Be careful what you wish for. It's most likely that the only replacement for a two-party system the US will get...
Will be a one-party system.
Because there is no legal pathway[1] towards solving the conditions that create the two party system, but there are many illegal offramps that will get rid of one of those parties.
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[1] There are way too many obstacles, and the bar for consensus is too high to legally have these reforms. The bar is much lower for having them illegally - all you need is a single-party trifecta - lead by the kinds of people who'd start a coup rather than relinquish power.
That's true at the federal level, but it's possible to get past the two party system at the local or state level where there's allowance for voter initiatives.
Portland's new city council setup, with four districts and three representatives each based on ranked choice voting, is a step in that direction.
While breaking the 2 party system seems unimaginable, I do feel like rank choice voting can do a lot to get us on a better path in the short/medium term.
I don’t know people are so hung up on ranked choice. Approval voting is simpler to explain, doesn’t require changing ballots and can be implemented immediately. Not to mention empirically results in more moderate candidates.
Plus the separation of powers seems too reliant on the president being a decent human being. It'll be interesting to see that play out over the next decades.
Pretty sure there's a pretty big friggin difference between [Democrats/Romney and Bush republicans] and [MAGA republicans].
The former are nearly indistinguishable between eachother. The latter are something entirely different, and have purged all the non-crazy from their party.
Why would AGI choose to be embodied? We talk about creating a superior intelligence and having it drive our cars and clean our homes. The scenario in Dan Simmons' Hyperion seems much more plausible: we invent AGI and it disappears into the cloud and largely ignores us.
It doesn't need to be permanent. If humans could escape from their embodiment temporarily they would certainly do so. Being permanently bounded to a physical interface is definitely a disadvantage.
> Instead of subjecting his gross estate to the federal estate tax, Hsieh could have set up a trust in which he has no control over, transfer his assets into it, then have a trustee continue to carry out his goals
Your estate is taxed before it goes into a normal trust. To avoid taxes with a trust you have to set it up a long time in advance and slowly shift money in. And at $1B, it's not gonna happen. Even if you use various tricks to put lower priced assets into the trust early and let them appreciate (or e.g. buy permanent life insurance with the trust assets), none of those strategies scale to O($billion)
GSTs used to be able to get around that, but not so much anymore.
A "real" way to avoid it is to put massive amounts into a charity (or occasionally a "charity"), and then have that charity hire your kids for cushy jobs. There are other ways around it too, hiding assets overseas or whatever.
But the article gives a very inaccurate description of using trusts to get around estate taxes. Which is ... weird, right? It's an estate planning attorney? I dunno.
yep, and the charity’s underlying entity can be a corporation or a trust, which does confuse the general understanding of these things as the terms are often conflated
friendlymail: an open source, email-based social network. Email a new post to yourself, and the app generates an HTML version and sends to your followers. They can comment and like via email.
I tried a self-hosted blog, but comments and likes were a mess. Email was my solution.
McDonald's or Starbucks will eventually add EV charging to stores nationwide. It'll draw customers, and chargers are so much easier and cheaper than gas pumps.
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