The Android suit has different claims in it than the iOS suit. One of the issues with Android is the allegation that Google killed deals Epic was trying to make with Android hardware manufacturers (by voicing objections to the manufacturers, who rely on Google) to get the Epic Store app preinstalled on some Android devices.
In the court hearings, Epic explained how they implemented their payment processor change addition without catching Apple's notice. The app simply asks the Epic servers for a list of payment processors available to display to users, and at review time it was only the Apple one. A week after the update, they added another entry to the DB, and now there's a second option, without modifying app code.
I've been a PC game pass subscriber since they started it up and haven't been disappointed. I honestly think it's one of the best values in gaming right now. Not every game on game pass is something you're going to love, but they have big depth and variety and a commitment to NEW releases, no waiting years for big titles like PS+ (to be clear, I own a PS4 and a PC, no actual Xbox).
It's more complicated than that. They blend traditional food crops with trees, shrubs, etc, often alongside some kind of transition cycle where they'll change what is growing where over time. Sort of a blend of sustainable logging with farming.
Yeah, I lost my phone for the first time last year, and was very very glad for this default, because I was able to remove 2FA on my now lost phone from my computer that remained logged into google services, and log into google on the replacement phone, and reset 2FA to that new device.
I don't understand why these large companies don't incorporate some type of printable backup code that can be used if your 2FA device is lost/broken. I've incorporated this type of system multiple times in the past, and it works wonderfully.
My paranoia about my devices stability and its 2FA software (LG G4 bootloop victim) means that I keep two phones with 2FA verification and applications enabled - one stays safe at all times so that in case I lose or drop my new one I can use the backup.
I've lost my phone and been able to re-connect to every 2FA service I use without any need for human interaction. For google I was saved because my laptop was still logged in and I could turn google's 2fa off.
Basically everyone else has an "I lost my device" thing and a fallback to SMS codes or email links. This certainly weakens 2FA in general, but strict 2FA is unusable in practice.
Just store your 2fa totp key or qr code or backup somewhere that is either protected by 2fa (password manager, online storage) , or is available offline (file cabinet).
Some online storage services have secure areas requiring 2fa to open which would be suitable.
Most services that use standard TOTP codes have backup codes that you can print out and store in a safe, and the ones that don't you can save the QR code that enrolls the 2FA app and use it again to re-enroll a new device if needed.
Obviously the backup codes are preferred as you're not storing a master key to all future codes, but it's a lot easier to manage than a second device (at least for me).
The hedge fund placed exec who has been running Gizmodo into the ground for the last year. Part of a larger trend of user-hostile design changes that have caused quite a lot of controversy as they attempt to extract as much value in the short term as they can. Last time they implemented this exact change it only lasted a few days before the writers at most of the Gizmodo sites more or less openly revolted. It resulted in the shut down of the left leaning news site though. I'm wondering whether we'll see a repeat, or if they'll shrug and give up.
Feels like you either missed the point of some of those specific recent examples, or you're oversimplifying them.
With the show, Cops (Live PD as well), the overriding concern was that the film crew and the process had turned law enforcement work into voyeuristic spectacle, literally profiting off the pain of others (some may believe those people deserve that pain, but that's a separate issue), and possibly even influenced the officers being filmed to engage in their duties differently than they might have otherwise.
Left out, also, is that 30 Rock's "censored" episodes featured blackface, which at this point, the issues with the practice have been covered exhaustively, and large corporations are only now deciding to care as they see public opinion shift, but it wasn't a great idea when they produced those episodes at the time, either.
You are forgetting about Paw Patrol, there is no excuse to try to cancel an innocent (and very popular) show for preschool kids just because one of the characters is a puppy dressed as a cop.
That was the kind of article you would've expected from The Onion, not the New York Times.
I get it, people are desperate to do something for the cause or to prove they belong to the "good side", but this is insane.
It was banned because it's a racial slur. It was always near the top of the list for any permanent banning. Mark Rosewater has gone on record about not printing it further because of this more than 5 years ago. https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/106100301518/
All seven recently banned cards are indefensible in both casual or competitive play.
Banning MTG cards is absolutely cancel culture in action, and is a completely indefensible act. Anyone who supports it is supporting cancel culture.
Stone-throwing Devils isn't a racial slur, unless it's one of those weird things where they go back and dredge up something forgotten. As certain segments of society are absolutely expert at doing. They exult in creating division and making us fight with one another, when we should be united against the ruling classes.
I knew that but I also was misremembering the article. The idea came from twitter comments, the article was just reporting it, not advocating it.
I was wrong.
> into voyeuristic spectacle, literally profiting off the pain of others (some may believe those people deserve that pain, but that's a separate issue),
The entire news media is like that in a large sense. What purpose does interviewing a family whose home got destroyed in a tornado serve? Of course they feel bad. Of course they will cry. “If it bleeds it leads”. Just like a car accident on the side of the road, people are drawn to watch. The news media profits off of that voyeuristic impulse to watch the misery of others.
And that's a fully valid criticism of a certain style of mainstream news that I completely agree with, and that is also being discussed in some circles, and even by some journalists, although it hasn't hit mainstream media level consideration openly. All falls into the massive and fraught discussion around how news gets paid for.
> All falls into the massive and fraught discussion around how news gets paid for.
More appropriately I think (at least for TV), it falls into the discussion of how new doesn't see falling revenues. In the past, news was a payment back to the public major networks paid to get access to the spectrum they were using. when it became obvious there was a way to make the news divisions positive in cashflow instead of cash sinks, they were optimized for that.
Now, where most news is probably delivered through an entirely different medium, even that minimal connection to the public good incentivized through the spectrum allocation is almost gone.
In the distant past, NBC, CBS and ABC would probably have been happy to do away with their news divisions, because it cost them to run them. That they would now fight you tooth and nail to keep them for the opposite reason should put into stark contrast how the incentives have completely changed.
Is it possible to completely disentangle money from news? Probably not, and it might not be a good idea. How do you fund investigative journalism if you do? Influence will flow from the money no matter what, but then again maybe that's not any different than it is now.
I don't know the solution. I'm also aware I'm glossing over the fact that different parts of the news industry had perverse incentives long before this (newspapers...), and that news probably was never as altruistic as I'm making it out to be, but it does seem like it's gotten worse. I have to imagine if the Founding Fathers had the current status quo in mind when they wrote the constitution and initial amendments, they would have tried to put some restrictions on the ownership of the press to go along with those freedoms.
> What purpose does interviewing a family whose home got destroyed in a tornado serve?
Fostering empathy, ginning up public support for emergency response. Whereas COPS etc were more effective at ginning up public support for brutal policing.
Also there's a key difference: film crews don't influence tornadoes.
"Whereas COPS etc were more effective at ginning up public support for brutal policing."
This is hugely speculative, in fact, I would argue just the opposite: if anything, it shows how ugly, grinding, boring and hugely 'social' policing is, as opposed to anything physical. It's literally about dealing with really weird and sketchy people in difficult situations all day every day.
I'm well aware of the nuance of 'COPS' but those issues don't remotely rise to the need for cancellation. There is quite a lot of 'reality' that comes through even the producers lens, and that's worth something. It's the original 'reality TV'.
And as for 30 Rock: they were obviously not doing 'Blackface' - they were using the notion of Blackface as a comedic device.
'Blackface' is a vaudevillian concept of dressing up as Black people in order to mock them. In 30 Rock, the device was used only by idiotic characters doing stupid and embarrassing things. If anything, they were embellishing the obvious social principle that 'Blackface is bad'.
That people misconstrue 'doing Blackface' with 'mocking Blackface' is quite literally at the heart of the problem of the 'mob mentality' - and that's not even getting into the more complicated issue of whether 'dressing up as someone of possibly another race' is even wrong or immoral in the first place.
And of course, sometimes jokes are a little off - that's comedy and it's ok. In what world do we start banning gags for this reason?
Blackface was obviously wrong 10 years ago and nothing has changed. It's still wrong.
What has changed is the fascism and power of the Twitter mob's ability to deny any kind of context.
Edit: I should add that 'Banning 30 Rock' is not 'catching up with popular interest' - this is misconstruing the opinion of the mob (or your opinion) with the opinion of 'most people'.
Nobody cares about 30 Rocks antics but a few people on the fringes with outsized voices. Network and Ad execs are fearful of said voices - and that's mostly it.
We all live in 'thought bubbles', it's worth walking down the street and looking around, because it's immediately clear that 'most people' are not 'like us'.
If you were to show 100 random episodes of comedy, with a few 30 Rocks sprinkled in, to a 100 Americans, I don't believe a single person would initiate an objection to any of it, let alone 30 Rock.
I'll go further: not even those people who even noticed the cheekiness of the comedy thought to themselves that they ought not to publish it. Not even most of the press writing about it - they're just following the themes and narratives of the hour because that's what they do. It's being pulled because some people (a very small group) are looking for reasons to be outraged and in a hyper-sensitive moment, nobody, but nobody wants to 'disagree' with said outraged person.
>And of course, sometimes jokes are a little off - that's comedy and it's ok. In what world do we start banning gags for this reason?
This one. To be honest, I'd be real careful right now to pick any hills to die on right now with respect to language, humor, and various other things unless you're really prepared to die on those hills.
Major this. Also plug for CGP Grey's "politics in the animal kingdom" video series that explains exactly why we have that 'lesser of two evils' problem, and how exactly RCV and Alternative vote systems resolve that problem, in a very simple, understandable way.
The problem with Fair Vote and the CGP Grey videos, while I like them for an introduction to the subject, both have two very misleading points.
1) When they say RCV they specifically mean Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There are many other, and better, RCV methods.
2) They overclaim IRV's ability to solve the spoiler effect (see my other comment for links). While other RCV methods have strong resistance to spoiler effects, IRV has a weak resistance. CGP actually hints to this when he talks about that IRV doesn't prevent a trend towards two party systems.
I think when people talk about RCV (in the context of single-winner elections), they're almost always talking about the same thing as IRV.
"Ranked voting" is the more general term.
> Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate (or candidates) is (or are) elected (and different methods may choose different winners from the same set of ballots). The other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked.[1]
> The similar term "Ranked Choice Voting" (RCV) is used by the US organization FairVote to refer to the use of ranked ballots with specific counting methods: either instant-runoff voting for single-winner elections or single transferable vote for multi-winner elections. In some locations, the term "preferential voting" is used to refer to this combination of ballot type and counting method, while in other locations this term has various more-specialized meanings.
I share your frustration with FairVote and CGP Grey (and recently an episode of Patriot Act) painting an unrealistically rosy picture of RCV/IRV as the solution to our voting problems.
There are some other systems that aren't ranked voting at all that I think would be significantly better than IRV, such as approval voting, range voting, and STAR voting (which is basically range voting with an immediate runoff between the top two).
For some reason, FairVote persists in claiming that in approval voting (which is like traditional first-past-the-post voting except that you can vote for more than one candidate), you somehow maximize your voting influence by voting for only one candidate. They call this bullet voting. I don't know what possible reason one could have for believing this.
They show "resistance to strategic voting" as "high" under RCV and "low" under approval voting. This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them. Under RCV, it's only safe to put you first choice first if they are either clearly in the lead or so far behind they have no hope of winning. If the outcome is in doubt, it's possible to cause your first place candidate to lose by putting them first. (That's a weird problem for any voting system to have.)
For this reason, I don't trust FairVote; I don't think they're presenting their preferred voting system or the alternatives honestly. They're more of an advocacy/PR organization that's pushing their chosen solution out of a sense of inertia or something.
The Center for Election Science is a smaller, less-well funded group that advocates for approval voting (and similar methods) that I donate to from time to time. They had a successful campaign to convert Fargo ND to approval voting back in 2018.
"Resistance to tactical voting" is a dumb, essentially nonsensical, concept. What we care about is how well the voting method performs given there is some amount of strategic voting. I made a simple chart here to visualize this fallacy.
Thanks for donating to CES. I'm the co-founder who filed the 501(c)3 incorporation paperwork back in 2011. We've come a long way, and Fargo was very exciting indeed.
> This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them.
Except elections rarely work like that. There isn't a set of options I can tolerate and a set I can't. I want my preferred candidate to win more than I want any of the "fine I guess" candidates. And if I have to pick between "bad" and "horrible" I still want to vote for "bad".
With approval voting, I am forced to vote strategically, considering what point in my preference order to draw the line at in order to maximize my chance of causing the highest possible position in my preference order to win.
I realise that IRV isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than any non-ranked choice voting method as far as I can see, and honestly I think the risk of the situations where honest voting results in a sub-optimal outcome is massively overblown, though I don't have data to back that up.
I would note that IRV has the advantage of being actually put into practice at scale (Australia, Maine), and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV), so you can have systems like Australia where IRV is used in single-winner races and STV in multi-winner ones without the voting public needing to learn two systems.
STAR, the system we're advocating, solves a lot of these issues though. Score voting is "like" approval voting but with more precision (really approval is just the binary version of score). STAR05 is often suggested because experimentation shows that it has enough expressiveness to generate good winners but is simple. You can always add more expressiveness by increasing the range in which you can score candidates, but there's diminishing returns as you increase it and added complexity (I don't think people will have a problem rating 0-10 though since we actually do that a lot).
I cannot think of any way that IRV beats out STAR. In STAR's worst case scenario (1-sided strategy) it still has a VSE equal to IRV's best scenario (100% honest). Any more honesty that people have in STAR just improves peoples' satisfaction. This is actually one of the main arguments of cardinal systems over ordinal systems (e.g. STAR vs RP/IRV).
If you're really into the ordinal camp, I'd also strongly encourage you to look into Ranked Pairs. The satisfaction is A LOT higher than IRV does. On the ballot side it is no different than what the voter sees in IRV (really this is fairly consistent for ordinal systems, by definition).
But I want to stress that STAR and Approval are not equivalent. I also want to stress that scoring is an extremely familiar concept to most people. "Rate this drive out of 5 stars." "On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate..." etc. So I'd argue that STAR is fairly expressive (which seems to be your major complaint) and is a simple and easy concept for voters to understand (since they are already familiar with it).
I'm a co-inventor of STAR voting. I explain it as, STAR voting is score voting on a 0-5 scale followed by an automatic ("instant") top two runoff. Whereas approval voting is score voting on a 0-1 binary scale. STAR voting performs a tiny bit better in computer simulations of voter satisfaction, but approval voting has the practical benefit of being super simple and requiring no voting machine upgrades. Both are superior to IRV.
Here's the first email I received from Mark Frohnmayer where he discussed STAR voting, following my speaking at his conference at University of Oregon, that gave birth to it. :)
https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup/status/1278118075972202496
STAR sounds very reasonable. And yeah, I'm definitely open to ordinal systems besides IRV. I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good (which is of course the whole point of voting systems to begin with). I'd consider IRV or MMP vastly better than FPTP, and something like STAR or Ranked Pairs only slightly better than that. Which is a good example of a preference that STAR would be good for expressing :P
> I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good
I see this as more when you're creating something. Like if you're writing software if it is good enough then don't continue if you have other pressing matters. Essentially this saying is about Pareto.
But when you already have things invented and you're just selecting things, this saying doesn't apply. We have 3 options: option 1 sucks, option 2 is meh, option 3 is pretty good. Which do you choose? It is pretty obvious that you should choose option 3. There's no other conditions on this problem. You don't have to spend more resources to get option 3. Option 3 is just objectively better, so why not pick it?
And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'll note that IRV is a 6% VSE improvement on plurality. STAR and RP are both 15% improvements on plurality. This is part of why people are frustrated. There's options that are objectively better, so why pick the worse one? And it isn't like they are differing in "betterness" by small amounts, we're talking about a pretty big amount!
You're calling 6% "vastly better" so doesn't that make 15% "astronomically better?"
> and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV)
Score voting (and by extension STAR voting and approval voting) have a proportional multi-winner analog that's much simpler than STV and arguably better.
I'm basically agreeing with literally everything you are saying, I just want to expand on certain things.
> RV vs RCV
These terms are too similar and really just confuse people, which is why I push back against it. I try to use "ordinal" a lot, but it is best for places like HN but not when I'm discussing with family. RCV makes people think that this is the only way you can rank people.
> STAR
Anyone who is advocating for STAR has my approval. It is the preferred system in my mind. I want to plug my longer post that has a lot of links and expands on all the topics you described
I think this is a style of argument that is increasingly becoming more common and is destructive. Pushing the your argument past the point of validity in an effort to make it stronger. Their use of broad classes is a gross mischaracterization. When they discuss Condorcet methods they discuss several types, lumping together the worst features from different ones. But they ignore the good methods like RP and Schulze. The comparisons are unfair. But then again, they aren't trying to appeal to people that are informed on the subject, they are trying to appeal to the masses which are completely unfamiliar with the subjects. But I do not think this justifies the outright lying and mischaracterizations.
> Spoilers and Strategy
In my other post I actually link an example of where IRV fails, and it is the specific type of spoiling that we are about: when similar candidates spoil (e.g. Bernie and Biden, not Stein and Biden). IRV doesn't solve this (but FV claims otherwise).
For strategy, this is the argument that I get into with the Condorcet camp (though we're clearly on the same side and these are nuanced friendly arguments not hostile). To me STAR is good because its range of VSE is more compact (i.e. resistant to strategies). The Condorcet camp claims that there is enough dis-incentivization to not vote strategically therefore just maximize VSE (VSE is only slightly different between STAR05 and RP). So for anyone listening on the sidelines, this is really what we're arguing, minutia. I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.
> I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.
Eh... I'm in the STAR/Score/Approval camp and I would be somewhat inclined to vote strategically against Condorcet, because it's worse than what I want and once it was implemented it would be even harder to dislodge in favor of STAR/Score/Approval than the status quo.
It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
This is fair and I won't really push back against it. This is the reason I push so hard against IRV. Because once IRV is the status quo it will be hard to continue moving forward. After all, we already have the capabilities. If you have to chose to eat acid, plain oatmeal, or chocolate pudding you don't eat the oatmeal then the pudding, you just jump straight to the pudding.
> It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
While I'm in this camp I do think it is unfair to completely rule out Condorcet methods. The interview I linked to with Dr. Arrow I think expands on this well. If asked to advocate for a system, advocate for score (STAR). But that isn't to recognize that there's so much uncertainty in Social Choice Theory that we can trust theory alone. There's smaller experiments that have been done, but nothing on the scale we are advocating for. Of course we expect the theory and experiments to be relatively accurate, but we must acknowledge the lack of empirical large scale data. Frankly, you can only get that by doing it.
> Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
I'm pretty similar. I like STAR and score about the same because I like simplicity, and don't see STAR as that huge an improvement over score. So maybe:
What I, as a European from a country that elects proportionally (which isn't perfect, but anyway), cannot understand is the blank stare Americans give me when people point out that the two-party system and FPTP are the things that need to be fixed for the US to have a democratic future. It's like so many of them cannot wrap their heads around something being fundamentally broken. The same goes for Canadians and UKians.
Americans are deliberately and explicitly indoctrinated from a very young age to believe our system is the best system in every way: most democratic, most free, etc. It’s not surprising that even the slightest challenge to those beliefs would be met with blank stares by many Americans.
We've literally been brainwashed from birth to believe that we have, by far, the best government that's ever been built. It's a major part of the school system.
Cognitive dissonance around the idea that there is room for improvement is inevitable.
I'm surprised that this attitude survives along side the attitude of "the government sucks at everything and it should be made as small as possible" that seems to be so pervasive in the US.
And I'm surprised that I get the same blank stares from Americans that have lived for a decade in Europe. It's like they've never contemplated any other way of electing. Of course it's not true about everyone. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it still surprises me.
Most people who believe the “the government sucks at everything and should be as small as possible” probably still worship the Constitution and “the forefathers” and believe it’s completely compatible.
Well I guess I am not part of most people, as I believe Government is inherently inefficient, and should be microscopic..
I also believe that "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." -- Lysander Spooner
To be fair, the UK did have the "Alternative Vote Referendum" where we got the second-worst voting system proposed as an alternative to the worst voting system (FPTP). That might explain why nobody thinks "alternative voting systems" are any good; they just think of instant run-off.
This frustrates me to no end. IRV has a 6% improvement of VSE over plurality. But STAR and RP have 15% improvements. Not only that, but both are strongly resistant to spoiler effects and the trend to two coalitions dominance (in the States that's the two party system, outside the states that's two major parties being the dominant ruler over their coalitions).
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it is because IRV doesn't effectively change things. The realist in me thinks it is just trendy.
For others: See me other comment (it is large, you can't miss it) explaining these topics in more detail (with links!)
