Tyranny of the majority is a major concern for democratic systems, hence the many protections against it. A system based on pure population majority is no less manipulable, you would end up seeing candidates campaign hard in the ~25 most dense cities and ignore the rest of the country.

That's because tyranny of the minority is typically not a major concern for democratic systems... Except in the United States, because it happens so damn frequently. In no other country does the opinion of ~2% of the population (Swing voters in swing states) take precedence over everything else.

Your response completely ignores, for example, the rural California vote. Those people don't live in dense cities, but their opinions are completely ignored, because they don't live in the right state.

Alternatively, why not double down on avoiding tyranny of the majority? Make a native American's vote count as ten white votes, make an African American's vote count as three white votes... The justification for it is about as good as making a Wisconsin farmer's vote count for that of three California farmers.

> In no other country does the opinion of ~2% of the population (Swing voters in swing states) take precedence over everything else.

It doesn't here, either. In order for it to "take precedence", it has to be the swing 2% - the 2% in the middle. That is, if the 98% of the country voted differently, a different swing 2% would be where the election swung.

They would have also gotten what they voted if elections were done away with, and Trump were announced a winner by fiat. That doesn't make it a good system.

There are two problems for them.

1. Unequal distribution of EC votes.

2. State-based winner-take-all distribution of EC votes.

Yes, their concerns would be far more likely to be heard with the elimination of #1, and #2. They can be completely ignored because of #2, and even if they couldn't be, then due to #1, there are better places to focus on.

Under a popular vote system, with the margins for victory as they are, nobody would be able to ignore the rural vote, as a whole. Right now, that is exactly what happens - it is ignored - except in a handful of states (Which, strangely enough, receive an overwhelming amount of federal subsidies - it's no accident that ~75% of farming subsidies go to only 10% of farmers.)

First off, most Americans live in city's, but rural voters would still be just as valuable as anyone else. So, the real change is removing extra power from people who only got it from accidents of history. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Second, having rotating senate elections, many votes requiring more than 50% to pass, and lifetime appointments to the supreme court are all designed to hold back a pure majority.

PS: I would suggest national proportional representation to the house, and instant runoff elections for the senate and president, with senate boundary chosen by a fixed public algorithm.

And as long as you don't lose the USB drive, or sit on it wrongly, or otherwise make it unusable.

The best and most durable solution is really some RFID tags embedded in your wrists and forehead.

Zuck 3 (paraphrasing): "We're building tools to help states censor things they don't like, independent of the truth of those things."

Consistent with 1, not really with 2. Agree that 2's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of issues with Facebook but yeah, best not to assume good faith lightly.

There's probably no reason for you to go around disabling hardware etc. You're aware enough of the implications and risks, it's possible you'll get pwned but not too likely. (Honestly I'm more personally worried about the inconvenience of Google nuking my gmail for no reason than anything the NSA might be up to.) Some of my coworkers cover up their work laptop webcams by default. I don't, the realistic threat model is IT or some other company representative spying on me, and I don't really care about that. If I find out I'll quit and I'm sure there will be lawsuits anyway.

All that said, I never liked the "well one day the government will accuse you of a crime somehow or otherwise severely limit your speech" argument. To me the better counter-argument is: "Fine, you don't care at all, you don't have to care. Similarly some people are super paranoid and live in a faraday cage etc., they can do that all they want. But a lot of people care to some degree in between, and a lot of other people are uneducated or unaware of the actual risks so aren't even aware of the problem that they could decide to care/not care about. If you don't care at all, again that's fine, just get out of our way as we try to protect people by default. Mass education of every issue is infeasible."

How is anyone supposed to distinguish the first 10 BTC from the last 10 BTC when the underlying satoshis might not even be the same? e.g. I might transfer those 10 BTC to an online store (web wallet, other trading, whatever) but then transfer them back, except I'll likely get a different 10 BTC. Seems like all you can determine is that you once bought $x and once sold $y. Since you can also exchange btc for goods, or mine it (which I believe even the IRS has different rules for), you can't say with certainty whether it must be $y <= $x or $y >= $x. So when you sell 5 BTC, it's either mining income (or other income) or a capital gain, but it seems like there's nothing stopping someone from always taking the least expensive taxes first.

> Seems like all you can determine is that you once bought $x and once sold $y.

That's all that matters. Your gains (or losses) are $y - $x.

> it seems like there's nothing stopping someone from always taking the least expensive taxes first.

Yes. If you had some with gains and some with losses, you could even choose to sell those at a loss in order to offset other gains.

The cardboard and marbles aren't self-aware, they just encode a configuration that sees itself as self-aware when left alone to execute. Just like the atoms of your body. Self-awareness isn't a static property, since it's hard to call someone under anesthetic self-aware, but just another thing an agent in motion perceives.

You ought to read Permutation City.

Materialism assumption. :)

lol can't even hang from a bar for over 3 seconds. I'm a coding machine regardless though.

Hanging from a bar, is actually the start of your path to doing a pullup. Next you jump up, and slowly lower yourself, over and over. Pretty soon you will be doing your first real pull-up.

Seconded. Some of it feels a bit dated, and it doesn't cover tools you can use like PowerMock if your codebase is Java and you really just need to get a piece of hairy code under coverage as quick as you can without having to refactor it all to be testable the 'normal' or 'clean' way. Nor does it cover refactoring for a functional and immutable approach (its approach is much more OO). Still a great resource to have on hand and be inspired by.

The most important thing is to follow its advice and just start doing it little by little, even small refactors of other people's code. A friend's company had a Book Club and some testing book got on the list at one point, and as they were discussing it they kept having arguments over how effective various things were, so they resolved the arguments by starting a Testing Club where every week everyone would put in at least an hour into getting some part of the system under test, or trying out a testing technique, and discussing it. Over time they got most of the product under test and fixed a lot of previously unknown bugs.

This might not exist, but could you recommend a text that _does_ cover refactoring for a functional and immutable approach? I would be interested in reading something like that.

Judging from their account age I hope so.