Why not? Their leader just got elected President if the US, if that’s not cause to take them seriously then what is?

Yup

IIRC two states and several major cities have also successfully implemented rank choice, and in every case it’s been because of Democrats.

As more and more local governments make the change, it’ll become more popular and gain more support on the national level.

The problem is that any third party that manages to eventually displace a member of the duopoly immediately replaces that party in the new duopoly.

Because the duopoly is a result of First Past the Post (FPTP) voting. As long as we use FPTP the duopoly will persist, just with different parties filling the two roles.

Anything short of switching away from FPTP for some form of Rank Choice is going to be a band-aid, mere temporary relief, and not even a very good one.

I feel like this probably explains some things…

I never watched Ghoulies, but I’ll never forget walking through the rental store and the box was eye-level with tiny kid me. Scarred me pretty bad. After that I was terrified of flushing the toilet, so toilet lid always had to be down and as soon as I flushed I would run from the bathroom.

Took me probably twenty years to completely get over it.

I’m a jeweler 🤷🏻‍♀️

Play with swords.

I do historical reenactment in the SCA and the fencers use actual metal blades to fight. It’s HEMA but with fun clothes and a ton of other optional activities like brewing and making our own coins (those are my chosen activities, but a lot of people do costuming, calligraphy, music, apothecary… the list goes on).

It makes my inner child so happy 😊

Let’s not downplay the value of that photo. Stuff like that is a critical competent component for building AI systems strong enough to visually identify people under a variety of conditions. It’s the keystone to a total surveillance state, which itself is the gateway to things like the social credit system used in China.

Edit: stupid typo

I think the critical difference is “Meta pushes for changes” vs “Meta pushes for changes with the support of thousands/millions of users”.

If Meta convinces Thread users that a certain change is good for them, it’s going to be that much harder for the people developing ActivityPub to push back on those changes. And even if the developers succeed, Meta can just use that to say “fine, we’ll fork off and make our own ActivityPub with data collection and advertisements” and if enough instances in the Fediverse are reliant one Threads for engagement they may just switch to the Meta version of ActivityPub, taking a chunk of our community with them.

And maybe that’s alright for some folks, but a lot of us don’t want any of that to happen, even potentially. I think it’s pretty unethical to deliver people into the maw of the beast like that, so to speak.

You’re 100% correct, but don’t think that’s enough for Meta. It’s inherent to the nature of corporations to sell to grow, ie increase market share. If Meta thinks it can increase it’s market share, even a little, by destroying mastodon.social it will.