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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Nope. The idea in no till is just adding stuff to the top and letting worms and roots handle the tilling.

    I’ve had good luck just dumping a foot or two of finished compost on the ground and growing in it.

    Another solid no-till approach is sheet mulching. You put down a layer of cardboard (to kill weeds), then layers of carbon and nitrogen like straw and kitchen scraps. Wait a few months, then plant. So you could do that in the late summer or fall to prepare a site for spring planting.

    A lot of these things depend on location, though. Something that works great in Pennsylvania might not work as well in Utah.






  • Colloquially, accidents are random events without intention or fault.

    That’s why there’s a push to use neutral terms like “crash” that don’t imply that the “accident” was just a random accidental mistake.

    And fault is often a bit of a misnomer. Many crashes are the result of bad design, but the courts would never say “this pedestrian fatality here is 40% the fault of whichever insane engineer put the library parking lot across a 4-lane road from the library but refused to put a crosswalk there or implement any sort of traffic calming because that would inconvenience drivers”.








  • I mean, to make that argument about the holocaust you’d need to lie about the numbers.

    There were 17 million Jews worldwide in 1939, but only 11 million in 1945. In Europe, the population went from 9 million Jews just before the holocaust to only 3 million Jews continent-wide after it - even counting those in allied and neutral countries.

    Poland, before the holocaust, had over three million Jews; 90% of them were murdered by the Nazis. Those people didn’t just evaporate.

    Meanwhile - did I lie about the numbers? Keep in mind, 2 million is the current number of Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage.




  • The problem is mathematical.

    To win the presidential election, you need to win a majority of the vote in enough states to win a majority of electoral college votes.

    If no-one gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives meets. Each state delegation gets 1 vote. Right now, that means that the Republican wins, due to e.g. Wyoming and Alaska getting just as much of a vote as NY and California, and Republican gerrymandering of swing states.

    There’s literally no way for third party candidates to be elected president. The best that a third party has ever done was in 1860, a 4 way race between a Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist.

    Lincoln, the Republican, got 39.8% of the vote but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes. The Democrat, Douglass, got 29.5% of the vote but only won a single state. Breckenridge got only 18.1% of the vote but carried most of the southern states. And Bell got 12.6% of the vote and carried 3 states - Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

    So Douglas ended up with more than twice as many actual votes as Bell, but got over 3x the electoral vote. And Breckenridge only got less than half as many electoral college votes that he’d need to win, and could realistically have only picked up Bell’s.

    The last time a third party candidate won a single electoral college vote was in 1968, when George Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the former governor of Alabama, and had left the Democratic party after the 1964 civil rights law and 1965 voting rights law were passed by Johnson.

    The Democrats are also more of a big tent than most parties in counties using party list PR would be. In Italy, AOC and Manchin wouldn’t be in the same party, while in the US they basically have to be to win.

    The two party system exists for structural reasons. Plurality only works well in two candidate elections; third parties only do well in districts where they functionally replace a major party. Getting rid of the two party system is possible by changing the structure - switching to e.g. STAR voting in the senate and presidency and using e.g. MMP or STV in the House. But burying your head in the sand to pretend the structural issues don’t exist just doesn’t work.


  • Homebrew is fairly different from pip, cargo or npm in that only python developers use pip, only rust developers use cargo, etc. And those are mostly used to manage libraries, rather than executables.

    Meanwhile, essentially everyone who uses the console uses homebrew regardless of what programming languages they might or might not use. I was making a joke about how good, useful and basically required homebrew is.



  • Israel has been involved in several wars against multiple other nations - for example, in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, it was invaded by Egypt, Syria, and a coalition that included Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Cuba, Jordan, etc.

    Israel is located at a fairly strategic location. Britain and France used Israel during the Suez crisis to stage an attack against Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal is one of the most important global trade routes.

    US support of Israel is a combination of funding American arms dealers and wanting Israel as a strategicly located partner. That’s why we fought proxy wars with the soviet union over it like the Yom Kippur war. The aid is intended not to fight Hamas, but to keep Israel strong against e.g. Iran and other neighbors. They’ve had peace with Egypt for decades, but that might be more because of Israel being strong enough to not be worth attacking.

    I doubt Biden personally supports the Gaza war, but a lot of this stuff is more about realpolitik and strategic concerns than anything else.