r/Foodforthought

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…imagine an alternative world—perhaps our future—in which Kentucky is just one six-member district. Everybody votes in the same election as you do for Senate, and parties put forward lists of candidates. So Republicans put forward a list of candidates, Democrats put forward a list of candidates. Democrats get 33 percent of the seats—the two most popular Democratic candidates on that list go to Congress. Republicans put forward a list of candidates—the four most popular Republicans go to Congress.

So that’s proportional. That’s what we think of as fairness. You don’t have to draw any district lines, and candidates run on party lists, and parties get representation in Congress in proportion to the share of votes that they get—which is a very intuitive sense of fairness.

Excerpts:

Head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee Ebrahim Azizi announced the mechanism to regulate traffic through the vital shipping lane on Saturday.

Under proposed plans, vessels would be charged “fees for specialized services” provided under the new system.

Azizi said: “In this process, only commercial vessels and parties cooperating with Iran will benefit from it.”

For those concerned with immigration: if we aren't educating Americans to handle our future where do you think we'll get people to replace them?

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The famous lines from Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey in 1816 here very much apply:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”

American education has been in a phase of systemic decay for decades, and the consequences are piling up. Right now, as the global economy is yet again being reinvented by artificial intelligence and quantum computing, America’s schools are cranking out year after year of failure. Since 2015, 83 percent of districts have lost ground on reading and 70 percent have lost ground on math.

There are lots of individual success stories to tell from districts and states that have beaten the trend, but the unmistakable truth is that the mechanism on which America has relied since 1965 to produce capable adults — universal K-12 education supported by federal tax dollars and accountable to federal standards — has failed. It won’t matter whether the United States or China wins the current struggle over which AI models run the world if Americans can’t run AI models.

Excerpt:

“…it is worth thinking through the legal and constitutional implications of annexing Venezuela, Greenland, or even Canada—especially since they are not favorable to the Trump administration’s other political, social, and cultural priorities.”

Gasoline accounts for a shrinking share of household budgets, but its political power can still make or break a presidency.

For Gen Xers and millennials, inheriting a loved one's car often means weighing nostalgia against practicality.