India, many cases: https://factly.in/analysis-do-dummy-candidates-with-similar-names-affect-election-results/

Russia, because of course: https://news.sky.com/story/russia-opposition-politician-boris-vishnevsky-says-two-lookalikes-with-same-name-as-him-running-in-st-petersburg-election-in-bid-to-confuse-voters-12402116

that’s just the first two that came up on a web search, I’m sure I could find others on the second page of results

…and to those who claim that US voters are too smart to get tricked by ghost candidates, this guy got 6,000 votes in Florida - enough to tip the win to the Republican candidate - despite not running any kind of campaign: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/frank-artiles-ileana-garcia-florida-election-b1820020.html

I think you’re letting what you want to be true override what you deep down know to actually be the case. But I guess I should know by now not to attempt injecting reality into an old fashioned partisan pile-on thread.

Trump’s approach is definitely corrupt and yet another of the hundred reasons he should be in jail.

But… recent years have seen other flawed democracies where unknown candidates with no previous track record in politics and no party affiliation but who just so happen to have the same name as a major party’s candidate show up. There clearly needs to be something in place to mitigate these shenanigans, but it seems more like a fix that’s needed in the ballot design, rather than the insanity that Trump’s pushing.

This really misses the point of [thing that the post wasn’t about]

FIFY

Last week, Google’s Finland country manager, Antti Järvinen, apologised for the forest clearings but claimed the company had acted “on the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time”.

That understanding being “it’s more profitable to just do it and pay the fine”

The first line was broadly right. But you blundered on the second, especially by phrasing it in a condescending way, because how many figures you should quote to depends on more context than just how many figures the input was quoted to.

financial misconduct

It’s always a grift. Time and time again all over the world, the far right are fuelled not from true belief in their bullshit but from the realization they can make bank by peddling hatred.

what’s to work out? just provide a phone number and city as your address, and one day someone will call you and mutter something unintelligible and you say “TELEGRAM… TELEGRAM” and then they telegram you to ask where you are and you send your location and then they show up with your grand piano on the back of their moto and ask for a mystery extra delivery fee.

That doesn’t even stand up on its own terms.

Farenheit doesn’t “intuitively” tell you whether there’s going to be ice on the road or whether your pipes are liable to freeze, and also has the added pain in the ass that on a very hot day you need 3 digits to represent the number instead of 2, and doesn’t even compensate for it by removing the possibility of negative values which can still also happen.

On top of that the extra scale doesn’t give you a perceivable difference between the numbers, that is to say, I could put you in a room and ask you if it was 70F or 71F and you’d basically be guessing.

Celsius on the other hand is eminently relatable: negative number means ice/snow, single digit means heavy coat, tens means lighter coat/sleeves, twenties means nice, thirties means hot, forties means remain indoors.

You’ve hit on my bugbear with most post-apocalyptic fiction: pretty much universally humans have shown that they will tend towards co-operation when placed in situations of hardship. But most writers, game designers and preppers want you to think that when civilization collapses everyone will be like “there’s no rules any more! I can murder whoever I want and take their stuff!”

The alt text on that strip seems especially pertinent