…really? The post was clearly a joke, and if it had any stance at all it was the celebration of modern medicine.

Skimping on security seems really stupid right now. There are probably a fair few Canadians who would like to do certain MPs harm… not to mention India has been doing political assassinations.

I’m lucky, in a sense, that I don’t have to make this decision. The only viable candidates in my riding are the Conservatives and the NDP, so I can actually vote my conscience.

That’s not how statistics works. You can have a significant effect with a tiny effect size, or a large effect size that on analysis turns out to be insignificant.

How so? The study showed no consistent association between funding and crime rates. That is true verbatim.

If there’s no zero in the dataset, then we don’t have any zero about data. It could be, for instance, that some police have a large effect, but that you hit diminishing returns incredibly quickly.

It specifies who the protester was. If it was a Yellow Vest, they would have said that.

Small comfort to the reporter who got beaten up or SWATted or stalked, or the news organization that gets vandalized or DDoSed. If you’re more likely to visit violence on your critics, people are less likely to criticize you. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s true.

Right-wingers are more likely to beat you up. Changes the calculus for photographers.

We can have perfectly secure online voting, if you’re willing for all votes to be public. Or we can have perfectly secure and anonymous voting, if you’re okay with some secret master list. There are very smart people working on cryptographic voting protocols and I think I would love to live in an online-voting-based direct democracy, but as it stands we don’t know how to set that system up.

Maybe we could make publicly known votes work. Athens did it, the early US did it. But there are problems with both intimidation and incentivization, and we’d need some sort of framework to prevent that.

The staffer has two jobs. Their first job is to send a useless mollifying email. Their second job is to make a tally mark next to the words “PORN AGE GATE – OPPOSED”. (Or these days, probably they click a button on a spreadsheet.)

Writing your MP is like voting. It’s useless individually, but in aggregate it will change their behaviour.

Who let the SCP authors write headlines?

The strategy that avoids the entire system being dismantled. Imagine if there were five congressional representatives from a new Social Democracy Party. Because those five representatives are the deciding vote if it goes along party lines, they can apply pressure on the Democrats to pass healthcare reform. Hooray, everyone loves the Social Democracy Party.

They might take a few more seats from the Democrats’ safe districts in the next election. But in a contentious district where the Republican candidate has a good chance of winning, if half the people who voted Democrat vote Social instead, the vote gets split and the Republican gets in. So many of those people, who want to vote Social, will realize that if they do, then healthcare gets completely gutted. So they hold their nose and vote for the Democrat.

Politicians are motivated by re-election chances. Corporations are motivated by money. The question is not whether a Ministry of Truth would be objectively good, the question is whether it would be less bad than what we have now. And what we have now is a Corporation of Truth with no oversight and laughable regulation. Some oversight, some accountability, and some aligned incentives is better than no oversight, no accountability, and completely misaligned incentives.

Can’t the Speaker shut that shit down? Especially since he’s admitted exactly what he plans to do?

Now we’ve gone from seconds to fix to hours to fix. If you wanted better I’d say to target pumping stations. If you could cause some serious damage to the pumps that push the oil, you could take the entire line out of commission for a good long while.

Of course, the pumping stations are guarded, and it isn’t a good look for ecoterrorists to kill people. But maybe you could pull a Stuxnet.

Down 10% over 6 months isn’t nothing, though – if that rate continues for ten years prices will almost drop to one-tenth. It took us a long time to get into this situation, it might take a while for us to get out. This isn’t a complete solution, but it’s a good start.

Looks like it’s people who report ownership on their taxes, i.e. legal owners. So either one or both parents would be a “homeowner”, depending on whether it’s singly or jointly owned, but other adult tenants wouldn’t be (unless they were partial owners).

You can solve more than one problem at once.

It’s a good idea. I see two problems with it out of the gate:

First, if it isn’t accompanied by other changes, it will increase the equilibrium price of food until the poorest are just as squeezed as they are now, or maybe slightly less. “Other changes” could include price caps (perhaps voluntary – grocery stores which agree to the program must also agree to a set of pricing regulations, and they would agree because it lowers their prices for the public without lowering their profit, meaning they have more customers who buy more), breaking up monopolies, or something drastic like a Crown grocery store chain. There could be other ideas too, but you’d have to do something to avoid it just being a subsidy to grocery giants.

Second, programs which are limited to specific foods often take weird stances about what is “acceptable” for poor people to buy. Not only does this rob them of dignity, it’s often very poorly-managed, results in a lot of administrative overhead, and prevents people from buying things like fresh fruit, certain (even cheaper!) brands over others, or food compliant with their dietary restrictions. I’d instead advocate for either no restrictions on what food is purchased, or a blacklist where the card works in every participating grocery store for every product except explicitly excluded ones.