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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • You seem confused on what an executive order is (or you’re not confused and are just saying this in bad faith). It’s not just the president randomly saying I order this to happen like some kind of dictator. It’s the executive laying out his/her interpretation of specifics on how a law should be implemented, a law already passed by congress. So unless congress has passed a law already, saying congress gives the executive the power to increase the size of the court on a whim, or decide to impose term limits on a whim (and they most certainly have not), then the power still rests with congress. Setting up and regulating the courts is a job expressly delegated to congress in the constitution. An executive order is meaningless here. What law would it derive its authority from? A congressional law might not even be enough for all of this, that’s why part of the plan talks about a constitutional amendment.

    And “No words” ?! How on earth are we supposed to build a concensus to do something, if in your opinion no one is allowed to even talk about it or express their support until it’s already happened? You make no sense. The sitting president endorsing supreme court reform is a huge step. And Harris is endorsing it too. Now we just need enough members of congress to get on board, and that’s how it could happen. Not talking about it because it can’t happen this second doesn’t make it any more likely to happen. Comments like yours if anything make it less likely, and discourage support for the people trying to actually get it done.

    I’m tired of all these nonsensical, “why doesn’t Biden just become dictator right now” comments. We’re voting against Trump because we don’t want a dictator.





  • On July 23, 2016, ahead of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the 2016 DNC Rules Committee voted overwhelmingly (158–6) to adopt a superdelegate reform package. The new rules were the result of a compromise between the Hillary Clinton and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns

    Ultimately, the DNC decided to prevent superdelegates from voting on the first ballot, instead of reducing their numbers

    People keep seeming to forget about the super delegate reform Bernie fought for. They are still there now, 15% of all the delegates (a lot of the super delegates being democratic elected officials like members of congress since that automatically gives the status). But they can’t vote in the first ballot any longer. They could only vote in a contested election in subsequent ballots, after all the other pledged delegates are unbound as well.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate

    Even before those reforms, they never really made a difference in any convention, except possibly 1984 when they helped push Mondale from a plurality to a majority by voting for him on the first ballot.

    I’m not personally in favor of them at all, but it’s not nearly as bad as it’s made out to be sometimes. If we go to an open convention though, unless there’s a majority choice on the first ballot, they may play a role on subsequent ballots.



  • Yes, that’s true. The poll averages themselves haven’t moved much either though. And the reliance on the fundamentals forecast has me nervous, but they definitely do it for a reason. When they developed the models and looked at poll history the pattern they found was the fundamentals had a big influence on what the polls would look like closer to the election and the eventual result. Polls closer to the election are more predictive than the fundamentals. Polls farther away from the election less so. There’s at least some reason to think things have changed enough maybe the fundamentals aren’t as fundamental for this race, but I guess we won’t know until afterward.


  • Exactly, I think because races have been so close lately, and the probabilities are ending up close to 50% often, people sometimes unintentionally conflate them with poll numbers. 53% to 46% would be a massive poll lead. For probabilities though in this situation it’s the same as saying they have even odds of winning. Look at those massive 95% confidence intervals, the race is in a statistical dead heat. It’s kind of remarkable how steady it has been despite all the wild events that have happened.








  • Yes. By all means primary one of those democrats who voted for this out if you can, but if you got to the general election and the choice was between a pro Israel Republican and pro Israel Democrat, it would still be way better to pick the dem.

    100% of house Republicans voted for this, while only 20% of house Democrats did. Right now the Republicans control what bills come to the floor for a vote since they have a majority. If Democrats had the majority and controlled the speakership, this bill never would have even come up for a vote in the first place since so few in their caucus support it overall. A pro Israel dem is not ideal, but at least helps ensure the 100% pro Israel (and a bajillion other reasons for being horrible besides this issue) Republicans don’t control the agenda for what bills come up in the house and senate.



  • Thank you for clarifying those misconceptions about what recessive and dominant are getting at. A gene isn’t really dominant or recessive. A phenotype (some trait in the organism like blue eyes or a certain disease) can be dominant or recessive though and results from changes in a gene. The same gene could have many different possible mutations, some with dominant effects, some with recessive effects, or some with no effects, depending on the change in the gene and the phenotype.

    To go further on that, many recessive diseases are because just one functional copy of many genes are fine from your body’s perspective. Many recessive diseases are due to loss of function of a gene or its protein product, a gene that for a variety of potential reasons no longer leads to a functional protein. Often your body can get by with just one working gene making protein, though both gene copies are generally always being transcribed and trying to be turned into functional protein.

    One big exception to this is the x chromosome. Males only have one x and have a y instead of a second x. The y is very tiny and has very few genes compared to the x, quite different from other chromosome pairs which generally just have copies of all the same genes on each other. Early in embryo development for xx individuals, one of the x chromosomes is generally inactivated and not expressed very much, otherwise xx individuals would have double the gene products of all those different genes compared to males, which the body is not expecting for x genes like it does for all the other genes that have a second copy.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation

    If you go even further you also get into the idea of penetrance. A gene codes for a protein, but that protein doesn’t exist in isolation, it interacts with lots of other proteins coded by other genes in the body, plus the environment. So for some genetic changes it might be a 100% chance at leading to a certain phenotype (like a disease or a specific trait), or it could be less, like only 70% or 30% chance or something of someone with that change getting that trait, even if it’s still “dominant” (meaning only one gene copy with that change is needed to express the trait).