Office buildings are test tubes, schools are petri dishes.

Polling generally showed Democrats supporting masking by a massive margin. The most recent poll I could find (April 2022) had support for mandatory masking on public transportation among Democrats as 80-5.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/majority-of-americans-support-mask-mandates-for-travel-ap-poll-finds

And those were the good old days when they were just trying to be subtly racist, rather than the now times where they’re just straight up trying to smuggle Nazi dog whistles in.

It’s not really any more disenfranchising than FPTP. While RCV has tactical voting issues, so does FPTP, and in most cases someone who doesn’t understand the system is just going to vote for someone they perceive to have a chance of winning, which is very likely to be in the final two candidates. And if they’re instead the type to vote for a minor candidate, their vote would have just been meaningless in FPTP anyway.

All the trivia about the very rare cases where tactical voting matters in RCV is just that, trivia. No one really needs to try to game theory their vote out, because in most cases it just doesn’t matter and RCV just gives some people the ability to first declare who they actually want before sending their vote to the preferred major candidate. And in the end, people who can’t figure out basic voting instructions simply aren’t thinking about their vote that deeply. We’re lucky if they’ve even familiarized themselves with all the candidates.

It’s really hard for any system to be worse than FPTP. The people spreading FUD about RCV are mostly doing it because the flaws in FPTP benefit them.

So just don’t make it that way.

But undervoting isn’t really a problem. No one is being disenfranchised by not casting a second vote (or ranking all options), they just aren’t availing themselves of the full range of options. Even just voting for one person could be an intentional choice if you don’t really care about the other options or want your first choice to have a better chance of winning an expected head-to-head.

This is at worst an indicator the government should run some informational campaigns, not a reason not to use multi-voting systems.

It’s always going to be two parties, because any other arrangement just hurts the parties with more in common. What does happen is one dies and a new party rises to replace it. For more simultaneous parties we need to (and should) change our voting system.

And pair that with the government saying it’s mostly killing old people and those with health issues then just declaring it over. I wasn’t expecting lockdown forever, but just like keeping it as an ongoing health concern. Instead they’ve been wiping their site of tracking, dropping funding, and abandoning workers to just hope their employer isn’t going to get them sick. COVID being over is good politically and good for business, so COVID is over.

You’re arguing that the EC’s unfairness is unimportant, not that it’s fair. And ignoring the senate imbalance where just a couple extra votes is a massive change.

So since it’s unimportant, let’s change it to be fair. Except I don’t think you really feel it’s unimportant and actually care very much about those two extra votes.

it’s still arguable that Republicans have unfair representation in the Senate and EC

LOL, wut? There’s nothing arguable about that. Republicans very definitely have an unfair senate and electoral advantage entirely related to being more popular in less populated states (which, with the notable exceptions you’ve highlighted, tend to also be more rural).

You’re cherry picking top ten and bottom ten like the whole swath of states in between don’t also have unfair allocation and thus don’t matter, while being pretty inconsistent with your battleground state definitions to suit your sorting needs (NH is blue because it only voted R once in 30 years, while every battleground you listed has the same history, and red Florida and Ohio have been 50/50).

While your point about population vs. density is correct, everything else seems to be trying to muddy the waters about the EC rather than just point out an interesting factoid or offer a pedantic correction. There’s no serious argument that the EC isn’t unfair from an individual voter perspective and biased toward one side from a national perspective.

Easy:

1. Vote in better Democrats
2. Abolish the filibuster
3. Pass law changing the number of justices on the court

Support from the legislature is all that’s important. If the justices say “you can’t do it”, then ignore them because clearly they can. The constitution says very little about the supreme court and its size has been changed multiple times before. This is just doing history again.

Hawaii isn’t in the ten least populous states and Maine isn’t a blue state. It’s not a straight sort, but Republicans far and away benefit from the unequal representation of the Senate and Electoral College.

Or instead of giving up we could make court expansion and reform a litmus test in future Democratic primaries. And/or normalize the idea that judicial rulings need to be enforced by someone else and they too have agency.

Because allowing this to continue for much of our remaining lives is also decorum. We live in an unjust system, but it’s not just how life has to be for the next 30 years.

I can’t think of any at-risk group that has meaningful influence on gun legislation, but many of the groups propping up the Republican party have been convinced they are in mortal danger.

Though, frankly, I do find someone who thinks restrictions to carrying a gun at a beach in peaceful and multicultural Hawaii aren’t reasonable to be a bit of a nut regardless of whatever risks you have in your personal life.

Daddy Kavanaugh wouldn’t warrant a complete refusal to answer. “My father paid my debts” isn’t a scandalous statement at all and would put to bed a cloud that’s been hanging over him since confirmation. That they’re not saying such suggests the truth would be a worse look than just leaving the question open.

Apart from the “why do you need it” question, the beach is specifically a place people often leave items that can’t be taken in the water unattended. Sure, legislators can write laws about how a gun must not be left unattended and gun nuts can swear up and down about how they would never do that, but they will. No matter how much you think “there’s a lot of people around” or “I’ll just be in and out” or “I’ll watch my stuff from the water”, thefts happen, and now a mundane occurrence has turned a supposedly (not really) “safe” and “legal” gun into one of those dangerous “illegal” guns they can’t be held responsible for.

We were perfectly happy with our gun laws, and they worked, and now fringe nutcases and a politically captured courts are telling us we can’t implement common sense restrictions because the nuts have a panic attack if they’re not constantly armed.

You seem to have an argument you want to present regardless of what the person you’re responding to said. They didn’t say it was greedy corporations, just that the Fed’s measures didn’t work.

And while the reduction from peak could be the Fed’s rates, there’s no reason to think it must be, as many of the proposed causes (supply chain disruptions, built up demand, pandemic stimulus) would all be expected to ease over time.

As for your chosen windmill, the studies pointing to price gouging suggest it’s related to a public expectation of prices increases allowing for gouging to piggyback on other causes for price increases. It’s not something the companies can just choose to do at a whim and only just now decided to be greedy, which means they might be pressured to reduce excess profit taking due to easing of any of the underlying factors or even just public sentiment.

It’s not like the rich countries are self-evidently sober and stable in their politics and climate impacts. The richest one just had their own wannabe fascist and has both been responsible for a large part of emissions and rarely met their climate goals.

Unless this is a prelude to going third party, he’s not spoiling anything in the Democratic primary. He’s probably more of a play to deliver anti-Biden/anti-Democratic-Party messaging.

For a lot of people “unpaid time off” isn’t a favor. You’re asking them to pay to vote.

Plus the rules frequently only come into play if their work shift makes it literally impossible to make it to the polls. If they could wake up from their third shift job to get in line as polls open before making it to their other job at 7:45 sharp, then no time off for you. If you need to get your kids to school during that time slot? Too bad, that’s time you could technically be voting, so it’s not your employer’s responsibility.