Yeah and the fact that it is basically the only city in the country where the water has been undrinkable for a long time is indicative of the general reliability of water infrastructure in this country. The US is geographically as large as the entire continent of Europe and is the third-most populous country in the world after India and China.

There is a section of the US population that subsists off bottled water, but it’s a minority and mostly lower-class. They might also live in old and poorly-maintained buildings where they think the pipes are of questionable quality, though if the water is actually unsafe to drink, the municipality will condemn the building. We of course have laws, so it’s illegal to rent out a building with no drinkable water.

The vast majority of Americans just drink tap water. Some people run it through a filter to improve the taste. Tap water is safe to drink in at least 99.9% of the US. Bottles water is viewed as more of a convenience, for example when you’re organising an event you might provide bottled water to attendees who don’t want soda or beer.

Yeah, a water gun.

“Instant-runoff voting” is the generic name for what is called “ranked-choice voting” in North America, “alternative vote” in the UK, and “preferential voting” in Australia.

Instant-runoff voting and ranked-choice voting are one and the same.

Where is Montania? It’s in the Eurozone?

No, it clearly has not. Identify one member of the US Congress elected by instant-runoff voting who isn’t from one of the two major parties.

Nope, that’s false. You clearly have not read the actual clause in the Constitution and are just assuming it says what you want it to say. Congress can overwrite the state rules at any time for any reason in any way it likes with two restrictions:

1. The new rules cannot violate the US Constitution.
2. They cannot change the location that senators are chosen.

Art. 1 § 4, Cl. 1:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

I oppose this. Instant-runoff voting (edit: also known as ranked-choice voting in North America) hasn’t produced much more political diversity and it didn’t lead to a breaking of the two-party system. I think a proportional system like mixed-member proportional might be better for letting in smaller parties and diversifying representation.

Congress can overwrite state election rules as they pertain to federal elections.

I think the Democrats should absolutely work with administration officials. After all, it’s important that their impeachment trials are scheduled during convenient times and do not overlap with committee testimonies.

Also, many arbitration clauses state that the company pays for arbitration costs as long as your claim is not frivolous. There was an attempted class-action case against Valve some time ago, and Valve pleaded that the contract required individual arbitration. So the law firm representing the customers filed tens of thousands of demands for arbitration for each individual customer, each of which surely would result in hundreds or thousands of dollars in arbitration costs for Valve…

A lot of arbitration clauses can be opted out of. This was the case with most of my credit card agreements when I was reading through them. It involves sending a letter saying that you want to opt out of arbitration. The clause is usually within the mass of text and not easy to find, but it’s there.

Realistically it’s more like 100 support Israel, 100 vehemently oppose it, and 200 just play along with whatever the leader says to not get kicked out of the party.

I do own a railroad. I bought it for $200. I own Reading Railroad, B&O, and I’m trying to work out a deal to acquire Short Line from my brother in exchange for Vermont Avenue.

🚨 TRADE OFFER 🚨

I get: billions of dollars worth of guns, planes, and other military equipment

You get: loads of bad press, occasional dinner with Bibi (while supplies last, no cash value, void where prohibited)

Because you don’t know whether you’ve actually type-checked everything and that your inputs are safely parsed. Part of defensive programming is to adopt multiple defences to prevent bad data from getting through, including avoiding ==.

Nobody is advocating for blindly trusting data from the user.

“I have no problem living in a house of cards as I make sure to never bump against the walls.”

The level of co-ordination is not even remotely comparable. If you make a post that embarrasses a big company or the state on Western social media, it usually stays up. They rarely intervene. Meanwhile in China, you have the entire state apparatus coming as one unified force after popular posts to shut down this type of talk.

This diagram is nonsense. JavaScript programmers know to simply never use == but to use === instead. Half of JavaScript is like this. Oh, there’s a feature, but it behaves in a super weird way so we don’t use it to avoid the weirdness.