From wikipedia:

Lev Parnas is a former associate of Rudy Giuliani who was involved in the Trump–Ukraine scandal and the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory. He was convicted of illegal donations to Trump’s campaign and sentenced to 20 months in prison in 2022.

In 2019, Parnas served as a translator for a legal case involving Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin and self-admitted Russian mob connections, who is fighting extradition to the U.S. to face bribery charges. Firtash has been free on bail in Vienna since 2014.

Strikes me as somebody who has a vested interest in adding more fuel to the fire. Either way this is scary and fucked.

I know its unlikely, but I hope they make another attempt and it’s successful.

I’m not in the same boat, but I empathize. I want the fuck out. Best of luck, and I hope you’re safe.

Don’t need to, Trump is actively stopping federal progress on climate change. Kamala having zero policy on it, doing literally nothing and maintaining the status quo is always better than accelerationism under Trump.

I also mentioned immigrants, and etc. Etc because there are lots of other people being targeted that I don’t have the energy to list.

Trans people, immigrants, etc fearing for their lives, being kidnapped to a foreign death camp, and going full conservationist on climate change is a lot bigger of a difference than 1.3%.

Idk I kinda like being able to take a shit without having to fill out a form every time.

Simplicity tends to sell better than complexity, and RCV is the one that’s known of already.

Agreed. And that’s why I think approval is such a big improvement over ranked choice.

“Tell us who you approve of, candidate with the most approval wins”

Is a hell of a lot simpler than

“Rank every candidate without ranking multiple as the same level, then we check if any candidate has a 50% majority, if not, the lowest candidate gets booted and the next wave of second choices comes in, repeat until there is 50% majority.”

And that’s before the peripheral benefits.

So far they’ve been more than happy to ignore everything except the status quo, unfortunately.

Agreed. It’s honestly sad.

My city/state has been warming up to these kinds of talks and candidates at least, which gives me a glimmer of hope. But for now it is not enough.

Arguably, RCV is just as complicated as STAR, and approval is simpler than RCV. And part of the difficulty in the heavy lift to get RCV is that it has some pretty rough flaws, flaws that don’t exist within the alternatives.

And the political environment is easing up to the idea of moving towards better voting methods. I’m not saying we should let perfection be the enemy of progress. All I am saying is that if we are going to be making changes, we should at least attempt the better options.

I absolutely agree with pushing the issue at a local level, however we should probably be aiming for approval or STAR voting:

https://dividedwefall.org/star-and-approval-voting/

RCV is way better than our current system, but even RCV has flaws.

We also need regulation requiring election reform within party primaries, because as of right now it is a clown show.

Yeah, the NPVIC is… I mean, let’s be honest here. It’s not great. It’s better than our current system, absolutely.

Agreed.

But it’s far, far inferior than rank choice.

I’d say it goes like

Approval >>> Ranked >>>>>>>>>>>>> FPTP (popular vote) >>> FPTP (electoral college)

Agreed.

We would need election reform for that to change, and while we are getting closer to that state by state, I don’t think we will ever get enough states to sign on for the laws to kick in.

I assume you’re talking about the NPVIC. But yeah, we are getting marginally closer to reform each year. And public sentiment towards FPTP voting is changing, which is good. The only downside is that it is slow, and people seem more keen on rank choice instead of approval (IMO the best).

And these changes will never happen with our current system in place, so it’s a catch 22. Can’t change the system without reform, can’t reform with our current system.

Honestly that’s the case with most problems in the U.S., it’s just a bunch of catch 22s the whole way down, and the whole way up.

Yeah, congress needs to be stacked with representatives that actually give a shit about protecting workers and democracy. And that’s never going to happen with a 2 party system and legalize bribery (“lobbying”).

And those things won’t get fixed until people start giving a shit and voting accordingly, and/or we have massive protests.

I don’t think that’s a starter.

I wasn’t being literal. There are a million things that need fixed, a few of them you’ve listed and I 100% agree with. The one I named was just one of them.

IIRC about 2/3rds of americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That is not an economy that is working for the people.

We need dramatic overhauls that Biden, and especially Trump will never deliver. We need employee ownership of companies for starters.

as “literally anyone except felons”

Oh don’t worry, they’re revising that part too. They want no limits whatsoever. They want felons to have guns.

I don’t think there are enough such edge cases for it to make sense for it to be legal.

If a corp needs an employee to be that close, then they should hire local, and/or rotate staff.

At a bare minimum, I agree, no corp should profit off of housing.

That’s how a lot of co-ops works. Or maybe it’s called non-market rental. I don’t remember the exact name but it’s definitely a thing.

Either way, landlord parasites are not needed.

restricting corporations from purchases, banning Airbnb (yes, they drive prices up, and if you use them, you are contributing to it), penalizing if unit is not occupied (though enforcement of this will be hard), or banning foreign investors.

Agreed, we should be doing all of those things. Corporations should not be able to own any kind of housing at all, and multi unit buildings should be under non-profit co-ops.

And to penalize unoccupied housing, we should have a georgist taxation system.

That, and there is a lot more stabbing in the Klingon Empire.