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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I actually had written an answer about the effects of the 12th amendment on the politics StackExchange that details how the original elections worked (or failed) under the old system.

    The interesting thing to me about this is that after Washington, there had always been running mates, and the problem wasn’t that the President and Vice President may be political opponents. The problem was the old system was open to gamesmanship that thwarted the will of the voters.

    1796 did not end with an Adams-Jefferson administration because Jefferson came in second. If things went as planned, it would have been Adams-Pinckney instead. But Hamilton preferred Pinckney over Adams and tried to sway the electors for Jefferson-Burr to vote Jefferson-Pinckney instead, which would have led to a Pinckney-Adams administration despite Pinckney campaigning with Adams as his presumptive Vice President. However, his plan didn’t work out, and Jefferson ended up getting the second most number of votes. This led to an Adams-Jefferson administration which was not supposed to happen. This was bad, but the shady dealings happened in the dark, and Adams was at least elected President in accordance to the popular vote. The politicians at the time thought that they could just sweep this under the rug as they now had a better understanding of how to manage their electors.

    But, that turned out to be false. In 1800, they planned to be smarter with allocating the electors’ votes, but the Democratic-Republicans failed and accidentally cast the same number of votes for both Jefferson and Burr. Under the Constitution, a tie is decided in the House, and the makeup of the House meant that Federalists had the advantage. They preferred Burr over Jefferson, so they tried to subvert the election and appoint a Burr-Jefferson administration rather than Jefferson-Burr. Hamilton ultimately convinced the Federalists to relent and give the election to Jefferson. This was now the second time that Hamilton intervened to orchestrate the results of the election, and this time, it was all out in the open on the House floor. Furthermore, in both of these instances, Hamilton’s actions screwed over Burr, leading to the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel that left Hamilton dead and Burr disgraced. So not only did the election show that this Constitution was failing in the democratic ideals of the revolution, it also led to the untimely downfall of two of the country’s top political leaders.

    So yes, the 1796 election exposed a pretty major issue, and the 1800 election showed that that issue could not be ignored. However, if you’re suggesting that the 1796 election led to the 12th Amendment because it showed the problems that arise when the President and Vice President are not politically aligned, I’m not so sure. It’s possible, but I don’t think that was a revelation to them. At the very least, the parties at the time were always trying to fill both offices with specific people, even before the 12th Amendment. The biggest problem they were trying to address was the way that the old system could be gamed by political elites.

    Also, sorry for the big wall of text. I just find this to be a very interesting topic.


  • It’s not so much that as that the coalitions and eventual parties wanted to hold both seats, so they ran multiple candidates with the assumption that one would be president and the other vice president. The electors would then structure their votes to ensure that the correct person was elected to each position. However, with the difficulties in long-distance communication at the time, this was prone to error. In 1800, this almost led to the candidate for vice president being elected as president.

    After that, they realized that it didn’t make sense to use one slate of candidates for both positions, so they separated out the ballot into president and vice president. That’s essentially how the elections had been running up to that point (particularly because they always had two votes to cast), but it was to easy to make a mistake. Both before and after the amendment, there was a presidential candidate with a running mate vying for the vice presidency.


  • He was a 19 year old man in the Netherlands talking to a 12 year old child in the United Kingdom on Facebook. He traveled to see her in the UK, got her drunk, raped her, and then attempted to get a hotel room with her. They couldn’t, so they slept under a stairwell and he raped her twice the next day. She had told him at one point that he was hurting her, but that didn’t stop him. After that, he flew back to the Netherlands and told her to go to a clinic for contraception.

    So they were essentially strangers to each other with a significant she gap. I don’t know what her exact intentions were when speaking with him, but she was 12. Even if she were thinking about sex, it would not have been with an understanding of what that actually meant. She wasn’t just under age, she was well under the legal age of consent. There’s a reason that children cannot legally consent to sex.

    Also, he’s never really shown any remorse for his actions. At best, he’s said that it was the biggest mistake of his life, but his overall stance seems to be that he regrets getting caught rather than raping a child. He’s much more angry at people calling him a pedophile than he is at himself for doing wrong. So your final points may be true, but they aren’t really relevant to his case because it doesn’t appear that he could be considered rehabilitated. He’s merely completed a prison sentence which was made lighter by Dutch law not classifying his actions as rape at the time.



  • The ask that YouTube manage their system better. Currently, they assume that a copyright claim is valid unless proven otherwise, and it is difficult for content creators to actually get them to review a claim to determine if it is invalid. So, a lot of legitimate users that post videos without actually violating anybody’s copyright end up being permanently punished for somebody illegitimate claim. What we want is for YouTube to, one, make it more difficult or consequential to file a bad claim, and two, make it easier to dispute a bad claim.

    However, that’s not going to happen because the YouTube itself is legally responsible for copyrighted material that is posted to their platform. Because of that, they are incentivised to assume a claim is valid lest they end up in court for violating somebody’s legitimate copyright. Meaning that the current system entails a private company adjudicating legal questions where they are not an impartial actor in the dispute.

    So your concern is legitimate, but it’s ignoring the fact that we already are in a situation where a private company is prosecuting fraud. People want it to change so that it is more in favor of the content creators (or at least, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty), but it would ultimately be better if they were not involved in it whatsoever. However, major copyright holders pushed for laws that put the onus on YouTube because it makes it easier for them, and it’s unlikely for those laws to change anytime soon. That’s what I’d say we should be pushing for, but it’s also fair to say that the Content ID system is flawed and allows too much fraud to go unpunished.






  • If you ever use SQL Server Management Studio, you can experience the opposite. Whenever there’s an update, you’ll get a notification in the application, but to actually install it, you need to go to Microsoft’s website to download the latest version and install it yourself. Chrome, on the other hand, updates itself upon restart without requiring anything special from the user.

    As a software developer, I really like that part. It means that websites I work on only need to consider the features supported in the latest version of major browsers rather than the last several (as was the case with Internet Explorer).

    So, it’s nice and something that I remember really appreciating when Chrome was getting popular. But it’s still a weird thing to brag about.



  • The executive branch is a bureaucracy that has to follow procedures. The president can direct the agency to start these processes, and that’s what he done. The HHS has done the necessary work to show that cannabis is deserving of a lower schedule according to the Controlled Substances Act. It is now up to the DEA to review that data and reschedule it accordingly. This is the process stipulated by the law, and the executive branch must adhere to it. If they don’t, it will be undone in the courts.

    The alternative route would be for Congress to pass a new law to specifically legalize cannabis, but they do not have the numbers, so the Biden administration has to follow the process outlined in the existing laws. He’s done what he is legally able to do, and it’s more than any of his predecessors have. It may be slow, but it’s pretty much a fast as the law allows.




  • The idea here are very interesting to read, but I think I’m leaning most favorably towards the last group’s idea to bury it with as little marking as possible. The plans modeled on Stonehenge seem odd to me. Stonehenge is famously a monument whose origin and purpose was a mystery, and that mystery enticed people from all over the world to travel to the site and excavate it. It seems more like a good reference for a method that would not work. How many people would have toyed around at Stonehenge if the monument weren’t there?

    At the same time, we have events with contaminated materials being used in construction within a matter of months or years, so it’s not like these are abstract problems. E.g., look at the 1983 Ciudad Juárez Cobalt 60 incident. We have the technology to identify contaminated materials, but we’d only use them if we have reason to believe we should. It’s probably fair to assume the same of future societies, so it makes sense to want to make sure they have reason to believe they should test the area.




  • The vacuum is the hard part, not the maglev. You would need to enclose the entire track inside if a vacuum, and that world be ridiculously expensive and practically impossible with current technology. It’s already very expensive to build a tunnel for a train, which is why they are avoided if possible. But this would need to be all tunnel that is air tight, so even more expensive than regular train tunnels.

    To put it into perspective, the current largest manmade vacuum chamber is at a NASA research facility in Ohio. It’s a cylinder with a diameter of 100 feet and a height of 122 feet. If this were laid on its side, about 1.5 New York subway cars could fit inside. The largest vacuum ever made can barely fit the vehicle inside, let alone allow it to travel between two different places where the extra speeds would be warranted.