I guess it depends on your definition of ‘major’. I think in a pluralistic democracy, any party that represents 10+% of the population meets that criteria. Of course, from the perspective of a two-party system 10% doesn’t seem like much, but it’s significant enough to have held the balance of power many times since the Greens came into existence in the ‘90s.
We have four Major Parties - Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens. If you understand their relative power based on our system of government, you’ll see that we’re somewhere in between the US and the EU with regards to representational democracy. It’s not great, but in the Anglospheric context we do pretty well because the others don’t have our combination of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representative Voting (PRV) and Mandatory Voting.
Labor is the largest single party in the Lower House. The Liberal Party has (almost) never gained a true majority. The National Party, with whom the Liberal Party coalesces (known in Australia as The Coalition or the LNP) is our current major opposition, and they only hold that position as a coalition. The Greens regularly poll between 9-12%, which causes our Federal Senate to end up giving them a significant amount of power. We also (thanks to changes a recent government made) have a significant crossbench made up of The Greens, minor parties and independents. Our current senate (and most previous Senates) has many potential ‘kingmakers’ (including previous AFL legend David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie and others) which mean that governments can’t pass legislation without courting those outside their party.
To the outsider it may seem that we only have two parties, but in our context we understand it to be more complex than that. Many Australian jurisdictions have known minority-government, government-by-coalition and Lower House government tempered by Upper House diversity which tempers the passage of legislation.
Like I said, it’s not a perfect system (and pretty far from direct democracy) but we sit in this interesting position between the absolute Two-Party System of FPTP jurisdictions and other systems that produce 5+ parties that need to form government together. Our system is far from perfect, but it’s not terrible.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction where every single vote I can engage in is RCV (Australia; NSW) I can honestly say that it’s so much better than FPTP. I don’t know what the perfect voting system is (frankly a subjective topic as it currently stands; please feel free to correct me with statistically valid alternatives) but RCV at the very least means that I can (and personally have) never vote for a major party as #1 and I can know for sure that my vote has never been exhausted, because I’ve never left a blank box. We also have mandatory voting, which helps to keep things sane.
In Australia, government election funding is only ever allocated to the parties based on #1 votes, so I can also confidently say I’ve never contributed to a major party’s election coffers as I’ve also never donated to any major party. I obviously support one major party over the others, as based on my preferences, but I’ll always give the election funding to a smaller party or Independent.
RCV is a wonderful step to take from FPTP. I understand that it may not be democratically perfect, and frankly no representative voting system may ever be, but it’s a far cry better than FPTP. It’s a known concept that here in Australia politicians vie to represent the ‘middle’ rather than the extremes, because the vast majority of voters aren’t overly-enthused political lunatics. We still have our issues to be sure, but I’d rather that the political class fight over the centrist majority rather than court the political extremes in order to convince people to actually vote thanks to mandatory voting.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Coalition has made a range of claims about what nuclear energy could do for Australia, and why it is better than building solar and wind.
What is the reality?
They lied.
I’m a human and fuck the LNP.
I misremembered and have edited my post above: the unit stupidly doesn’t wear bodycams at all.
However, the tactical police units who stormed McKenzie’s home and shot him did not wear body cameras.
Under previous questioning, one of the senior constables involved said, “obviously the tactical guys wanted all body-worn switched off”.
Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame asked one of the tactical officers why the unit does not use body-worn video.
Officer T1 said the team did not want tactics being given out and “inadvertently it always seems to get out on social media”.
https://9news.com.au/article/83310510-9e0e-44a3-84b0-5bd275dce9af
In the NSW (Australian) emergency services, there’s now a division that’s been slowly rolling out called the PACER (Police, Ambulance, Clinical, Early Response) program where Police can have mental health clinicians who are based with them attend to a call to provide immediate advice, support and mental health therapy in some cases. It’s still a pilot program at the moment but where it has been rolled out it’s significantly reduced mental health presentations to hospital at the very least. I’m keen for statistics to be seen around reductions in arrests or charges, because I think they’re likely to follow.
Thankfully Police shootings in NSW are generally pretty rare, but they still happen. Recently (2023) a 95 year old woman using a walking frame and wielding a knife was tasered by a cop and died a week later from her injuries, and back in 2019 a man was executed by three shots to the back while having a psychotic episode after officers disabled their bodycams (edit: I misremembered - the cops that stormed the house weren’t wearing bodycams at all). We don’t have it as bad as some do, but it’s still not a great situation.
Although we in Australia are pretty frickin arse-backwards and conservative about stupid shit, I do have a lot of faith and hope in programs like PACER. I just hope it can be expanded and become mandatory statewide, but the cynic in me says that’s not likely. As someone who’s had to call Police for a relative’s mental health crisis before, I can definitely understand the fear.
I would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.
I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.
I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?
Or a Sikh trans woman. Or a cis woman with very active facial hair follicles. I mean, it could be so many different people.
We’re biochemical foundries. It’s pretty damn cool.
Yeah, if “toxic + toxic = toxic” made sense then table salt would be extremely dangerous.
Sodium = extremely volatile and usually explosive metal when interacting with water (more than half of what makes us)
Chlorine = gas at room temperature that can kill you in minutes at concentrations of 1000ppm or more
Sodium + Chlorine = Sodium Chloride = delicious table salt that makes food yummy and helps power our neurons
Welp, looks like it’s gonna be yet another Ubisoft cash-grab. Yay.
I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t have been. I’m pretty sure the rules around what is kosher and not were set a few thousand years before infant formula was invented, and so if it wasn’t kosher then literally every Jewish person would have been breaking Jewish law until they could move onto solid foods.
Where I’m from, some people will still use feet/inches only for heights of human beings (weird, I know), but the most common response is in cm. For instance, if you asked me how tall I am I’d say 173cm, but I would say it like “I’m about a hundred and seventy-three” or “one-seven-three” - you don’t really have to say the units. Much the same as you’d say “I’m five foot seven” and you don’t need to specify “inches”.
That’s interesting, because “the apple doesn’t/didn’t fall far from the tree” is a known Anglophonic saying that basically means that a child turned out a lot like a parent (gender not necessarily specified). I wonder if one is a calque of the other.
Therein lies the issue of using LLMs to answer broad or vague questions: they’re not capable of assessing the quality or value of the information they hold let alone whether or not it is objectively true or false, and that’s before getting into issues relating to hallucination. For extremely specific questions, where they have fewer but likely more accurate data to work with, they tend to perform better. Training LLMs on data whose value and quality hasn’t been independently tested will always lead to the results we’re seeing now.
Yeah, I’d almost say it’s an essential purchase. I buy a fair few online titles and I’ve found my 128Gb SD to be a bit lacking. I’m considering upgrading to a 256Gb or 512Gb but they’re still too expensive at high transfer rates.
If you have to choose between capacity and transfer rate for an SD card for a Switch, go for transfer. I had an old slow card and that was abhorrent for load times and stuttering on games that were stored there.
Uhhh, no. That’s not how RCV works at all.
Let’s say there are five candidates - A, B , C, D, and E.
Let’s assume candidates A & B are the most popular.
Personally I choose to rank them as C, E, D, B and then A.
Out of all of them, no one gets over 50% of the #1 vote. Whoever gets the lowest #1 vote is knocked out first. Let’s suggest that this is C. All of their #1 votes and therefore my vote is then transferred to E.
Let’s suggest that after this there’s still no one who has over 50% of the vote between the other four candidates. Let’s further assume that candidate E has the lowest resulting vote after the first round of knockout. My vote is then transferred to candidate D.
Out of A, B, and D, let’s assume none of them still have over 50% of the vote after this redistribution. Let’s further assume that D has the lowest vote of the three. My vote is then transferred to B.
Given there are only two candidates left, one will have to have a majority. That candidate wins.
Under RCV, as long as you mark every box with a preference your vote can never ever be wasted. It will always end up with a candidate that wins or one that loses, but it cannot ever be exhausted and therefore meaningless.