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You don't need control of the House to work on bills that you don't even intend to pass until the next session of congress, though. There's nothing stopping the Republicans, Democrats, or even average citizens from writing bills right now that are intended to be voted on by future sessions of congress.

And the House of Reps voting on the bill next week is also meaningless, because the bill has a 0% chance of passing this session with the democrats in control of the senate - and the House of Reps would then have to pass it again once a new session starts. Which, they probably will - but that doesn't make the vote next week somehow less meaningless. So the headline is pure clickbait: Congress isn't about to "gift" Trump anything. The gifts will come next year.

That's it, yes - each state gets as many electoral votes as it has congressmen, including senators. Most states award all of their electoral votes to whoever wins the state, with no proportionality to it at all - only two states (Nebraska and Maine, neither one large) do anything proportional with their votes.

With a system like that it's easier to see how things can end up with the less popular candidate winning - they can, for example, sneak by with 50.1% of the vote in just enough states to win, but bomb it out with 20% of the vote in all the other states. That's an extreme example specifically for the purpose of illustration, but less extreme versions of that are usually what happens.

The electoral votes also aren't distributed entirely fairly - the number of electoral votes per person tends to be larger for less populated states. The less populated states also tend to be Republican states. So in a very real sense, each person's vote counts for "more" in those states, and "less" in states with high populations. I don't believe it's really possible to fix this problem without vastly increasing the number of electoral votes, but congress currently has its size capped at 535 members for what I consider not very good reasons.

Yes, the whole system is trash from the ground up. But much of its structure is defined in the constitution itself, which is very difficult to change.

Faithless electors have never once affected the outcome of a US election.

This is not correct. The electoral college is exactly as susceptible to giving the win to the person with fewer votes as it was in 2000 and 2016. It's also not an issue that's due to any state in particular and is not an issue that can be solved by individual state action. The NPVIC would fix it but requires the cooperation of many states and is not in effect, and has stalled pretty hard in recent years.

Nah, the bill was never passed in the senate so it isn't law at all. Just unenforceable posturing.

God, you're exhausting. They don't sell the data. Get over it. The email left no room for ambiguity. You're reaching so far it's embarrassing. Are you really that jaded?

Reviving a long-dead thread for a relevant update, in a top-level post because you deleted all of your replies in the thread where it was relevant.

Mozilla did reply to my email asking for clarification on their Fakespot privacy policy, and whether they collect or sell user data, as we were discussing - though that reply took them four weeks. Their response in full:

""" Hello,

Thank you for contacting Mozilla and for your question. At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws. The only data we share outside of Mozilla are generalized aggregated metrics with service providers who make Faksepot run to help us with logging and debugging issues to provide an uninterrupted experience for our customers, and we do not share this data for monetary gain. We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

We trust this answers your questions and thank you again for reaching out.

Kind regards, Mozilla """

The main difference to me is the lack of a profit motive, which is the primary driver of enshittification. The federation helps harden it against things like abusive admins, since it's dead simple to jump ship to another instance in that case, but honestly that's pretty secondary to me.

There was this game of dots I played against my 12 year old niece. The game was looking pretty even with two obvious large snakes building up - she ended up making the move that opened up the first, smaller snake for myself, hoping to force me to open the larger one for her. But I purposely didn't claim the ending squares in the first snake, which let me avoid opening up the second for her. So she was forced to then open up the second snake to me, letting me claim basically the entire board.

The second image explains it better - with the black lines as the setup she left me with, the usual strategy would be on the left, while I played as on the right, with the blue line as my last move.

That's essentially how Generative adversarial networks work, and the effect is that the generative program gets better at making its fakes be undetectable

Notes in Google Keep will sync between mobile and web

13 sextillion transistors is about 1625 billion transistors per human, though - or just over 200 iPhones' worth of transistors per person. That's still about an order of magnitude higher than I'd have guessed.