in a world of material concerns, laced throughout with hints of magic, he is an outright cartoon character.

It’s like Satan, who is the devil, going up against Roger Rabbit. “Do you mean to tell me you could have done that at any time?” “No! Only when it was funny.”

… unless the customer is over 18, right? The age where an age rating doesn’t fucking matter?

This is the same shit as Australia “refusing classification.” Oh cool, guess it’ll default to the highest bar to entry, oh no wait the whole thing was just an excuse to censor fictional people taking imaginary drugs.

And the author spent a year hassling Mozilla about how killing XUL plugins would make his wildly popular plugin nearly impossible. Did they move one iota to help that? Nope. Did they adopt DTA functionality natively, like they’d absorbed Pocket? Did they fuck. Their mantra for two straight decades has been “just rewrite!” and they cannot imagine why they kept hemorrhaging devs and plugins and users once Chrome slimed its way into everyone’s options.

Never give Nintendo money.

fearmonger that it would split the vote

… it’s a ranked ballot. This country already prevented that, as a concept.

It’s gonna bug me for ages that these people seem unaware how functional their democracy is.

There’s a dozen Firefox extensions that really matter, at any given time. Mozilla has never appeared to give a particular shit about any of them. Paying special attention based on popularity wouldn’t be ideal, but for fuck’s sake, their passive-aggressive treatment keeps burning out the developers who fuel their ecosystem, and it would take vanishingly little effort to shield their keystone plugins.

If their active neglect had ruined both uBlock and DownThemAll - I’m not sure I’d be using Firefox anymore, and I’ve been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Why the fuck would anyone normal even consider it?

This is why the JVP was able to win - they consolidated the working class Sinhala vote, while not threatening Tamils and Muslims.

With Sri Lanka’s ranked ballots, they didn’t need consolidation. Working-class voters could have had this, at any time, with no risk. And if voters keep wasting their second and third votes, then this new plurality-winning party is going to trounce the split alternatives, until one of them disappears, or both of them disappear.

I appreciate the background - but it doesn’t change the math. When voters only get (or only use) one choice, and there’s two parties on the same side of a divide, one of them has to utterly dominate the other, to stand any chance against a popular third party. If you think these two parties have irreconcilable differences then they’re probably both fucked.

Either these voters start using their ranked ballots properly - or they’re going to keep getting a two-party system. Changing which two parties matter doesn’t change that system.

The most anticipated release of 2013.

Never give Nintendo money.

If most voters keep picking one guy, these three parties will become two parties, or the two more-similar parties are fucked. That is what Duverger’s law is about. It doesn’t mean third parties can never win - it means a three-party system cannot last.

If Sri Lankan voters remember how their own goddamn electoral system works, they can have a four-party system, no problem. But as you point out, they’re acting like they have America’s elections, where this schmuck who got 17% is now a massive liability to the runner-up who got 33%. If those two presumably-liberal blocs got together, they could handily oppose the leftist bloc. But if they’re competing for the same exclusive votes then they’ll both become irrelevant.

Sri Lanka already fixed the thing that breaks Plurality. Their voters just aren’t using it, for some goddamn reason.

Or they were the people who made this year’s result possible.

Objectively not. Every single person who wanted him, last time, could have listed him… also. They sure didn’t. His support was three percent. That’s not a viable path to power, that’s a punchline.

He’s done stuff since then. Right? Campaigned, presumably? Been in the news? Built up the expectation that a meaningful number of people would prefer him over other major candidates? That is what made this result possible. Losing a prior election is not a prerequisite.

Frankie Boyle: “Humans actually make quite poor shields. That’s why we invented… the shield.”

Dude had 3% support despite everyone being able to toss him a vote just-in-case. Anyone who voted for only him, “last election,” was a fool. That negligible support is not what made him a viable candidate in the separate election they “just did.”

No kidding your choices depend on how other people vote, that’s what democracy is. If you can’t rally a shitload of people behind your guy… you lose. That part is not the failure of Plurality. Plurality blows because two similar groups can be wildly popular and still get destroyed by a minority of schmucks.

The winner of this election was not decided by everyone seeing through The Matrix or whatever and deciding to defeat a broken electoral system. It sounds like 95% of them are functionally unaware of which electoral system they have.

It causes massive damage with ramming attacks.

Did it, though? The iceberg kept floating.

What you want is Blizzaga, but wetter.

I had hopes for recurrent systems becoming kinda… Dixie Flatline. Maybe not general enough to learn, but spooky enough to evaluate claims.

Well thank god that’s not what I wrote. What does run on corn flakes is natural GI… in several senses.